photo of little jinglin when she went to enrolled in a preschool in the chinese education system

i’ve probably thought about raising kids a lot more than most other childless 20-some year olds. part of the reason is because i feel like i’ve been a mother since i was 7 years old, which is when my younger sister was born, then double-bam again when my younger brother was born a year later. i care a lot about my siblings and want them to feel unconditionally loved, supported, and empowered to develop into awesome and capable young people.

my siblings are now in high school. one of the main complaints i hear from them now is that they tell me school is boring, that assignments feel meaningless, and that school has this monopolizing effect on their time, leaving not enough time for their interests outside of the classroom. hearing them complain did make me think a bit about why we’ve decided this thing called ‘school’ is the default prescription for most people’s first 20ish years of life. warning ahead of time that this post might have more complaints than solutions, but maybe serve as some initial thoughts on the topic.

why does the current education system exist in the way it does

• school seems pretty useful for helping systematically churn out Productive Members of Society. by issuing everyone a somewhat standardized curriculum, we can create a shared American identity and create people who learn to be obedient citizens and workers.
• a standardized curriculum also helps promote shared literacy and numeracy, which seems good for social coordination.
• great! now students are being taught things. now we need a way to measure their ability to learn and apply the knowledge we teach them. hmm, what about grades?
  • what does it mean to be a good student? this is actually a bit fuzzy to define. hmm, let’s design a grading/GPA system as a proxy! proxies exist everywhere because they are a useful abstraction to quantify things that are otherwise hard to measure. just like how credit score is a proxy for lenders to determine a borrower ability to repay debts, we can use grades/GPA as a proxy for measuring ability or knowledge or work ethic.
• institutions need a scalable way to measure and compare student’s abilities. a college admissions committee tasked with reviewing 40,000 applications does not have the bandwidth to individually assess every student for intellectual ability. school creates legibility and makes people predictable and comparable to institutions like hiring managers, college admissions, etc.

pitfalls of the current schooling system

• when students are always given a well-defined rubric of what constitutes success, it atrophies their ability to come up with the rubric on their own. in the real world, you will rarely be told which direction is most promising nor will you be handed a neatly-packaged roadmap of how to get there.
• in a similar vein, because school outlines the curriculum you should follow, it allows you to procrastinate thinking about what you would want to explore if you had more autonomy, mental bandwidth, and time.
• students sometimes are not emotionally invested in what they are learning, maybe because they don’t see the application or usefulness of the work that is being assigned to them. versus if students learn from a result of trying to achieve a goal/project that they themselves are excited about, there is more emotional investment
• grades/GPA seem extremely Goodhart-able. there are so many ways to raise your GPA that have nothing to do with learning more or becoming more capable.

possible solutions

• make school as close of a simulation as possible to how the real world works. instead of using grades, we issue students some fiat currency & encourage them to create projects or make things that other students can pay for
• still have a core curriculum for basic literacy math/science/social science, but allow students to progress through the coursework faster if they want to
• more training programs for teaching teachers how to teach/be good role models
• in this system, i would want a way to incentivize working on things that have no immediate commercial application (no other student wants to ‘buy’ it). so something similar to NSF grants.
  • just like in the real world, there is lots of usefulness in seemingly ‘useless’ research!
• allow students to teach each other & design classes and workshops! i am super bullish on student-to-student teaching.
• in feb 2025, i was a counselor at the Asian Spring Program on Rationality, a 10 day camp for mathsy teenagers. these camps have a pretty interesting pedagogy. because these camps are short, the goal of these camps is to give young people exposure to fields or ideas they might not know exist. there really isn’t a goal of teaching mastery given how short the camp is. also all the classes are optional. students are told that if they think staying up late to have a conversation with another student is more valuable than the morning class the next day, they are encouraged to make the decision to skip the class. maybe classes should be more about sowing the seeds of curiosity rather than a forced prescription of content
• a re-haul of the school system will probably be slow. in the meantime, imbue kids with meta skills like how to use the internet to teach yourself things or how to cold-email people and ask for help/resources