Education
Why do students go to school?
Our society’s standard answer is so obvious that it seems hardly worth discussing. It is almost shouted from every school transcript and class syllabus: learning the material.
In 2001, the Nobel Prize was awarded to economist Michael Spence for a mathematical model of one explanation for these puzzles: signaling. The basic idea is that students go to school not so much to learn useful job skills as to show off their work potential to future employers.
Functions of college—networking and dating—can be seen as investments in a student’s future. In other words, some appreciate college in part because for them, it’s simply fun—like a summer camp that lasts four years. It’s a place to join clubs, go to parties, and experiment with drugs and alcohol. For a more limited set of students, even the classes themselves might be fun (shocking, we know).
Compulsory state-sponsored education traces its heritage to a relatively recent, and not particularly “scholarly,” development: the expansion of the Prussian military state in the 18th and 19th centuries. And in the mid-1800s, American educators and lawmakers explicitly set out to emulate the Prussian system. This suggests that public K–12 schools were originally designed as part of nation-building projects, with an eye toward indoctrinating citizens and cultivating patriotic fervor.
Schools that are full of regimentation and ranking can acclimate students to the regimentation and ranking common in modern workplaces. The main symptom is that unschooled workers don’t do as they’re told. For example, consider the data on cotton mill “doffers,” workers who remove full spools of yarn from cotton spinning machines. In 1910, doffers in different regions around the world had a productivity that varied by a factor of six, even though they did basically the same job with the same material and machines.32 In some places, each doffer managed six machines, while in other places only one machine. The problem was that workers in less-developed nations just refused to work more machines:
Moser, an American visitor to India in the 1920s, is even more adamant about the refusal of Indian workers to tend as many machines as they could “…it was apparent that they could easily have taken care of more, but they won’t… They cannot be persuaded by any exhortation, ambition, or the opportunity to increase their earnings.” In 1928 attempts by management to increase the number of machines per worker led to the great Bombay mill strike. Similar stories crop up in Europe and Latin America.
So it’s a mixed bag. Schools help prepare us for the modern workplace and perhaps for society at large. But in order to do that, they have to break our spirits and train us to submit to our place in a modern hierarchy. And while there are many social and economic benefits to this enterprise, one of the first casualties is learning.
Plato’s “Republic” (Book VII, 536e):
“a free soul ought not to pursue any study slavishly; for while bodily labors performed under constraint do not harm the body, nothing that is learned under compulsion stays with the mind.” “True,” he said. “Do not, then, my friend, keep children to their studies by compulsion
But you can just do things?
I think a motivator not mentioned by the book, based on my own observations at Waterloo, is that school is also used as a tool for building conviction, courage and accelerating self-esteem and agency.
Paul Graham specifically defines being a student as BFS.
Given this dichotomy, which of the two paths should you take? Be a real student and not start a startup, or start a real startup and not be a student? I can answer that one for you. Do not start a startup in college. How to start a startup is just a subset of a bigger problem you’re trying to solve: how to have a good life. And though starting a startup can be part of a good life for a lot of ambitious people, age 20 is not the optimal time to do it. Starting a startup is like a brutally fast depth-first search. Most people should still be searching breadth-first at 20.
Consider my own reaction to building cat card game before I enrolled at waterloo. Consider grades at waterloo, and finally waterloo from first principles.