In this alternate universe school is completely funded by the government and housing is included.
Look, I’m not saying that you’re lazy for not spending your nights and weekends at the library taking online learning courses, but you can answer your own question by answering another, “What’s stopping you now?” There are fewer barriers to education now than there ever have been. People who are curious learn. People who are driven accomplish. People who are both discover.
School isn’t just learning the stuff in the classes. It’s the shared experience too. It’s the teachers holding you accountable for learning.
“Going to school” is a very different thing than just trying to learn on your own. Self motivation and time are a huge barrier for a lot of people. I think the OP was imagining being able to go to school every day and just take classes for free with other people also interested.
I have done my fair share of school. I just think it would be cool to keep learning, but not only that. I think if peoples default was to continually learn stuff and the time allowed to do it wasn’t hampered by outside influences we could all engage in much deeper conversations about all sorts of things.
You should never stop learning. School gave you the framework by which you can build new information and knowledge, use it!
Ok but that’s not my question…
Some good companies will provide you with paid education, of course it’s in form of a training, to an important topic used in that company.
Harvard puts classes online for free, libraries are already paid for through tax dollars and YouTube exists. You can go back to school whenever already friend
You can go back to school whenever already friend
The hypothetical included living costs. Which would let you digest those educational resources to learn. Saying they are there without having a system in play is just ignoring the realities of life.
Right, of course I could spend all my spare time learning stuff. What if I was allowed all my time to be spent learning stuff?
The library?
No…
teachers would be really freaking sad with all the people who go only for the free housing
Would they though? Wouldn’t they be thrilled to teach things in an open ended, no pressure type environment. It wouldn’t have to be structured like it is today. People could learn what ever they are interested in, focus solely on that, and teachers could offer different levels of difficulty based solely on each person’s ability.
With free housing, I’m expecting quite a bit of people to be there without interest in learning anything. There is also a lot of pain if the learners aren’t filtered into skill levels because you’re going to have to “conserve” teacher power so that everyone gets at least one teacher for their subject. A “bright-line” solution to this would be dropping those who don’t pass a test after a few weeks, but then you also risk filtering out those who only want to learn a specific subtopic.
That’s not the point. The point isn’t to force people to learn. The point is eduction is readily available. Sure there might be a person there that doesn’t want to do anything but live in their dorm or what ever. Except, there is no obligation for them to learn anything either because school doesn’t end.
They could be stuck into a class all about socializing while playing video games. A class about stacking blocks. Whatever.
Then you say, well then how does society work if everyone is dicking around in school. It’s not a complete answer but imagine you have all these people who have learned all this very specific stuff according to their interest. What do you think they are going to want to do with it? They will want to apply it.
You’re focusing on the education being the value, where the combination of low responsibility plus free room and board may end up being more valuable to some people.
You wouldn’t be forcing people to learn, but going to college is a lot more preferable working in fast food or as a janitor.
Am I crazy, people have interests, right? Even the most useless person, given the chance, would be more than willing to explore those interests. History of Marijuana? Cheeto manufacturing?
Those types of classes would probably overfill.
Even the most useless person, given the chance, would be more than willing to explore those interests.
Maybe to a certain extent, but probably not to extent necessary to succeed in college.
A major difference between high school and college is that people choose to be in college; they don’t choose to be in high school. Make someone’s economic life dependent on college and it switches back to being high school.
And something that you haven’t addressed is when people leave. I’m imagining people being more than happy getting stuck in thesis hell for their Masters or Doctorate because it means they still have a roof over their head and food on the table and being a student would be a far better job than a lot of other work out there. There is a reason why all degree programs have a point to try push students out, either via graduation or flunking out.
Masters or doctorate implys they don’t need to leave the system. They are contributing. In this world, there is not need for honors or degrees in the same way it is now. Degrees, the way you imply, mean you indend to stop educating yourself and join the workforce. That’s not the point. You don’t have to stop. That’s the point.
This system could work, but there needs to be an incentive to actually learn instead of hogging resources. To create value and not just be a huge budget hole of consumption like OLPC, the incentives should be passing tests for a skill that people can be paid for. Until we institute anarchy, such a project would be doomed to close if there wasn’t such an incentive.
(That is, assuming people allow the government to allow people to get free housing by simply learning about the history of weed, which is still banned in many states. Such “interesting” topics also have way more hold within only the neurodivergent community than the masses.)
I’m more just world building here then actually plotting a path to this utopia. Societal needs will always push their way forward but I think there is a level of misappropriation of resources and around education.
The world kind of builds itself, honestly, though.
If society made education our ultimate pursuit answering unanswered questions would be what it’s all about. Who would teach them? The people who never leave the system, of course. What if they aren’t good teachers? Not every teacher is suited for every student. Structuring classes can be based on learning competencies. Teacher involvement can be based on learning competencies. Ok, but someone needs to run society. Well, we have a population of highly educated individuals.
I think, the more we break down this thought experiment we find that this is actually the natural order. No, not in the form of academia but in the form, what is it called, anthropology? Think to your friend group. Friend groups succeed when they have a unified task. Because each contributor has their own set of experiences each provides new information for the rest.
I don’t know. Thanks for humoring me.
It’s already like that except the funding part. There’s free online learning for basically anything available to everyone in the world, 24/7. And people do take advantage of it.
You can learn whatever TF you want from reliable, trusted sources it’s just that all you get from it is the knowledge. You don’t normally get a degree or a certificate or anything like that. Because those things are for traditional institutions (and how they make money).
If you really want to learn something, go learn it. What’s stopping you?
If you really want to learn something, go learn it. What’s stopping you?
Work.
If I don’t work full time I can’t afford to house or feed myself.
Work wipes me out mentally leaving me no mental bandwidth to spend what precious little time I have left to go learn, even if I want to.
I would love to be able to dedicate time to learning like I did when I was at university but even with the government funding available to me I would have to upend my life.
I do spend time doing learning around things that interest me but it is depressing how little bandwidth work leaves for me to do that.
The issue as I see it is that knowledge in any subject is protean. It changes. So if you wait to long to go back, what you learned before would be completely useless and you’d effectively have to start from the beginning.
Heck, the things I was taught in my Archaeology Degree from 2001 are at best, incomplete, and in some cases, now completely refuted. If I had left and decided to go back even ten years later, the technology that was suddenly in use alone would force me to start all over again.
That is a feature not a bug. The alternative is people being in senior positions that want to do things “the way they were taught to do it” 30 years ago.
Have you considered checking out your local Community College?
I think I was fine with school ending at some point. Focusing on new things… Trading in some annoying obligations for others. I don’t think I’d elect to come back unless it’s just every now and then.
Yeah, I’m 100% glad to be out of school but as a society we just kinda accept that school should end and then you only do work. Just wish we could reverse that idea. That people who are capable were given more opportunity to explore all the different possibilies this world contains.
How interesting would it be if you and the grocery store clerk could get into a conversation about their dissertation on dark matter or something.
Think, in a future with complete automation why can’t this be a possibility?
Agree. I’m not sure if the grocery store clerk will be a human in that scenario and not a robot… But I’d like to live and see humanity arrive at some post-scarcity utopia like Star Trek. Where everyone can choose to do whatever they like, because all the basic needs are met. And all the mundane tasks are done by automation. I’d certainly learn a lot. There are some skills and languages that’d I’d like to try or maybe even master.
Sure, the clerk might be a robot. Just pointing out that even though you might not pursue a career in theoretical physics there might be people who are very interested in it anyway.
Replies in here really showing why teachers are so tragically underpaid 😔
It’s already like that except the funding part. There’s free online learning for basically anything available to everyone in the world, 24/7. And people do take advantage of it.
You can learn whatever TF you want from reliable, trusted sources it’s just that all you get from it is the knowledge. You don’t normally get a degree or a certificate or anything like that. Because those things are for traditional institutions (and how they make money).
If you really want to learn something, go learn it. What’s stopping you?
A decade or 2 ago? Maybe a ton
Now? This is essentially the truth with the internet
What do you mean ? Tons of people come back to school later in life, and it’s ~~often ~~ sometimes funded by unemployment, better giving money to someone for 2 years than for thei rwhole life
Everyone would go anti intellectual because of those free loading students
That’s how it works now. Assuming you can afford it.
The government would end up housing and educating most of the population, which would cost more than any country could afford.
