Alternative Education

The current school system is utterly fucked:

1. Teachers that JUST teach are an enormous bottleneck . Unless they inspire they are taking up funding and time.
2. You win by not questioning anything, ever.
3. You win by taking a simple path to a simple metric. Nothing in life is like this.
4. It was, after all, designed to produce obedient soldiers and factory workers.
5. Most questions are discouraged. Most teachers discourage good questions by giving shitty answers.
6. Almost every single one of my heroes, and great men agree with me.
7. Highly incentivizes goodhartmaxxing.

pg is smarter than me. Read his write-up.

Throwing money at the problem has not solved this though.

The DoE is effectively unfixable as any change would require us to change centuries-old paradigms, and at the bare minimum require a new president and a decade.

The better option is to make absurdly cheap schools, where you gut out most of the spend by removing teachers entirely, and make it look closer to MIT Building 20.

There should be only a very small number of teachers, paid handsomely.

The main educational interactions between students should be open-ended discussions between students and teachers, about the topic they are learning most recently. Beyond that, students learn however they want, and are graded by conversing with one of the few teachers, about what they learned, and breaking it down thoroughly.