Education as public good

From the archive of my 2022 personal site.

What is education?

"The act or process of imparting or acquiring general knowledge, developing the powers of reasoning and judgment, and generally of preparing oneself or others intellectually for mature life." — Dictionary.com

Generally there is a student who learns from a teacher.

What is a public good?

"A service such as national defence, law enforcement, and road building, that are for the benefit of, and available to, all members of the public" — Dictionary.com

Generally something everyone uses or has access to. My interest in public goods was spurred by Kevin Owocki's Greenpilled. Highly recommend.

How do we pay for education?

This section will most likely show my upper class United States bias, but I will do my best to be objective.

Kindergarten through 12th grade

Public grade schools are paid through local school taxes, as well as state and federal subsidies. Essentially taxes. Private grade schools are paid directly by the student's parent or guardian. With any service, the expectation is if you pay more for it, it should be better.

Academia

You have the same options of public or private upper education. There are generally more private schools and fewer public schools relative to grade school. At this point, many students take on debt to pay their way through schooling. There are direct forms of compensation like scholarships, grants, working as a Resident Assistant or Teaching Assistant. Those are up to the student to acquire.

Bootcamps

In the past decade a new form of education has emerged called a bootcamp. These are usually in STEM-related fields like computer science. They are paid for by the student, with the option to pay in full, in installments, with debt, or with an income sharing agreement where the student pays the bootcamp a percentage of their income when they get a job.

Other services

In life there are many opportunities to learn. Generally these will be paid for privately and directly, like hiring a private tutor, or by the government as a public good, like the public library.

Resources vs. relationships

Resources. If you want to learn something, you need a resource that has the knowledge you are looking to acquire. This can be a book, video, or an entire course. With a resource, the limit to your knowledge is the knowledge contained within the resource. Resources are one-way communication and education.

Relationships. A relationship is a resource that can talk back to you. This can be to offer feedback, inspiration, or questions. The limit of a relationship is much greater than the limit of a resource because they can share all of their knowledge while also inspiring you to learn more than even they know. Relationships are two-way communication and education.

Choice

There are a lot of decisions to be had when learning something new. In today's systems, the learner does not have much power of choice.

Where will you learn? For grade school, that is dependent on where you live. Onward, that is dependent on which schools and/or teachers accept you. You must prove you are a worthy student.

What will you learn? In grade school, you don't have many choices here. Maybe in high school you can choose your extracurriculars. After that, you have a lot more choice, but again it is dependent on where you are accepted. To be accepted, you may already need experience in what you want to learn. So this decision may come before a relationship is even established.

Who will you learn from? This is highly dependent on where you will learn. The teacher has every right to leave the relationship at any time. Fortunately in today's world, if the where is "online", your options are relatively limitless.

How will you learn? This is limited to the teacher's capacity to learn and their willingness to take feedback and suggestions.

Ideal education

In an ideal world, you could:

learn anything you wanted
from anyone you wanted to learn from
with anyone you wanted to learn with
for free

Sounds great right?

Possible solution

The solution I envision is a martial arts style of learning/teaching applied to any knowledge field. A knowledge Dojo.

Leadership. This Dojo will be led by one or several sensei. They will oversee all instruction in the Dojo.

Students. The students at the Dojo will be ranked by their skills. This rank will be in the form of a belt (white, yellow, ..., brown, black). They will practice with other students and learn from those with greater skills than them. To move onto the next belt, there is an assessment given by the sensei.

Dojo as public good. To make it a public good, there could be a general membership fee for everyone. To reward the sensei and student-teachers for their instruction, they can get paid from the membership fees. So if someone has trouble paying for membership, they can teach more.

Limitations. Membership to the Dojo may be a hot commodity. To keep the community reasonably sized, there may need to be a cap on how many people can be a part of the Dojo. Fortunately, as more students become sensei, the model for the Dojo can be replicated like martial arts gyms are today.

Dojo DAO. The implications for this in web3 are salient. There is a strong need for more skilled developers as well as a strong desire to learn. I may do another writeup about a potential "Developer Dojo DAO".

AI teachers. With AI teachers, we really could learn anything we wanted to learn from anyone we wanted to learn from. A real world example today would be learning to play chess from the world's best chess player, Magnus Carlsen. It would cost a lot of money to pay him directly for his time. But an AI teacher could play exactly how he does and give tips similarly to how he would. This is possible today. As with many novel AI applications, chess is leading the way.

I want a world where I can upskill without any friction besides my own cognitive impairment. There are different practices around the world that we can learn from to establish the education systems we want for the future. The core principles I see are free choice, open access, and win and help win incentives.

Thank you for reading this far. I would appreciate any and all comments, questions, or feedback. :)