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Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

This wouldn't work for the same reasons it wouldn't work to have a k-12 school for theoretical physicists: (a) no one smart enough to understand the subject would want to work full-time teaching third graders, and (b) only a small fraction of people are suited by ability and temperament for this kind of work, and you can't select them at age 5.

It might work to have a specialized HS for hacking (hacking, not founding startups), but even there you'd face problem (a). Probably the best bet is for HS students interested in hacking to take courses at their local college-- which they do already.

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(a) no one smart enough to understand the subject would want to work full-time teaching third graders

That's an awfully broad statement. I'm sure there can be found someone very smart that would be interested in contributing back to children... Woz comes to mind, as does Will Wright...

(b) only a small fraction of people are suited by ability and temperament for this kind of work, and you can't select them at age 5.

I think you're thinking along different lines than the poster. He doesn't look at this as starting a venture capital firm, but as a replacement for the broken public school system. The funding doesn't have to come from equity, but the general hypothesis smells right:

A good early schooling would allow those currently going to public school to create (on average) more wealth in the future. One could use a fraction of that (future) wealth to actually fund the school. From the little I understand, a lot of private Universities work this way - where a good chunk of their budgets comes from alumni donations.

Why can't this system work before college?

Why can't this system work before college?

This is a serious question. I'm sure the idea isn't exactly brand new, so why hasn't it worked? There's gotta be some kind of problem, but I'm not seeing it...

"... Why can't this system work before college? .... so why hasn't it worked? There's gotta be some kind of problem, but I'm not seeing it ..."

Try these

- http://paulgraham.com/hs.html

- http://paulgraham.com/mit.html

Local college wasn't, for me, a good place to learn hacking (They taught C++, and at the fourth week we were still on 'Hello World'. I was asleep at that point :) ) This would be an accelerated course. Instead of teaching C, Hacker School could teach a higher level language like Lisp or Ruby/Python.

Would it work if the focus was actually founding startups, though? Four years of intensive programming training followed by the chance to found a startup (or co-found one) when you've graduated. Class projects could even be to actually launch startups, as a class.

We can do better.. We can at least try to do better than what's offered out there. I didn't have a place to be creative in high school. That happened after school, during the night. I know thousands of other kids are in the exact same place as I was.. Could we somehow give them a little hope?

Have you heard of the IMACS program (http://www.imacs.org/)? I never attended it myself, but I have a hacker friend who used be an instructor there and really enjoyed his work.

I dont like the idea of selecting kids for anything at age 5. But I'm not sure its impossible.

One of my most vivid memories of childhood is from about 7 years old, when my brothers class (he was 9 or so) was doing an entrepreneurial project. The premise was a company to build the best paper aeroplane, where longer flights would earn more money which you could spend on more materials. Or something. I remember being obsessed by it, and begging to be allowed to do it as well. The same things I love about startups now (having come back to that realisation after a detour to phd land) is exactly the same as then.

What I love about startups is sort of hard to explain. Its not exactly running my own company, I find little excitement in the idea of a consulting firm. Its really being in that feedback loop of making, selling, reinvesting and growing. Its plugging the outputs back into the inputs, optimizing your clever piece of technology and scaling out of sight.

I desperately want schools to include more of these sorts of projects when my kids (first one on the way, yikes :) go to school. I think entrepreneurship and creativity are deeply linked.

Interestingly, one of the greatest mathematicians of all time, Andrey Nikolaevich Kolmogorov, spent quite a lot of time teaching in schools, and writing textbooks and articles aimed at that level of audience. This was especially true later in his career. As arguably the greatest mathematician of his time, he inspired many Soviet mathematicians and physicists to make a lot of time for teaching in Schools. Paul Erdos also made a great deal of time to meet with students. More recently, Physics Nobelist Carl Wieman quit the US because his work on physics education wasn't being funded. Of course, these examples don't contradict your statement, but they do make one wonder what is possible.

You can attract smart people to teaching if you can promise them that the people they get to teach will be sufficiently smart. It's probably impossible to make that guarantee for 3rd graders, but it's possible for 8th.

There is significant evidence to show that for the vast majority of the time, there are no "smart" or "dumb" kids if you consider children young. It isn't impossible to create a school where the vast majority are geniuses...

There is also significant evidence to show the opposite. Nature vs. nurture isn't going to be decided by posts on news.YC.

Yes, better education produces "smarter" kids, sometimes dramatically so, by some definitions of "smart", but "where the vast majority are geniuses" is stretching it beyond credulity.

> Nature vs. nurture isn't going to be decided by posts on news.YC.

Touche :)

a recent article about the Polgar chess sisters would provide strong evidence to counter point (b). (Recap- they were all taught chess intensively starting at age 4 and they are among the best chess players in the world. Also, all the great modern chess players learned chess at very young ages.) Certainly not everyone has the ability, but perhaps a bigger problem is finding ways to make it as fun as games are for children.

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