Hey guys,
It was fun stalking your discord server. Had joined it months ago when I connected with FA maybe on Linkedin, but forgot to check it later on. Interesting stuff. Also, watched bits from your podcast.
Thought to share my two cents on education system, but I see no point regurgitating the same thing. You guys have (mostly) got it right. I also once shared a curated list of interesting essays on this topic. This one by Paul Graham is specifically good: https://paulgraham.com/lesson.html
The part about fixing it is the tricky part. But it seems like something I have moved past. Used to think a lot about this in early days of my university.
[discord doesn't allow long messages, so will add the rest in thread]
TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:20 am
The part about fixing it is the tricky part. But it seems like something I have moved past. Used to think a lot about this in early days of my university. First, I thought students were wrong, we need to fix how students approach their learning. Then, I realized professors were wrong, because they don't encourage behavior. That should be fixed first. Then, I was like it's not their fault, students' learning capabilities are already too messed up in school/college board ke exams in many cases to an un-fixable degree, so we need to fix school education first, which is even more tricky thing because we don't have good enough teachers at school level. The reason it seems is that at school-level parents oversee their children's educational progress, but parents don't understand the dynamics of the ever-so-changing world themselves and think only in terms of grades, because of their own insecurities or status games e.g. flan ke bache ki to ye position aai hai.. So, in most cases, parent's incentives aren't properly aligned towards actual learning of the students themselves. So then, I was like we need to fix parenting. But I got stuck there and have been stuck for a while. Because I don't know how this can be fixed for masses. Maybe I can homeschool my future-kid, and provide him such an environment where his natural curiosity is not repressed, and thus he learns things himself, but that would be because I have internalized such a worldview. How do we convince the masses to adopt this worldview (which seems to be correct)? I don't know. We need something like cultural change, but I certainly don't know where that would come from.
One solution though that I came upon though from a different path was when I was thinking of the situation of educational NGOs for children and how even relatively well-funded ones are supporting only a very limited students. The potential solution is something that I haven't thought about fully, but it seems it should be somehow self-fund by getting children to work on useful meaningful work that the institution can commercialize upon. The hardest problem though is that it would be deemed illegal because of child labor. But if children can do meaningful work for some allocated amount of time of their day where they get to learn things, I don't see any harm in it. In fact, homework is also kind of child labor except that it's useless and children hate it, and it doesn't benefit the school either.
Aaron Swartz who was a prodigy in programming had written this essay when he was 14yo:
https://web.archive.org/web/20020819014933/http://www.aaronsw.com/school/2001/01/21
He argues how denying children useful and meaningful work is actually stripping liberty away from them and is harmful for them.
Well, this was a very long tangent from the initial question but that's how thoughts flow. I have more thoughts on it, but I would be curious to know what are your take about these ones.
TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:24 am
So, my current take is like it's messed up from all directions, but if we need to fix something first, it should be parenting where we give children the liberty to explore and learn things on their own
FA — 27/04/2025 1:27 am
Thanks for sharing your very raw and authentic trail of thoughts. 💙
Agree with your thoughts mostly and I consider the solution you gave a viable one for higher education at least.
🙌
TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:28 am
Despite the fact that I hate giving introductions, I think some minimum info would be fine. I'm Tamseel - currently in last semester undergrad in Economics and spend most of my spare time tinkering with computers and reading blogs on the internet.
FA — 27/04/2025 1:29 am
I’m a fan of yours from LinkedIn 🙋♂️
TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:30 am
Oh wait, am I that popular?
I guess Talha is to blame for inflating people's prceptions
TA0 — 27/04/2025 1:30 am
I think I would think more on this and write an essay/blogpost
I suppose you might be familiar with Talha Ashraf from linkedin as well. I have had conversations with him on the topic, and he has interesting thoughts on it as well. His main thesis is that education system is a monopoly and to fix it, you need to fix things from the demand side of talent. E.g. a lot of companies prefer students with ivy league degrees, but if you create a good company where you don't give a shit about people's credentials and hire purely on basis of how good they are at solving problems, that's something closer to breaking the monopoly.
FA — 27/04/2025 1:44 am
I am definitely familiar with Talha bhai. 💯
That’s actually a super interesting take.
FA — 27/04/2025 1:52 am
If companies don’t care about degrees and being from ivy league etc. people wouldn’t care either.
This should solve the “credential problem”.