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Comment by brad0 | Hacker News Reader

- offer better incentives/pay: Right now in Australia no one who does well in school goes into teaching. The demand is there so universities bring in people who get 20/100 on their high school scores.

- change the format of education: kids are more anxious than ever (see current HN front page). There’s no guarantee that you will be okay financially with the current education system.

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Good points.

But is education always about financial security?

Do we need teachers in their traditional or rather in their current roles? Should the way of knowledge transmission be altered?

What would happen when there are less jobs to fill and more human population? What is the role of education and work when automation spreads?

I guess we will have to go back to definitions:

What is knowledge?

What is education?

What is the purpose of knowledge?

What is the purpose of education?

There is alway room for improvement, but education requires constant thoughtful observation and adjustments. When I talk to my sister who was a teacher, I am impressed about the deep thinking that went into adjusting the education of each of her students. I don't see technology helping this very much.

I think children learn more from peers than from books or teachers. If children are formed as groups so an older child is in charge of younger ones and younger ones are responsible for those under them and so on, knowledge transfer is both ways. Now older kids have to learn and be teachers to their younger students. It seems to be a better system.

Technology can help to cluster students appropriately so they learn and teach from each other. My 2c.

This can be true, and not true.

How students learn varies a lot more than many of us want to admit.

It is best to have a variety of means available, and multiple opportunities for students tonpresent how they learn.

It is human work. Reach the students, understand who they are, tease out what they can become...

Your sister is an increasingly rare bird.

So many lack time, resources, agency to do that.

Nearly all of the educators were able to do that for me. 70's 80's

I find the lack of agency, and standard, often teach to test, load shocking. Much reduced agency in many cases.

It appears that the censors have struck again and remove a thoughtful and fair-minded discussion.

I have had enough I will never again contribute to HN.

For those of you who are not yet aware, this topic is STILL being actively suppressed even today Jan. 14, 2019, click on |parent| at the top of the page.

Aw, not sure why you say that. What was removed? I enjoyed reading this page, and particularly what you wrote.

I really enjoyed the discussion on this post as I have children and I want the best for their future.

I would like to see more discussion on this topic.

I was thinking about Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age. What if every child has a cloned AI in the form of a robot or a tablet etc. it mirrors the child’s knowledge base. And depending on the life circumstances of the child, every choice the child has to make, it offers a variety of subjects to learn and master. In the future, there are no ‘degrees’ ..only skills that are marketable. I find it difficult to believe that we will have a job market as we know it now for the future generations. What is education for then...if we do end up in a post scarcity world..education still has value, yes? OTOH, if we end up with a resource scarce world, survivability would be based on skill sets that are not salary based. Just wool gathering here. What kind of future do you think your kids will have and what kind of education do you think they’d need in their future?

I caught one of the Akimbo podcasts a while back where Seth Godin argued that kids will need creativity and leadership as the core skill set for future jobs.

I tend to agree with this, the current form of public education worked well when manufacturing jobs were plentiful post WWII. Those types of jobs have migrated overseas. Trying to bring them back here will not work as many firms have begun using advancements in robotics.

Some form of art, craftsmanship, or apprenticeship will likely be part of the future mix of jobs. If you read books like The End of Jobs by Pearson or The 4 Hour Work Week by Ferris, you get a sense that being an entrepreneur is a possibility. However, I think one has to consider the real odds and survivorship bias.

What I have done with my kids is to try to instill a love of learning. I have taught my 5 year old daughter using a visual programming language. I think it is very important that you make an effort to teach your children skills that are not generally taught in school.

I wonder too. Was it something I said?

I don't think so, your interactions were impressively civil. I think maybe it was that a lot of your comments on this page were being grayed out, something he evidently had a problem with recently.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18861861

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