The “do it yourself” ethos of tech extends to how techie parents school, or unschool, their children:
According to the most recent statistics, the share of school-age kids who were homeschooled doubled between 1999 and 2012, from 1.7 to 3.4 percent.
And many of those new homeschoolers come from the tech community. When homeschooling expert Diane Flynn Keith held a sold-out workshop in Redwood City, California, last month, fully half of the parents worked in the tech industry. Jens Peter de Pedro, an app designer in Brooklyn, says that five of the 10 fathers in his homeschooling group work in tech, as do two of the eight mothers. And Samantha Cook says that her local hackerspace is often filled with tech-savvy homeschoolers.
“There is a way of thinking within the tech and startup community where you look at the world and go, ‘Is the way we do things now really the best way to do it?’” de Pedro says. “If you look at schools with this mentality, really the only possible conclusion is ‘Heck, I could do this better myself out of my garage!’”
The piece paints a rather unflattering picture of unschooling — but I don’t think it’s entirely the writer’s fault.
Yeah, I called it. I thought the article would mention how the parents don’t like school themselves.
Techies* don’t like grade school because what is the point of being forced to be bored and in close proximity to a herd of morons, sorry, 100 IQ pleb spawn for about nine fucking years Did I mention they try to bore you to death too?
It breeds nothing but contempt, bitterness and a negative attitude to education.
*and probably most smart individuals who aren’t very good at pretending they’re dumb.
Here’s DeBoer on the article.
Kling also recently wrote
The establishment speaking.
What’s the deal with that DeBoer dude? Is he supposed to be some sort of cautionary tale of what happens if you teach a supercilious twat too much rhetorics?
He doesn’t even allow comments on his blog. What a blowhard.
R.: He used to, but it wasn’t productive. His conversations are on Twitter.
I noted the amount of commentary on the Super Bowl experience this year from the manosphere and other parts of the dark enlightenment. Many were annoyed or shocked at how feminist it was or how it was an exercise in social engineering.
It dawned on me personally that it was one of the few times I had actually watched TV in the past months, meaning TV as that network commercial driven thing.
And I think TV is getting stupider and stupider because it is the bottom feeders of technical capability that still watch it. These are people that are too stupid to use the tech available, which is ridiculously easy compared to what was necessary in the past. I use a 200 dollar chromebook with a 15 dollar HDMI cable, plug the cable into the TV, set the TV input to HDMI, then set the properties on the display to “Mirror”. And then a wealth of different content is available. I watch movies. They pop up crap internet ads that I kill. But these ads are a long way from the slick psychological manipulation that is shown on TV.
And in the course of not watching that “programming”, and I used that word in all senses of its meaning, and then immersing myself in other content, like this blog and many others like it, my world outlook and the way I plan, view, and live my life is radically different than what it used to be. The stuff I “covet” is now different. Instead of drooling over things now I life simpler because I don’t see these commercials that convince to “need” things I don’t need. I don’t agree with the “conventional” world outlook that is sold on that TV. And to go back to it, even for some three hour spell like the super bowl shows me the impact of its absence on my life.
College perhaps is getting to be the same way. Maybe the same people (well not exactly the same. It is “college” after all) are too stupid to figure out how to learn from the internet. Or they wish to work in those things that require those credentials.
I think we, and I mean “we”, in the sense of this particular community, are changing what the sense of being an “intellectual” is all about. Before, you were, or thought you were an intellectual if you checked off all these boxes beside this list of books. The list was completely defined as valid by universities. So if you read some Hobbes, some Rousseau, Locke, Ricardo, Malthus, Keynes, Foucault, and the others on the list, some big name philosophers, then hey, you were in the club. You went around quoting the shit they said, dropped some phrases, maybe wore a turtleneck, then you could consider yourself and intellectual. Mostly that list was taken care of by attending a university. And you could be confident that the stuff those professors told you was certainly on the list of things that you could check off those boxes.
Today that’s bullshit. Anyone that limits themselves to that list is probably an intellectual cripple compared to the action that is going on the internet today. I would say there are probably 10, 15 writers in the internet today that are some of the best writers and thinkers ever. Ever.
I’ll just spit out two. Steve Sailer and Henry Dampier. The amount, the breadth, and the depth of the content just coming from just these two guys alone dwarfs a lot of the writers that make the famous college list.
My sister used to make this sort of joke threat to me, “I’ll hit you so hard, so often, that the next time you see me coming, you’ll say ‘hey gang’.” And that is to me, what Sailer does to the whole staff of the number one flagship newpaper in the world, the New York TImes. One man consistently kicks their ass.
And that’s just one guy on the internet.
I used to be this daily reader of the Peak Oil site, The Oil Drum. They had this daily feature called “The Drum Beat”. It aggregated all these links from all over the world for articles having almost anything oblique to do with energy including financial, politics that could be directly affecting finance, or energy production. But the real value was in the comments. The community was this broad based collection of technical, financial, and engineering people I have ever known. Nothing could come up in the world, or some topic involved in some aspect of drilling, exploration, finance, law, etc that someone, some serious expert in that community could not give a detailed explanation of. One guy called it “his second education.” And I heartily agreed.
So if you lock kids in a classroom, well you monopolize that activity. Just as the internet created completely new forms of journalism, of entertainment, and allowed radically increased means for creating true new intellectual writing, it could and would create novel means of educating children.
There is this one great online video course, The Western Tradition by Eugen Weber. The guy blows away every other lecturer on the subject you ever heard. He taught the class at UCLA in 1989, and it was converted to a video format, complete with visuals, statues, art, sketchings, photos, of some of the greatest works ever in history. It was picked up by Ananberg CPB. It is a waste of time for any student to listen to any other lecturer on this subject. Any other Prof is just jacking off compared to this guy. A kid could jerk around, coloring in coloring books for 11 years, then take this Weber class, and knows more than 95% of the population on the history of Western Civ. You have no idea of what sort of education you get from whatever jack off you have teaching over at the local high school.
And I haven’t even looked for similar sorts of courses in other subjects. The site you find this Weber course has tons.
I am about to take this course on Machine Learning from Stanford, free. It’s a 20 lecture course with labs, all lectures on videos, and labs available through download. My opinion, and I worked in Comp Science for 25 years is that a kid could find a basic Unix course covering concepts and shell programming, a basic course in C, another in C++, a few college level courses in linear algebra, matrix math, all online, then go right into this Machine Learning course. Then come out of it, and then take some courses on Hadoop, and he is ready to get jiggy in a very technical field. All without a college degree. So what if he has to hang in the informal world for a while.
Kaggle is a site that focuses on the topic. It offers competitions for prices, serious prices like $500,000 from Boeing and Alaska Air for some best route algorithm for airliners based on data like weather and wind etc. That particular competition was won by a group from Vorenzh State University. The forum members share, teach, collaborate, with each other. The topics are quite broad, for example, another was a contest to look at a controlled collection of tweets from a bunch of previously psychologically tested “tweeters” to determine which of the them exhibited signs of psychopathy. The results were quite accurate.
This is just one example of how someone could create a career in a very very specialized subject and never set foot inside a classroom. What good is a classroom going to do for these people? They are better off being together in some forum, using other means of collaboration and congregation than the standard mechanism of some classroom.
And then throw into that mix, the whole war on boys, the war on men, the feminization programming, the anti-male bias that any boy would receive in a typical classroom.
I would say any reader of this blog would probably have kids that would be better off in this “unschool” thing than they would be in some traditional class. I can’t say the same thing for every other kid. But I don’t care about every other kid.
Mark Minter:
An excellent comment. I found myself agreeing with with every word, especially the bit about great internet writers such as Sailer and Dampier.
An insightful and accomplished friend of mine who harbors a degree of sympathy for Alt Right views, although he does not — at least not yet, anyhow — subscribe to them in their entirety, says that what most strikes him about the movement is how much better both stylistically and intellectually its writing is compared to the verbiage churned out by the Left.
The very smartest people cannot help but notice — are noticing — this. Eventually this realization will spread downward, from the head to the rest of the body politic.