> Small children will touch a hot stove only once yet billionaires will fund personalized learning initiatives again and again and again and we might wonder why.
The author doesn't answer and I don't have an answer either. But the interesting observation is that billionaires don't learn from experience. This is a sure sign of ideology at work.
What worries me more than billionaires funding learning initiatives is how many people fall for this kind of "reasoning" when it's about something they're primed to not like - where they'd reject it in any other context.
I mean, seriously. Small children will touch a hot stove only once, yet try to walk despite repeatedly tripping up. Obviously they don't learn from experience.
And you can make a small child cry without hurting them at all, e.g. by saying "Boo!".
Tell me you've never had small children without telling me you've never had small children
That's not enough. Repeating the same stupid ideas again and again and again without learning from past failures is not a viable approach.
The only stupid thing is following this absurd "argument" from the article. Kids, stoves. Seriously, what the fuck? Giving up on things after first negative experience is no way to live a life - literally, you would not survive to adulthood if you followed that brilliant idea.
At some points you have to stop trying stupid things.
Here the stupid idea is thinking education is a solo activity while in truth it's a social one. A 50's multiple choice quiz on papers is the same as a quiz on computers. It's a very small part of what learning is about.
The world would be a much better place.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_Facebook
Even setting that aside, your premise doesn’t hold: you can’t “learn from experience” by watching others. The whole point of the phrase is that you have to do it yourself to learn.
I run a small science club where the kids learn and experiment in small groups guided by tutors who enjoy the stuff. And I'm running out of money fast: I cannot charge much for the courses and workshops (those without money run along free of charge anyway) and I need to spend money on rent, materials and especially the tutors. And the last expenditure is growing linear with the amount of classes I offer and is easily the biggest.
People in business, especially in tech business, try to set things up in a way where you can automate stuff away and it's easy to see schools and classroom education as a great opportunity to try the same approach.
This is my personal speculation, but self-learning can be extremely helpful for people with a lot of investment in a specific topic and high intrinsic motivation - a description likely to fit most people that made a vast fortune by themselves and their usual peer group. This is probably a serious filter bubble making them believe that self-learning is the way forward for everyone, since it worked for (nearly) everyone they know.
The answer is in the analogy: the billionaire didn’t get burned. If the child touched the stove but it was merely warm, they wouldn’t learn to avoid it.
Losing millions when you have billions is not a big deal.
I'll admit that there's a flip-side viewpoint here: If you're a billionaire, in a society that very obviously has a lot of problems, and all you've got for tools and skills is a billion-dollar hammer that you're real handy with...well, okay - try hitting some things with your hammer. When the world is screwed up badly enough, even kinda-clueless change has a decent chance of improving something...right?