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Comment by kevinalexbrown | Hacker News Reader

the bad habits that school somehow implanted in me

School might be a mechanism, but I doubt that's the driving force. Losing a sense of curiosity and play is an ancient phenomenon that predates modern education. When I became a man, I put away childish things was written 10^3 years ago.

If schools are doing X, Y, and Z and students are losing curiosity, stopping X Y and Z might not do any good unless it's part of a broader cultural problem. More importantly, the question of whether schools are the best place to prod cultural forces remains open. If we do decide to curate curiosity in schools, it might be beneficial to understand why curiosity is dying in the first place.

I'm curious if anyone has any insight into what these forces might be and why they're so universal. Unless losing your sense of wonder is a relatively recent transformation, why did humans evolve in such a way that wonder isn't conserved across development?

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Disillusionment with age seems a relatively universal phenomenon. There is no end to stories about humorless elders in any part of the world, at any point in remembered history.

> More importantly, the question of whether schools are the best place to prod cultural forces remains open.

I think that the problem is actually in how society looks at schools, rather than schools themselves. We think of it like a machine, to be kept fueled and oiled, into which we can feed empty buckets and get them filled. We try not to get involved in the actual machinery, which is full of loud noises and creaking cogs. We expect magic. We expect numbers. We expect efficiency. We expect standards. And this is wrong, all wrong.

Curiosity dies when boundaries are perceived as absolute. If you push at a wall, and it doesn't budge, you stop pushing. It has given you a response, and it's a boring response; you lose interest. You stop being curious. That doesn't mean we shouldn't have absolute boundaries, but it does mean we need to give serious thought to why each boundary exists.

Few ideas:

1. Part of the issue today I believe is the standardization. Inherent in standardization is depersonalization, lower standards, skewed values and incentives, which leads to a mediocracy, and demoralization ensues, which leads to lack of care, which is directly related to a dying curiosity.

2. Another part is the poor understanding and poor acknowledgement of how humans learn. Meaning the system in places doesn't cater for the basic needs of kids/adults.

3. A third is a potential misalignment or friction between societal expectations of behavior and human nature.

Lastly, just because it could be true that people have always become disillusioned doesn't mean that the school isn't a driving force.

"I'm curious if anyone has any insight into what these forces might be and why they're so universal."

The force that can causes a loss of a sense of wonder is survival. People do not just learn for the sake of learning. They learn because they are a part of a complex system that requires knowledge to survive. At some point, the cost of failure is no longer worth the utility of eventual success. Lots of people quit their jobs to try something new, lose all their money, and file for bankruptcy. If they had simple stuck to what they know, they would be in a better position. Satisfying curiosity is not free in terms of time, money, or happiness.

Being in a better position financially often does not equate to more happiness. This is one thing about the human spirit that cannot be quantified.

Research says otherwise.

Recent research has begun to distinguish two aspects of subjective well-being. Emotional well-being refers to the emotional quality of an individual's everyday experience—the frequency and intensity of experiences of joy, stress, sadness, anger, and affection that make one's life pleasant or unpleasant. Life evaluation refers to the thoughts that people have about their life when they think about it. We raise the question of whether money buys happiness, separately for these two aspects of well-being. We report an analysis of more than 450,000 responses to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index, a daily survey of 1,000 US residents conducted by the Gallup Organization. We find that emotional well-being (measured by questions about emotional experiences yesterday) and life evaluation (measured by Cantril's Self-Anchoring Scale) have different correlates. Income and education are more closely related to life evaluation, but health, care giving, loneliness, and smoking are relatively stronger predictors of daily emotions. When plotted against log income, life evaluation rises steadily. Emotional well-being also rises with log income, but there is no further progress beyond an annual income of ~$75,000. Low income exacerbates the emotional pain associated with such misfortunes as divorce, ill health, and being alone. We conclude that high income buys life satisfaction but not happiness, and that low income is associated both with low life evaluation and low emotional well-being.

http://www.pnas.org/content/107/38/16489

My guess would be it is, as you indicated, an evolutionary development. When humans are young, we have very little knowledge of how the world works, knowledge which will help our chances of survival later in life. We also have our parents providing what we need to survive (at least during our early childhood). It makes sense that at this time we try to learn as much about the world as possible.

As we grow up, we start to already know more about the world, so their is a diminishing return on more exploration. We also (becuase of our increased knowledge) would move to being the more productive members of the species, so it makes sense for our efforts to go more into survival so our offspring can devote their resources to exploration.

It's probably an example of the exploration exploitation strategy. When young figure shit out, when older further develop the knowledge and expertise you started on while young. This is only a partial explanation, of course.

Exploration and Exploitation in Evolutionary Algorithms: A Survey

http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~shliu/pub/EE_ACM_FINAL_b.pdf

http://www.cscs.umich.edu/~pjlamber/Complexity%20Course_file...

Your analysis is spot on. Schools are part of a larger economic system that is based upon alienation. How can I be curious about the things around me if they are based upon closed designs? For example, how can I be curious about the operations of my own computer if it is based upon proprietary software? Our entire society alienates people from the production and design processes and it alienates people from themselves and one another.

I think the computer as an example of a closed design is perfect, and that this will soon no longer be the case. Raspberry Pi is doing, IMO, exactly what you are describing here. Allowing child-like, fearless exploration of the device. I don't understand why corporations feel the need to continue with this closed design process when there is already enough evidence provided by Raspberry Pi that this is not necessary. There is a continuous backlog of requests for the units. Clearly, according to basic supply and demand in economics, this is what people want. Looking at all the brilliant software that has been designed is astounding. Alienation is not how greatness is achieved, and Raspberry Pi IMO is rightly proving this system very wrong.

Unfortunately, I don't share your optimism with regards to our immediate ability to liberate ourselves from computer systems with closed designs. The Microsoft hegemony has been here for decades and I don't see it going away anytime soon, so it looks like closed designs are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

In the spirit of healthy debate, Microsoft's control of the desktop is akin to Kleenex's control of the tissue market. It will always be there because no one really expects it to change. Which is true. Innovations in desktops are lagging behind those of mobile innovations. Raspberry Pi cannot truly be classified as a desktop device, or any other classification we use for tech. The fact that it ships without a case exemplifies its versatility and wanton openness, which I believe is a key element to the OP's desire in education reformation. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has sold somewhere near one million devices since its inception 347 days ago. The iPhone sold one million devices in 74 days. Apple had nearly thirty years of market presence before hitting that benchmark. The Raspberry Pi foundation has not and I think that if the tech giants wish to stay alive, they should stop locking down their devices and software if they want increased adoption rates. Computers are the future of education and the more open their designs, the more open people will be to tinkering with them, and, as the OP puts it, no longer "Avoiding stuff I didn’t know how to do." This will help advance and educate along the lines the OP wishes to see.

This isn't to say that everything ought to be open source. Capitalism is intrinsic to certain innovations, so the need for closed designs is necessary. The openness need not be as outlandish as it sounds. Less penalizing Terms of Service might be an excellent step towards this.

> In the spirit of healthy debate, Microsoft's control of the desktop is akin to Kleenex's control of the tissue market. It will always be there because no one really expects it to change.

The thing is that most software development is done on desktops and similar environments that Microsoft controls. Software development isn't usually done on mobile devices because they generally don't have keyboards. This means that developing an operating system that that doesn't alienate its users from production and that ultimately works to eliminate the user/producer distinction is something that remains out of our reach.

> Capitalism is intrinsic to certain innovations, so the need for closed designs is necessary.

When do you think it is okay to alienate consumers from the design process? Capitalism transforms peoples labour power into a commodity to be bought and sold in a competitive market. This alienates workers from their own productive lives and from one another. When is alienation which is intrinsic to capitalism ever essential to innovation?

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