

Hacker School - palish

It seemed best that this had its own discussion so we could really refine this.  The original discussion is at <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44627</a><p>The idea is to create a YCombinator-like process that starts at the K-12 level.  Perhaps not as far back as kindergarten, but definitely before 6th grade.  Students would be trained in programming, art, writing, and other methods of creation.  When the students graduate, some number of them will be given the opportunity to start a company.  In return, the school will get 2-10% of the company.<p>But what about the students who won't start companies, though?  Clearly not everyone will have what it takes to think of a viable business.  Well, the wonderful attribute of this system is that everyone's a winner.  Anyone who doesn't start a company could be a cofounder or go to work for previous companies produced by this program, or go to college if they'd like.<p>Why would children be motivated in such an environment?  My theory is simple:  If you don't treat them like idiots, they won't become idiots.  Show them the joys of creating something cool.  They'll like it.  <p>The reason children aren't motivated in a public school environment is because most public schools are prisons for children.  It was for me.  This system is the polar opposite of that.  Everything revolves around project creation and development, <i>not</i> rigid, unbreakable structure that beats compliance out of the children, which is how public high school is.<p>The teachers would need to be extremely high quality.  They need to <i>want</i> to be a part of the process of training the next generation of hackers, not hired because there's a shortage of teachers.  <p>Hacker School would focus on programming, but there's no reason why it couldn't train children to become excellent journalists, novelists, or any other creative activity the students like.<p>One property that this system needs from the beginning is a way for advanced children to be placed right where they're mentally stretched.  If it makes sense for an extremely bright child to skip three grades, so be it.  There are social implications, but another theory of mine is this:  If you give children an environment where you respect them and treat them like adults, they will respect and treat each other like adults.  Sure, there will be social conflicts, but there always are in life.  Yes, they will lack maturity to deal with those.  Yes, there will be outlying cases where it's really bad.  But the system can be flexible in dealing with things like that.  <i>There won't be childish punishments.  There won't be detention.</i>  I don't know what the appropriate system of punishments is, but it doesn't seem like we need to even worry about that until it becomes a problem.  Adults have a way of sorting things out, and I believe children can behave like adults.<p>Please be harsh in constructively criticizing this.  The system needs to be the best, and for it to be the best, I ask that you guys please tear apart anything about it that seems like it won't work.
======
pg
This wouldn't work for the same reasons it wouldn't work to have a k-12 school
for theoretical physicists: (a) no one smart enough to understand the subject
would want to work full-time teaching third graders, and (b) only a small
fraction of people are suited by ability and temperament for this kind of
work, and you can't select them at age 5.

It might work to have a specialized HS for hacking (hacking, not founding
startups), but even there you'd face problem (a). Probably the best bet is for
HS students interested in hacking to take courses at their local college--
which they do already.

~~~
andreyf
(a) no one smart enough to understand the subject would want to work full-time
teaching third graders

That's an awfully broad statement. I'm sure there can be found _someone_ very
smart that would be interested in contributing back to children... Woz comes
to mind, as does Will Wright...

(b) only a small fraction of people are suited by ability and temperament for
this kind of work, and you can't select them at age 5.

I think you're thinking along different lines than the poster. He doesn't look
at this as starting a venture capital firm, but as a replacement for the
broken public school system. The funding doesn't _have_ to come from equity,
but the general hypothesis smells right:

A good early schooling would allow those currently going to public school to
create (on average) more wealth in the future. One could use a fraction of
that (future) wealth to actually fund the school. From the little I
understand, a lot of private Universities work this way - where a good chunk
of their budgets comes from alumni donations.

Why can't this system work before college?

~~~
andreyf
_Why can't this system work before college?_

This is a serious question. I'm sure the idea isn't exactly brand new, so why
hasn't it worked? There's gotta be some kind of problem, but I'm not seeing
it...

~~~
bootload
_"... Why can't this system work before college? .... so why hasn't it worked?
There's gotta be some kind of problem, but I'm not seeing it ..."_

Try these

\- <http://paulgraham.com/hs.html>

\- <http://paulgraham.com/mit.html>

------
justinsb
But maybe school should be about education, rather than training? Broadening
minds, rather than turning out cookie-cutter programmers. Teach someone how to
think for themselves, start them in some (foreign) languages, introduce them
to history and literature, give them the basics of mathematics and science,
and they can easily learn programming and will have the broad base to come up
with great ideas.

Hot-house them on 'how to launch a startup' and 'coding in Fortran' and you'll
probably turn out legions of people very good at passing exams in 'structure
of business plans (in the year 1999)' and 'syntax of Fortran', but when the
world moves on they won't be able to adapt.

That said, I think your idea is sound, though your methods are wrong. A school
should encourage creativity and intellectual development - that's how to
produce your future YCombinators, journalists etc.

I think we're seeing the failure of the training model in India, where they do
turn out legions of capable developers, but comparatively few capable
entrepreneurs.

I guess I think that the best way to achieve your goal is actually closer to
the current educational systems than one so directly and narrowly orientated
towards the goal: education is more of a journey than a race.

~~~
palish
Unfortunately, the current public system fails to educate very well, and a lot
of private schools are based on the public model. With that said, I know there
are excellent private schools. This would be in addition to those.

It seems like the best compromise will present itself when real-world tests
are done. The whole school won't be devoted to training, but there will be a
certain percentage of training. The fact that there is a single focus (Your
startup at the end of the road) will be the motivating force for students. I
would've given anything to know that there was light at the end of the tunnel
besides "go to college".

I totally agree with you. Education is a wonderful journey, not a race.
Students would be able to find out what they like and a specific idea that
motivates them, then get access to resources that would help them create value
relating to that idea.

------
geebee
I don't think that a K-12 school for hackers would work especially well. That
said, it would be nice if schools stopped practices that almost seem to
deliberately extinguish hacking and startups. Schools teach you that you need
to ask permission to do things. It isn't until you get to college that you
don't have to ask permission anymore.

Hackers and entrepreneurs become who they are by realizing that they don't
have to ask anyone's permission.

I remember learning violin when I was a kid. If I played something that wasn't
on my "to-do" list, my parents would call upstairs "are you practicing, or
just messing around?"

I read that Andre 3000 used the three chords in "Hey Ya" because, well, he'd
just recently picked up the guitar and those were the three chords he knew.
Didn't ask any permission, just started composing.

Recently, I saw a dude in a coffee shop with a guitar, and he was technically
awesome. It was fun to stop and listen for a few minutes, but I wouldn't have
been able to tell you what he was playing five minutes later.

Schools don't really teach creativity, and I don't think they can. But they
might do a better job getting out of the way.

~~~
rms
I had one teacher in public school, in fifth grade, who insisted you didn't
need to ask permission to go to the bathroom. I didn't get that much freedom
again until I got to college.

~~~
geebee
I have a two year old, and I'm not sure I like the subversive influence of
Thomas the Train. It's teaching him that being useful and reliable is the most
important thing an engine can be.

The engines all wait for Sir Topam Hat to show up at the station with a task
for them. Once, Thomas the Train didn't like the task, and started to
object...

"Really useful engines don't argue," says Sir Topam Hat.

So Thomas goes off and does the task.

Personally, I agree that really useful engines don't argue. Why would they
bother bringing this dude around to their point of view, when they have so
many other options in life?

Anyway, I think a lot of these stories date back to a time when the US economy
really needed a lot of strong arms and backs that didn't argue. Try to manage
programmers like that now :)

Actually, try to have that career now as a hacker. You may get to limp along
with a task list for a while, but no way are you getting anywhere with that
approach. It's not just about startups - I doubt you'd even get hired for
anything remotely promising. Won't work, not a chance. The last thing I want
to give my kid is a set of values that will make it impossible to thrive in a
modern economy.

------
Mistone
It seems like K-8 is pretty much reserved for core skills - math, sci,
language etc. Where I could see a lot of value in this approach is at the high
school level (9-12). This type of program could be piloted at a few public,
private and charter schools as an adjunct academy for students.

Also it would have to really be multidisciplinary and the main focus would
need to be on fostering creativity and transferring creative skills into the
"real world", not just programming and a few art classes.

There is a really interesting "entrepreneurial" program at Everett Community
College (<http://www.everettcc.edu/programs/bat/sbd/>), that could possible be
reverse engineered into the type of program described above.

------
steveplace
Hi, first post for me.

This is feasible up to a point. The all out "charter school" idea would have
the most government and beaurecratic hangups. There would still have to be
standards and accountability (read: testing) that would have to go along in
order to comply with this.

However, there could be some smaller, scalable, proof of concept models that
you could deploy to both public and private schools. For instance, you could
create that whole idea into a subject (Design, Hack, 'trep 101), or you could
make it completely elective like during lunch or after school.

Another way to approach it is create it through a vocational program. These
programs exist for other trades, mainly blue collar, in which they get paid a
little and learn to be an electrician, car mechanic, etc. Around my area,
there is a vocational school that pulls from all the high schools in the area,
and they take the second half of the school block to attend. Transferring that
sort of model over into "Hacker School" would seem like a nice first step to
see whether it would succeed.

------
ivankirigin
There is a related discussion here:
[http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/08/back_to_school.h...](http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2007/08/back_to_school.html)

I think there has been a significant and artificial extension of childhood,
and it is a bad idea. Expecting more from kids and giving them power and
responsibility is a good idea.

From that blog (which quotes these paragraphs from Kay Hymowitz): " Teen paid
employment is at an all-time low; about 35% of teenagers are working at some
point in the year, compared with close to half at the post-World War II peak
in 1979. That's because for kids these days, summer is no different from the
rest of the year; it's always time for education, or, more precisely, resume-
building.

In the junior-high and early high-school years, middle-class strivers spend
summers at soccer, hockey, swim, diving or baseball camp to sharpen their
athletic skills; they go to science, computer and arts camp to pump up their
academic records. In their junior or senior year they jet off to exotic
destinations to fill in the international travel/community service credential,
building huts in Guatemala, supervising nursery-schoolers in South Africa or,
as one company offers, reforesting fruit trees in Fiji. And then, finally, for
many older teens, it's an internship, a part-time, usually unpaid, job-lite at
an office in a business or nonprofit organization. "

------
Keios
I seem to have only a few questions...

How does a 6th grader know that she wants to be a startup-founder?

Are you attempting to replace an admittedly broken schooling system with
another one?

Are you attempting to increase creative space? If so, can creativity be
decoupled from freedom? Are you going to force them to be creative?

Finally, at a risk of sounding a tad off. What good will this do anyone? What
pain are you fixing? Is there a pain big enough? Why hasn't it fixed itself
yet?

~~~
palish
Hiya :)

Any given 6th grader doesn't, but it seems like if enough children get a
chance, some will succeed. The nice thing about this system is there's no
penalty for failure. Students can work for other startups or go to college.

This sort of system could be an alternative for people actively seeking one.
Maybe parents who realize the current model might not be the best for their
child, or a student not satisfied with the rate of teaching.

The school would be an increase in creativity.. It's focus would be on
creation. Of course the school wouldn't force anyone to do anything. It's
simply an alternate path, one that would probably be fun for everyone
involved.

I was actually trying to fix my own pain, and this seemed a reasonable way to
do it. You see, I'm nineteen. At seventeen I dropped out of public high school
to work for a videogame company because I couldn't stand it one second longer.
I felt caged, mentally beaten up, and I felt extraordinarily hopeless. Running
off to pursue a creative endeavor like writing video games at a game company
solved all that. It was simply the best choice for me.

But wait a minute, if I was so miserable, there must be other children who
are, too. Creative ones who can accomplish great things if only society deems
that they could follow their dreams. And why couldn't they actually work on
their dreams in the best place for it, in an environment with creative people?
Yeah, they need a certain level of maturity, but that can be supplemented by
having mature people around to go to for advice.

So, in short, it would be great to offer the hopeless some hope, something
other than "Just wait 'til you get to college, everything will be wonderful
then".

~~~
Keios
Hi Palish, Thanks for your response. Some more thoughts...

The challenge is that the current system is generic, it allows you to choose
any field of work or study and that choice can be postponed. In your school,
that choice is made early and that brings with it a risk.

I think your pain was that 'you' felt mentally caged in the current
educational system and that 'you' fixed your pain by making a change. What you
seem to be doing now is applying a 'mass fix ' by generalizing/abstracting
your problem, and while that works in most cases it may need additional
fleshing out. Perhaps the fix for each individual might be more effective,
perhaps everyone who feels caged needs to apply an individual patch just like
you did rather than fix something which isn't broken when they are in 6th
grade. Are we fixing before there is a pain?

Hope these thoughts help you develop your idea. Best of luck.

------
pdsull
Seems to me that part of being a hacker is the ability to create despite
restrictions. Embracing obstacles, and in doing so overcoming them. Maybe by
remove the pre-existing boundaries, you remove part of what makes a hack so
great.

By simply removing the obstacle (traditional schooling in this case), doesn't
that cheapen the creation? Put another way, if hacking is the status-quo, is
it still hacking?

~~~
omouse
_By simply removing the obstacle (traditional schooling in this case), doesn't
that cheapen the creation?_

This would be the greatest hack in the fucking world. Replacing the
traditional school system.

There will always be restrictions and great things to create. Don't you want
more people having the chance to create fantastic things and crush obstacles
left and right?

------
ivankirigin
I heard of a program in Seattle in which smart kids finished High School in
8th grade, and took classes at a local university from 9-12. That is, they got
their undergrad degree out of the way by the time others were done with high
school.

Having a whole class do this makes sense. First, not everyone does it, only
the smartest. I wouldn't expect everyone to be better off in such an
accelerated program. Also, rather than enterprising individuals losing out on
the social aspect of High School, I'd expect this group of kids to be much
more mature for their age.

A vocational senior project may as well be a startup for some in the group.

------
dfranke
Palish isn't the first one to get this idea:

<http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/07/wizard-school.html>

~~~
andreyf
That sounds insane, but I can't find any mention of it anywhere else... is it
fictional?

~~~
dfranke
Yes.

~~~
andreyf
How marvelous, nonetheless. My favorite part:

If a Wizard is given complete technical control over a project (which is
usually the smartest thing to do, but companies are rarely very smart), the
Wizard will typically write in one of the super-succinct "folding languages"
they've developed on campus, usually a Lisp or Haskell derivative. They call
them Folding Languages because they write code that writes code that writes
code... Wizards swear by it, and there's no question that they can produce
amazingly compact, fast, clean-looking code.

lol!

------
dfranke
Most 6th-graders act like idiots even when there aren't adults around to treat
them like idiots, so standards for admission would need to be pretty tight in
order to create the proper culture. It can certainly be done, though.
Canada/USA Mathcamp (<http://mathcamp.org>) is one incredible success at
creating an environment where kids act like adults.

------
ph0rque
As far as punishment goes, there's something really simple: the kid gets
kicked out (and goes [back?] to public school). This won't be the first
resort, of course, but the fear will be enough to keep the kids in line.

Also, you could do trial runs during the summer, and if both the parents and
kid like it enough, they get to stay.

~~~
palish
It doesn't seem like it's best to resort to keeping kids afraid. They have to
feel bad.. They need a conscience. They need a reputation that's tarnished.

~~~
euccastro
Why do they need all that?

~~~
palish
I was trying to figure out alternatives to "sit in a corner" (detention).
Maybe that's the best way, but I wish I knew why.

~~~
euccastro
If I had a school, I wouldn't have any punishments; only warnings and bans.

It's not your right to detain anyone, nor to scare anyone. When students cause
undue trouble for others, just tell them why that is not acceptable and inform
them they need to change their behaviour or leave. Not as a scare measure, but
so they know their situation so they can make a decision. If they don't want
to attend this school, or if causing trouble is more important for them than
that, they're best out. The main problem with behaviour in public education is
that you can't ban the bullies and assholes except maybe in extreme cases.

~~~
alex_c
But that won't cause anyone to change their behaviour. Troublemakers will only
see "warnings" as a sign that there are no consequences, and won't believe
they'll get kicked out until it does happen. There has to be a middle ground
between no punishment (warning) and getting kicked out.

You can't just explain abstract consequences to a kid and expect them to react
the same way as a rational adult. Some might, most won't.

~~~
euccastro
They'll believe it if they know it has happened to others before. I've found
children are experts at figuring out how hard they can push it. They can show
quite mature behaviour if you treat them with the respect and expectation of
responsibility of adults. The converse is true for grownups that are treated
as children.

If you want a middle ground, you might readmit non reincident students, if
they insist, after they give some service to the community (not necessarily
the school). But you don't present that as a punishment, but as a token of
regret and will to change. For that reason, you have to be pretty convinced
that it's the child who wants back into the school. You shouldn't listen to
parents for this purpose.

------
portLAN
Start-ups should be a temporary economic blip. In our lifetime, we should
either see convincing virtual reality, or be sitting on the beach sipping
umbrella drinks served by robots which have taken over all "work" positions.

It's beyond the pale that with our present technology and abundance that we
still use "being out on the street and starving to death" as a stick to make
people work dead-end jobs. At least, if you'd like a future where all human
beings are valued and cared for simply because they are human.

For crying out loud, it's the 21st century and the world still has human
slavery. Don't judge your country based on it being better than the worst --
that encourages a race to the bottom. Judge it from a future perspective;
science fiction has offered plenty of promising visions for humanity.

------
andreyf
I remember having this argument with my Math Reasoning professor: how old
should a child be before learning simple math logic?

More appropriate here, let me ask: how old does an average child have to be to
comprehend all of the features of Lisp or Haskell?

~~~
palish
Children can solve puzzles from a very early age.. If learning to program is a
puzzle, it isn't unreasonable to assume that a few could have an excellent
command of programming by 18.

~~~
andreyf
A few, by 18? I was looking for people to make the argument that most could,
well before 10. I'm not talking about the skills that come with decades of
experience, but just a conceptual understanding of the unique functions of the
languages - functional and syntactic abstraction - closures, lisp macros, etc.

------
andreyf
This idea reminds me somewhat of the [Sudbury Valley
School](<http://www.sudval.org/>), but with more of a focus on math and
computer science.

~~~
ecommercematt
I can see where you're coming from, however, at Sudbury Valley, there is no
curriculum whatsoever. Plenty of hackers and serial entrepreneurs emerge from
SVS, but there's no pressure to study anything at all there.

The main problem I have with the Hacker School idea is that compared to the
Sudbury Model (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_model>), it is stifling
and pushy. I'm a Sudbury Valley alumnus, and I doubt the time I spent there
glued to computers all day would have been as fulfilling as it was, if I were
doing so under coercion (and I bet even the real deal hackers I know from
there, as opposed to mere computerphiles, like me, would agree). Also, I got
somewhat bored with computers for a while, and I'm glad nobody forced me to
stick with them, so I could return to them later with greater intensity fueled
by nothing but pure desire.

My criticism of this idea is similar to Paul Graham's criticism of
"incubators."

Here are the Grahamster's words on the subject I'm referring to
(<http://www.paulgraham.com/sfp.html>):

 __I've heard Y Combinator described as an "incubator." Actually we're the
opposite: incubators exert more control than ordinary VCs, and we make a point
of exerting less. Among other things, incubators usually make you work in
their office-- that's where the word "incubator" comes from. That seems the
wrong model. If investors get too involved, they smother one of the most
powerful forces in a startup: the feeling that it's your own company.

Incubators were conspicuous failures during the Bubble. There's still debate
about whether this was because of the Bubble, or because they're a bad idea.
My vote is they're a bad idea. I think they fail because they select for the
wrong people. When we were starting a startup, we would never have taken
funding from an "incubator." We can find office space, thanks; just give us
the money. And people with that attitude are the ones likely to succeed in
startups.

Indeed, one quality all the founders shared this summer was a spirit of
independence. __

He said "if investors get too involved, they smother one of the most powerful
forces in a startup: the feeling that it's your own company." Allow me to
slightly modify this quote to illustrate my point:

If teachers get too involved, they smother one of the most powerful forces in
an independent person: the feeling that you're in charge of your own destiny.

In other words, give someone genuine independence, and he'll go for it if he's
got the stuff.

------
bootload
_"... create a YCombinator-like process that starts at the K-12 level. Perhaps
not as far back as kindergarten, but definitely before 6th grade. Students
..."_

So we need to go to school in a structured environment to learn to play with
technology, break it down and build it up again?

------
brlewis
<http://www.teach-scheme.org/Materials/>

------
iamwil
I'm a bit surprised to see no one's mentioned Hackety Hack

<http://hacketyhack.net/>

It's Why the Lucky Stiff's venture into creating a ruby programming
environment for kids that tries to entice their creativity.

------
jsnx
There isn't a formal process leading to creation or innovation; and doubtless,
there is not a formal process to train creators or innovators. Mentorship is
the way to go -- put your computer away and work with a child.

