209 points | by Gooblebrai3 days ago
I have to point out the fallacy in the first paragraph. He cites a bunch of people who began working in their teen years who later went on to become famous, presumably because they started "doing" things so early. As a counterpoint, there are many millions of young people throughout history, and even now, who began "doing" at a young age and were nothing more than average, at best.
Dropping out of high school to go be a "doer" is a great way to become a high school dropout, not a prodigy.
The survivorship bias you point to is a big part of it. Reading the biography of Carnegie, just as one example, strikes me as kind of egregious because it quickly becomes obvious he was part of a child labor system and by counterargument succeeded largely because he was one of the lucky poor given access to private education by a wealthy benefactor. You could just as easily turn Carnegie into a counterexample, of what happens when you give a child an education with lots of attention. He also happened to be in the right place and right time, in the railroads just as they were taking off.
The focus on the schools too seems really misguided to me. Most of the problems with society today, in my opinion, are due to all the formal roadblocks placed up by bureaucratic red tape, instantiated by the labyrinths of government or private human resources departments.
There are just so many things that require such and such degree, or such and such experience, not because they're actually necessary, but because various legalistic bureaucracies require them. Some of the examples in the essay could happen today, but most of them probably not. The essay seems to quietly acknowledge this but then turns attention away from it, probably because it undermines its thesis.
In my own career I've heard lots of stories like this from the past, both close to me institutionally and more distally. People just sort of showing up somewhere and chatting and then getting a career because they came there to do the work, were respected on the basis of conversation, and had a path forward. None of that would happen today. There would be rubber stamping required, certificates and degrees in a specific field or subfield, with no attention to whether or not the person has the actual ability and background in the area to do the tasks involved.
Schooling today I think has problems, and I agree with the premise that doing things is important. But I think schools teach to what is out there in the world, and students are doing things in school curricula all the time with no acknowledgment later because you're seen as commensurate with a degree. It's not a problem with schools, it's a problem with having vocational paths with opportunities be open to people who have the skills and abilities, but just don't have quite the right credentials or connections. Maybe it's always been that way, but something about today's society makes the examples provided in the essay seem irrelevant today for all sorts of reasons that have nothing to do with the schools themselves.
There must be a balance. Without regulation bridges collapse, trains of toxic chemicals derail, and people get poisoned even just by eating and drinking. With too much regulation, innovation is stifled, usually because regulators were captured.
The US seems to have the worst of both, decades of captured regulators and people being harmed by powerful business interests. Meanwhile the public education system gets undermined constantly by a self fulfilling cycle of neglect and deverting funding to private schools.
(Of course in a polarized electorate it's risky to admit both sides have a point, and try to work toward a productive compromise. After all, we can't have our candidate in the wings lose because our opponent incumbent got a 'win'--even if it is most of what we wanted anyway.)
> (Of course in a polarized electorate [...]
Although the electorate is polarized, the two major parties do not significantly differ on support for things like regulatory capture, the revolving door between business and government, and the ability to frictionlessly convert back-and-forth between corporate money and political power.
after a few decades working as a programmer, do my highschool or university grades really still matter? yet some companies ask for them (notably canonical, they are also asking how i did in math in highschool. wat!?)
University credentials probably have more to do with proof one has grit, or social signaling. Unless it's for a specialized role that needs a certain degree.
Indie Gaming slant on these following examples, and I suspect that this sector is above average for this type of thing, but I suspect if I looked I could find many dropouts in other fields. On the other hand, Carmack dropped out of college, Jonathan Blow dropped out of college. Markus Persson dropped out of high school. Eric Barone never found a job despite graduating from college. All of these people are out-of-this-world fucking good, but were not at the time that they dropped out, which means according to your guide should not have gone on to create what they did.
Let’s take Markus: before he made Minecraft, he made relatively mediocre games that didn’t get much traction. Minecraft was an exact copy of someone else’s game (Infiniminer) that was posted on the same forum that he went to. He saw potential when its original creator did not (the creator of Infiniminer got angry that people extended his game so he shut it down). Minecraft blew up. The games that Markus made after Minecraft? Relatively mediocre again.
So what can you learn from the example of Markus? Nothing. Nothing at all. Sometimes you just get lucky.
Simply put the act of doing something doesn't make you lucky. However if you are lucky already, you can do most things and win.
Confirmation bias is very tricky here. A quick look at top essentially single games of all times shows that a full 50% or so of them were created by drop outs, a number way outside of what we would expect. But how many dropped out and failed?
All of these guys clearly had the capability to create greatness within them their entire life, but were stuck in an environment that did not fit their talents or did not otherwise give them the support that would allow them to thrive, like Tao got.
And yet, all of the people whom were failed by the system will never be heard of, and we have no idea the numbers of these people either. I expect that there are way more of them than unsuccessful dropouts.
While yeah his early games are very weak seeing Infiniminer‘s engines potential as a survival game and creative game rather than a team fps deserves credit.
Gates had super-early access to computers via his prep school. By the time he left high-school, he probably had more computer experience than almost all college graduates.
Jonathan Blow spent almost 5 years at Berkeley and hooked up with the Tcl guys (Adam Sah sticks out). That's practially a graduate degree. see: http://number-none.com/blow/papers/rush_tcl94.pdf
Markus Persson--(By 1994, Persson knew he wanted to become a video game developer, but his teachers advised him to study graphic design, which he did from ages 15 to 18. ... He never finished high school, but was reportedly a good student.) That's hardly a high school dropout. And, IIRC, studying something like graphic design in the system in Sweden is akin to an apprenticeship, no?
And frequently from connected and/or rich families. That can be very useful in success, it turns out.
Seems kind of sad to me that, that is the price to pay...
I should mention that I such an experience myself with the driving licence. I did not need a driving license, because I live in a city with a great subway, but I was thinking about it. Took some mental energy on the regular. So I took it when I was around 27 years old and haven't driven our thought about it since.
Anyone else with similar experience?
There are far too many off-ramps to ‘comfortable’ along the way, for it to be any other way.
Anger is as good a motivator as any, I guess. What else do you propose?
Greed has a lot of history too.
Love (at least genuine love) much less often, since love for oneself has to be there first - and that is rarely going to coincide with actual high performance.
That is only because our system is so heavily built around bureaucracy and credentials. Regardless of his skills or intelligence, the HS dropout will face discrimination for not having his pieces of paper so intense that it would be illegal if done against any other group.
maybe it's an elite small percentage who push society forward and improve it, and it's important that they are discovered and learn by learning and not as important what the rest do with their education.
I think society should be organized around the common (wo)man, but the common man wants the best doctor when he needs medical care, and the common woman wants the best aircraft designer to have designed any plane she flies on.
that's not to say that we should not look for better ways to educate people, perhaps we can find more doctors and plane designers, but just because 10% (or whatever) is all we get out of education doesn't make our education system a bust.
Having had to get back into electricity recently, sure I didn’t remember a thing, but it came back much faster than the first time.
But studying advanced maths forced me to learn to think rigorously and take various minuscule details into account, and that skill is valuable.
That is because regular, and failing(even fatal failure) often is just how nearly everyones life works.
You win by first learning where you are going to die, and not going there.
Most college dropouts fail. You are better off finishing school.
I got much more vocational coding in than the vast majority of my classmates before I dropped out, and not all of the theoretical stuff has been applicable. But what was has been invaluable.
You have to really understand why you can break the rules and still succeed. And if you have to use the word “stupid” or “sheep” in your explanation you’re most likely wrong.
This is a two way street. If you can't articulate why something is the way it is without regurgitating a talking point from it's peddlers then you're wrong too.
The adult equivalent of this to quit your comfortable paying jobs to do a start-up. Fail bad, and realise you are landed way behind people with 9-5 jobs.
Most of the times- "Do this scary thing and win" requires lots of luck going for you. In fact it can be attributed luck alone in nearly all cases.
The problem is people think if they work hard enough that chances will be in their favor. That's rarely, if ever the case.
By and large. Study well, get a job, save, invest, tend to your health and relationships. Just do the well set formula. You can't go wrong here.
If a person picks a useless major, the decision is on them.
Agreed.
> If a person picks a useless major, the decision is on them.
Not just them. Their parents, the school, etc. There are so many "simple" things to know. Too many for them to always be obvious, even when they "obviously" should be.
A mistake that a million young students make is a mistake worth updating the educational system to handle better.
And as an objective practical matter, it is always on society. Society systematically loses masses of individual potential by not providing more guidance when it matters. (And perversely turning education into an easy loan factory, regardless of expected income, the opposite of good guidance.)
I have been known to advise young people that their intended major was akin to taking a vow of poverty, and they all insisted they were following their dream, and are now working at minimum wage jobs.
I don't have a whole lot of sympathy for students who discover after they graduate that their chosen major has no value. How do they go through 4 years of college never checking such things? Google "starting salary for history majors", for example.
At Caltech, everyone knew that ChE paid the best, and AY degrees were worthless (this was long before google). The AY majors usually did a double major - AY for fun, and the other degree for money.
> I don't have a whole lot of sympathy
It is a big objective problem, for the students and society. So even without feelings, some kind of incentives need to be better aligned with reality.
Limiting student loan repayment terms, with a limited percentage of student income recoverable to banks, would certainly incentivize banks not to help students get in trouble.
Telling basket weaving majors that they are welcome to do it for love, but to expect to be paying for the degree themselves up front, or with an ongoing job, represents the desired outcome, in simplified terms.
In any case, and I know this isn't a popular thing to say, but when you're 18 it's time to take responsibility for your choices, and time to stop saying your choices are other peoples' fault.
I don’t think that’s unpopular or the least bit controversial. Obvious, no?
But ending the story there isn’t productive. So perhaps it is not a popular reason to not consider other factors & improvements.
Individual lack of conscientiousness isn’t the only factor.
Students being handed loans, for whatever ill thought out career plan, with no immediate need for payback, facilitated by market warping government encouragement, schools whose incentive is obvious (they get most of that money), and banks who see students as easy marketing targets, is a systematic upfront incentive/road to the original ill thought out career plan, but now saddled with overwhelming debt.
Such a colossal amount of economically mismatched careers and debt that the topic is a regular subject of national politics.
There is an entire system of active influence, causality, conflicts of interest & responsibility there too.
I am pretty sure there is no careers you cannot find some information on with rather simple searches.
Try it. Gott im Himmel!
Elite American universities can attract top scientific talent from overseas with good salaries and very well equipped labs, because they have the money. This, in turn, attracts foreign students.
I know a German who spent over 20 years in the German university system, taking advantage of every free program so she wouldn't have to get a job.
For a well known trope, the spawn of first generation wealthy people tend to dissipate that wealth. They didn't work for it, and so they don't value it. It's why people look down on nepotism. Things not earned are not valued.
I know I became more diligent with my studies when I started writing tuition checks out of my earnings.
It’s not a theoretic point either, plenty of universities do it right now.
But it is effective.
When I was old enough to do work, he'd have me buy my own shoes :-)
Some of those young people cultivate skill by getting practice during youth. Doing that while young builds a compounding machine of personal interest + confidence + progress.
I have never seen broad data to support this, so discussions revolve around anecdotes[1]. That's fine by me though because we have countless examples of the legends of their craft who fit that mold: bill gates, zuck, warren buffett, taylor swift, mozart, da vinci... the list is long.
No single system will work for every single student. But that isn't the point. The point is that the best of the best deserve to feed their interests at a young age, which the current US upbringing limits. How many more bill gates and zuck-level creators could the world have if more talented youths could cultivate their talents very early in life?
[1] Although not broad data, the thinking behind these works build on a similar point: Thiel Fellowship [https://thielfellowship.org/]; PG's essay How to Do Great Work [https://paulgraham.com/greatwork.html]
That means the coursework and schedules are designed specifically for the lowest common denominator of a student.
This means that if you're anything but, say, the bottom 20% of students, public school isn't an efficient use of time for you. You should be learning more in the same amount of time.
There are a lot of other problems with it too, but that's the most egregious. If education was more efficient, a lot of the other problems with it could be solved as well.
Fixing the inefficiency doesn't necessarily mean paying more attention to the top 10% at the cost of denying resources to the bottom 90%.
One path is to develop individualized plans that allow students to work at their own pace. Instead of advancement at the end of the year, advance at attainment of a proven proficiency level.
Still require kids to physically go to school, but transform the classroom for the modern age.
Have teachers balance working with local students with working with ones in a nation-wide online network. Leverage that network of instructors and bring it to bear on a child's education, instead of leaving it entirely to those in geographic proximity.
Since most of them are teaching the same topics, start recording the lectures and promote the best of them. Balance live and recorded lecture with live hands-on local assistance as well as online Q&A.
This wouldn't increase inequality. If anything, it can't be worse than sending the richest 10% to private school while the other 90% are left to.. what it is now.
It's not even about giving them more resources, but the taking away that infuriates me. The single most valuable thing a child can have is curiosity, the second most is their time. Anyone who takes away one or the other are fundamentally an enemy to me.
Forcing kids who have great potential to go at the pace of the worst is taking away both of those things at the same time. These kids don't need much babysitting, they are also completely able to learn from anything. They do not need a live instructor, that's for sure.
But this doesn't come cheap, and tutoring is also going a bit out of style, regrettably.
Isn’t the more apt comparison between “pointless” schoolwork today and the “pointless” menial labor that would characterize more typical adolescences in early industrial times?
For that matter, between interest groups and national contests and wholesome YouTube role models aand makerspaces and even open-source, where kids can ease their way into meaningful contributions—all against a backdrop of world-historical material security—isn’t it an even larger handful of exceptional kids today with the means to break out and “do” than in the past?
Why should we look to the experiences of the exceptional few to understand what works best for kids on average?
Later I invite the counterfactual:
"Imagine if Carnegie and Da Vinci were instead compelled to stay in school for 10 more years. What would have happened?"
and,
"A 13-year-old Steve Jobs once called Bill Hewlett—whose number was simply listed in the phone book–and received a summer job at Hewlett Packard. This would be unsurprising in Carnegie’s time, was certainly surprising for 1968, and is culturally verboten today."
A telephone was only accessible to businesses and the wealthy during Carnegie’s time, so no surprised there.
A better analogy would be a postal letter.
Impossible to predict accurately, since so much of opportunity is luck. Maybe they would have made better connections in school. Maybe they would not have. Maybe they would have made the exact same connections.
It's possible to make a statistical argument that since they got such ridiculously unlikely opportunities, any deviation from the path they took would have been bad for them. But then you're no longer arguing about the value of education, you're just making observations about a pair of lucky people. And that's not compelling at all, when you don't address the entire outcome distribution for people making the exact same choices.
I wouldn't disagree that school isn't a place for being productive, if productivity is defined as "making something people want." By that definition all learning is unproductive.
[2] For maths, reference the works of Jo Boaler, Peter Liljedahl, etc.; most standards I have seen in social studies in recent years have inquiry as a key component, and I know several teachers who make use of projects there; there is often agency in choosing projects in art, particularly in upper grades; and so on.
The modern education system emerged as part of the industrial revolution. It's purpose was not to produce enlightened individuals but to produce productive/obedient laborers. People needed to know how to read/write and do simple calculations. Maybe a bit of math on the side. And there had to be some kind of system to rescue the really smart boys (mostly at the time) from being wasted on blue collar work and get them on some track to higher education. But mostly universities were for the upper class. You were born into that, not cherry picked from the lower classes. Education was about getting lower class kids up-to a lowish standard so they could be productive. And modern education hasn't really improved that much.
We have an opportunity to rethink education. Like many, I had lots of different teachers in high school and in university. Some really amazing, some not that great. Being a high school teacher is a tough job. It's a very rigid program that is sort of standardized for everyone. Mostly there isn't a lot of wiggle room to go beyond that. Lots of kids have trouble dealing with that and they kind of drop out or fail.
The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now. Anybody can get access to that. For free even. Education no longer has to be a group thing where everybody does the same things, gets the same tests, and then get the OK stamp of approval to be unleashed on an indifferent job market. Lots of people just coast through high school so they can finally start their lives not realizing that they just burned up their most important quarter of it.
I love Neal Stephenson's the The Diamond Age: Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer which is about a poor young orphaned girl getting her hands on an AI powered book that starts teaching her and adapts to her context. That's slowly becoming science fact with modern LLMs.
Maybe that's true, maybe it's not.
Either way, at 60, on a daily basis in my life, almost all the skills I use were thing I learned after I turned 25 (and most of them after 30). That includes cooking, woodworking, programming, swimming and host of others.
My stepfather used to say (he probably still would if given the chance) that the point of school (by which he meant what in the US is called K-12) is learning how to learn. I agree with 100% (surprise!) - the reason I have been able to learn things in later life is because I got an excellent opportunity to learn how to learn when I was younger.
> The opportunity with AI is that education can be much more personalized now.
I don't even know what this means. The best education consists of a situation (sometimes created by a teacher) that provides a given individual with the opportunity and motivation to acquire some knowledge about something. I do not see what AI can possibly have to do with creating such situations.
You no longer have to learn anything, you can just ask.
I feel there are also a lot of urban myths about learning and the human brain out there. You hear it all the time everywhere: I’m too old to learn this language/instrument/skill now.
You cannot just ask how to build or cook or paint or weld something. AI cannot help with this (certainly not yet) beyond the sort of information that the internet (and youtube in particular) is already providing.
The problem with self-directed education is one does not know which direction to go. By following a program, you're following a path of learning what you need to know that you don't know you need to know.
For example, what kind of math would you need to know to do mechanical engineering? Hydraulics? Electronics? Physics? Astrogation? Signal processing? It's all different.
Schools don't really adapt to the individual currently. It works for the average student but there are lots of students that don't do well with that. And it doesn't really get the best out of people.
When offering advice on how to learn how to program, I have to heavily recommend that students try their best to avoid the use of AI. Whereas previously the best advice I could give was to "build something", it is now possible to build a piece of software without understanding it at all. I have observed this myself with Rust; I have built a few programs now by repeatedly prompting AI models. I have even been quite engaged in designing the architecture, guiding the programs towards patterns that my intuition as a programmer says will be good for Rust too. The software works, but I can't help but feel I have learned nothing at all. Building something is now insufficient to learn, at least in the domain of programming.
I feel there will be far more compilations we will have to address in order to benefit from AI in education. That said, I am still optimistic that it will be a net positive force.
I hear this all the time, but I've never seen any evidence of it.
For a retrospective review of that history, with extensive citations, Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society can get you started on your own research. His book is fundamentally polemical because he was invested in his opinions about the past, the present, and the future, but the bibliography and citations prove useful for this topic even if you don't buy his summary perspective.
There are of course many other primary and secondary treatments contemporary to the time, that you can review without reading through Illich's polemics, some of which are very easy to find in the Harper's Magazine archives.
What you'll find, broadly, os that there was very little said of the idealism we now attribute to enlightment and almost all of the dialog about modern public education, especially compulsory -- by both proponets and critics -- was quite practical, focused on what schooling and education would acheive (or sacrifice) for industry, social cohesion, cultural diversity/uniformity, crime, child welfare, political alignment, and national identity.
IOW, "I've never seen any evidence" is understandable (we each only have so much time to study), but it's not for some lack of that evidence.
That doesn't make learning by doing a bad idea, or even necessarily a poor first choice, but if it's the only way for you to learn that's a problem.
School typically only caters to one type of learning, and it actually wouldn't matter which type since only focusing on one always leaves out the other.
Lastly, if you can only learn one way, and it is a defect, what do you expect them to do? Genetically modify themselves? Chemically correct themselves? They're kids, they need to be catered for, they can't do it for themselves.
No, your claim is even stronger - that anyone who doesn't learn that way has a learning disability?
I think either version is far too strong a statement.
Regardless I think it's trivially true that one learns by doing primarily or possibly exclusively. When I think of all the practice problems or "think through implications" that I have to do before being competent enough to claim i know something... Let alone my first attempt at applying the knowledge. That's all "doing".
Another point is that you can’t really learn a skill unless there are stakes - a real goal you need to accomplish, real customers, real coworkers. Grades aren’t real stakes; at least I didn’t regard them as such.
I’ve seen this over and over through the years as new college grads arrive who know a lot about things but have no idea how to do those things. Unless they went to a school with a good co-op program.
I didn't drop out, because I was wildly successful.
Exactly the opposite, in fact.
The process of climbing out of the wreckage is what helped me to become [moderately] successful.
I doubt anyone here, would be impressed by my career path, but I'm happier than I ever thought that I could be, now.
I think the apprenticeship model is really the best way to learn in a practical manner.
But that involves things like staying with employers for more than a year, and also, employers treating their employees in a way that makes them want to stay.
It also works with unions, because they have a whole infrastructure, wrapped around it.
- All of us are more naturally talented at some things.
- When you end up working with your natural talents, you have it easier than everyone else.
- Working in your talents often translates to passion, and that’s how you get the so called “agency.”
- To find your talents, you have to try everything once (e.g. wakeboarding, tennis, programming, accounting).
- More well off parents can offer their kids more opportunities to find their talents.
- Schooling and “doing” are orthogonal to finding your talents. Neither learning or doing will tell you your talents, passion, or give you agency, but you should do them both anyway.
I’m just speaking from my experience. I put a lot of practice into things that I am also talented at and life is good. shrug
I put practice into other things like cooking and music too but I’m not going to become a chef or play music for anything but fun.
I think we've yet to stumble upon a form that combines these three actions into one medium. Perhaps AI-guided doing (in simulation) will be the way.
Maybe if you're stuck in a classroom with unmotivated people, or your classmates are much slower than you, or the class is huge and your teacher doesn't give a shit about teaching. But in the absence of a severe case of some incidental problem like that, I've found the opposite to be true.
Besides that, a lot of classes are centered primarily on learning by oneself anyway. Many of my favorite classes in college were simply too fast-paced to allow students to rely on lecture time to pick up the material. Most of the learning was driven by out-of-class study, while lecture time was essentially used (along with office hours) as a chance to ask questions and catch up. In those classes I had the dual pleasures of exploring the material in solitude and testing my understanding with others who likewise were exploring the same wonders (and sometimes struggling with them) for the first time. It was great!
Admittedly, I was generally extremely unhappy in high school, and even in college I often felt frustrated with the arbitrariness of assignments and grades. But for me, as studying with others, especially people who were smart and passionate, was one of the best parts of both. (Generally, college was better due to a greater sense of freedom and (eventually) classes that were much more challenging in a way that felt meaningful.)
For me it was the noise. Also, being in a UK 'comprehensive' (state school) meant mixing with people from families with varying work ethics and it pained me trying to understand why other kids motivations, even other adults' motivations, were often very different to mine and what I had been brought up with at home.
Fwiw, I went to a state school as well (in the US). But by the time I was at the university, I already had a two-year degree, and all of my general education requirements were already fulfilled. So my first few years in college had the benefits of very small class sizes and a genuinely diverse student body (i.e., students of all ages from high school students doing dual-enrollment to retirees pursuing 'continuing education', students who were parents, students who were military veterans, students who had had already had careers in trades, students who were working full time, etc.), plus they were (mostly! some of the science and math classes were genuinely demanding, being taught either by passionate teachers or for supplemental income by university instructors who didn't want to bore themselves create extra work by dumbing down their curricula) easy enough that I had a ton of free time.
And then the last few years of it were comprised entirely of upper-division electives, except for a couple of major-specific requirements that the university refused to transfer from the community college. It was still a lot of classes, since I ended up doing a double degree (and part of an accelerated masters program that I ditched come graduation time), but basically all of those classes were (a) in my specialties of interest and (b) my choice. Those class sizes were mostly pretty small too, though some of my computer science classes were still huge (100+ students).
I've myself had work habits that were/are largely mysterious to me. But at any rate, by the time I got (back) to the university, my classes were all advanced enough that the vast majority of students in them were committed to their subjects (or else they were experienced enough to know they should drop the uninteresting class in the first week and take something better for them instead).
Wasted time.
Yeah the class composition probably matters, I wish a universe where what you described make sense.
If you drop out of school, do it because you've found a better way to learn.
If you stop learning, whether in our out of school, that is the path to failure.
Maybe stated like this it sounds obvious, but it runs counter to people expecting LLMs to learn to do things for themselves by "book learning" (pre-training), unless regurgitating artifacts from the training set is all you need.
The issue is that intelligence and action are prediction (with motor cortex output predictions driving muscles and becoming action - a useful insight/framing from Jeff Hawkins)... In order to act well, you need to learn to predict/react well, but these predictions need to be based on your OWN state per the sensory inputs you are receiving. Learning to predict what someone else would do (being book smart) doesn't help when you're the actor, where the predictions need to be based on your own internal state.
1. is lemonade a home craft? 2. who is forcing their children to bake sourdough croissants? 3. is craft baker really the career path of the future?
The most valuable thing is learning when to apply each type of learning, and the best way to learn that is with different kind of mentors. I guess the well known people that he lists as examples had a lot of those. For me that is the differentiator.
School is neither necessary nor sufficient for achievement. Certainly education, in some form, must be required. E.g. learning to read and perform basic math, but "school" as it's known today is not the only way, nor likely even a good way, to learn those skills.
The most precious resource is agency - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27695181 - July 2021 (325 comments)
It shood be basic literature for all institutional teachers.
Agency is actively suppressed at school; that's one of its core functions.