<story><title>Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/rfs-news-jobs-and-democracy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thowar2</author><text>Education should be on this list.&lt;p&gt;The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education.&lt;p&gt;1) The current methods are highly ineffective for teaching&lt;p&gt;By getting more effective at teaching children, and helping them to self educate, we get better informed citizens who can interpret news more accurately and effectively participate in democracy.&lt;p&gt;2) The current goals for education do not align with current &amp;amp; future needs&lt;p&gt;Our current system is designed to produce factory workers for the industrial economy, which was adapted to produce knowledge workers for the information economy. But we are moving towards full automation of most of those jobs.&lt;p&gt;We will need to prepare people to be adaptable in a fast changing automated world: more entrepreneurial type skills are needed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>saalweachter</author><text>See, I hear techies grumble about education constantly.  Our education system is teaching the wrong skills or not challenging students or just an elaborate babysitting racket.&lt;p&gt;I hear teachers, on the other hand, complain that after decades of trying everything they can, they&amp;#x27;ve realized that they cannot help students unless those students have safe, stable, supportive home lives.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s easy to say we should introduce children to programming early, even easy to do.  It is easy to complain about critical thinking skills and kids these days.  It is easy to see that overtesting schools and overreacting to those test scores wastes resources and the time of children and teachers.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s hard to find a way to ensure one in six children in the US subject to food insecurity always get three good meals a day.  It is hard to figure out how to provide stability in a single family, let alone all families.  It is hard to say a child shouldn&amp;#x27;t drop out of school and work whatever job they can when their parents have been unable or unwilling to provide for them.&lt;p&gt;We have been talking about and trying to fix &amp;quot;education&amp;quot; my entire life; maybe we should try fixing some of the underlying problems first, even if they are hard.</text></comment>
<story><title>Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy</title><url>https://blog.ycombinator.com/rfs-news-jobs-and-democracy/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>thowar2</author><text>Education should be on this list.&lt;p&gt;The root of all these problems stem from a lack of effective education.&lt;p&gt;1) The current methods are highly ineffective for teaching&lt;p&gt;By getting more effective at teaching children, and helping them to self educate, we get better informed citizens who can interpret news more accurately and effectively participate in democracy.&lt;p&gt;2) The current goals for education do not align with current &amp;amp; future needs&lt;p&gt;Our current system is designed to produce factory workers for the industrial economy, which was adapted to produce knowledge workers for the information economy. But we are moving towards full automation of most of those jobs.&lt;p&gt;We will need to prepare people to be adaptable in a fast changing automated world: more entrepreneurial type skills are needed.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Cleisthenes</author><text>Using public education for any form of job training is one of the gravest mistakes that has put us in the current position.&lt;p&gt;The reason for public education is to have an informed citizenry able to participate fully in society. Using it as job training is just corporate welfare, that is using tax money to pay for something businesses should do themselves.&lt;p&gt;There is often overlap in the skills needed in an informed citizenry and employees (e.g. reading, computer skills, etc.), but not always.&lt;p&gt;Trying to chase what business or the marketplace wants is a fools journey that create citizens poorly prepared to be fully empowered citizens with a solid understanding of the world.&lt;p&gt;I suspect entrepreneurial skills would be well covered by this approach as it should emphasis skills of leadership, self-reliance, consensus, and creative thinking.</text></comment>