THE ALMANACK OF NAVAL RAVIKANT

CURRENT EDUCATION

What is the purpose of our current education system?

I think there’s no question, it’s completely obsolete. The education system is a path-dependent outcome from the need for daycare. From the need for prisons for college-aged males who would otherwise overrun society and cause a lot of havoc. The original medieval universities had guard towers that faced inward, for example. You had to put a curfew, and you have to lock up the young 18-year-old males before they go out with swords and daggers and create trouble.

College and schools and the way we think about them come from a time when books were rare. Knowledge was rare. Babysitting was rare. Crime was common. Violence was prevalent. I think schools are just byproducts of these kinds of institutions.

What schools matter for is wanting to keep the kids out of the parents’ hair while the parents go to work.

What has changed since then that has rendered our current education system obsolete?

Now we have the Internet, which is the greatest weapon of knowledge ever created, completely interconnected. It’s very easy to learn. The ability to learn, the means of learning, the tools of learning, are abundant and infinite. It’s the desire that’s incredibly scarce. I think if it’s purely learning you’re after, learning can be done much more either on your own or through the Internet or by uniting through the Internet with like-minded groups.

There used to be no such thing as self-guided learning. Now, if you actually have the desire to learn, everything is on the Internet. You can go on Khan Academy. You can get MIT and Yale lectures online. You can get all the coursework and get interactivity. You can read blogs by brilliant people. You can read all these great books.

What value does our current education system provide, if any?

The only benefit of school today is socialization. It creates socialization because kids want to be around their peers and they want to learn how to operate in the society of their peers.

What needs to change about how we learn?

In an age of Google and smartphones, memorization is obsolete. Why should you be memorizing the Battle of Trafalgar? Why should you be memorizing what the capital of that state is? We still put undue weight on that, because that’s how it was when we lived in a pre-Google world.

The second problem is the current educational system has a one-size fits all model. It has to say you have to learn X now, then you have to learn Y.

I’m sure 90% of you had this happen to you, when you were learning mathematics. At some point, you were keeping up, you were doing arithmetic, then you were doing geometry, then trigonometry, pre-calculus, and calculus.

Somewhere in there, you got lost. Somewhere while building this massive edifice (the logical structure of mathematics) you missed one lesson. You missed one concept, just a few classes, or your brain couldn’t think the specific way something was being explained. It should have been explained visually, but it was being explained numerically. Or it should have been explained symbolically and it was being explained in cartography. You were not able to keep up.

The moment you miss a rung in the ladder of mathematics, you can’t go to the next one. The teacher says, “We’re done with pre-calculus, we’re moving on to calculus.” You’re saying, “Wait, I didn’t understand pre-calculus. I didn’t understand how pre-calculus leads from trigonometry to calculus. I missed that whole part.”

Now you get to calculus, and you don’t understand the fundamentals. Now, you’re reduced to memorization. You’re like, “DX/DY. When I see the symbol, I do this.” You’ve lost the actual learning. You’ve lost the connection to the underlying principles.

We teach all these kids calculus and they walk out not understanding calculus at all.

What needs to change about what we learn?

I think learning should be about learning the basics in all the fields and learning them really well over and over. Life is mostly about applying the basics and only doing the advanced work in the things you truly love, and where you understand the basics inside out. That’s not how our system is built.

What would you focus on, if you were running a grade school curriculum?

I would probably optimize for happiness, nutrition, and exercise.

Show them answers to “How do you build good habits?” “How do you break bad habits?” “How do you have good relationships?” “How do you build basic skills?”

I would probably have them run a lemonade stand or a small business and earn money so they can understand how that works. Have them work on something charitable-related, or take them to the third world and show them suffering, true suffering, so they can get some context. I’d probably teach them public speaking, business writing, basic persuasion. Maybe a little bit of programming on top of the reading, writing, and arithmetic.

I’d probably eliminate chunks of geography, history, and honestly even second or third languages. Music, unless they had musical inclinations. I know this is going to horrify some people, but the question is, “What do you emphasize?” It’s not initially good to educate every child in every thing. You have to find out, “What is their aptitude?” [7]

I think the problem is we’re over-educated in weird ways and we’re mis-educated. [1]

How can we create more effective schools?

“Schools replace curiosity with compliance.” This was a tweet, @Kpaxs posted and I retweeted it. Five words. I love that because it is so short, just five words. I think that is so right.

When I think back to my own education, so much of it was, “Sit down.” “Shut up.” “Raise your hand to go to the bathroom.” “No, you must memorize this, even though it doesn't make sense to you right now.”

With children, you just have to feed their curiosity. All the really smart kids I know are essentially autodidacts, self-learners. You cannot force a child to be a self learner, all you can do is feed their curiosity. For example, if they want to want to pick up the guitar, get a guitar. If they want to put it down, put it down. If they want to go to a soccer class, get a soccer class. If they don't want to play soccer, don’t force them to play soccer.

Why is curiosity so important?

One of the biggest problems I have with the educational system is when people graduate college, they stop learning. It’s not their fault; it’s just that they’ve been told every year, every month, ‘read this, do this homework, do that subject, now cover this,’ and they are given huge swaths of free time.

Then suddenly all of that is taken away, and very traumatically you’re thrown into the workforce and told, “Now get up in the morning, you have to be up by 8, you can’t leave your desks until 6 or 7, you’ve got to grind on this even if you think it’s nonsense and you’re not learning anything.”

The work environment spends a lot of time beating your love of learning out of you. (Not that you ever had a love of learning because in school it was on autopilot.) [2]

Moving on from early education, what are your thoughts on higher education, colleges and universities?

We have this legacy idea: the only way to be properly educated is university.

I'm actually not a huge fan of the current university system, at least in terms of the cost it imposes on you both in terms of opportunity costs and financial costs. In exchange, you get credentialing and an alumni network, but you've spent four years of your life and an enormous amount of money.

University is about filtering smart people out of the noise and credentialing them so an employer can say, “Oh yeah, this person went to a good university, they’re probably pretty smart.” They kind of get acceptance into being an elite class.

Should kids try to get those things on their own?

Credentialing, at least in the programming environment, you can get on your own to some extent.

An Alumni network would be a little hard to build, but if you can get a good internship or good job, you might just want to drop right into that. But obviously, that only applies for exceptional people.

So if you are going to go to university, the first rule is: learn things that you can't learn by yourself. Because most things you can learn by yourself at home. [10]

What was your college experience, and what would you do differently if you went to college today?

I went to Dartmouth, and studied CS and Econ. I started in Physics, but it was too hard. [42] Then I switched to English and History. My grades were fantastic, it was really easy. They told me I should be an English professor.

The reality is, I could have done that for fun. I could have read those books in my spare time. There's no need to go to school for that. If you're going to go to college, learn something you can't learn on your own.

What should people learn in college today, that they can’t learn on their own?

For most people, that means mathematics, programming, physics -- it's the STEM disciplines. It means having access to the tools, people, rigor, discipline, and exercises to learn them well.

Now, if you are at the level where you can learn STEM disciplines on your own, then you may not need to go to university. Also, you can't get high-quality medical training on your own in your backyard. So you do have to go to school for some, but it’s a fairly narrow set of things.

For most, you don't need to go to school. I love philosophy, half the books I’m reading at any given time are essentially philosophy books, but I wouldn’t be studying philosophy at school. [10]

What do you think about the “free college” movement?

Even though I started out as an English and History major and I love those topics, I don’t think the government should’ve been subsidizing me studying English and History, because I probably would not have been able to pay my student loans back. In fact, they should’ve been encouraging me a little bit to at least pick up something vocational for my own sake, and also for the sake of the taxpayers to sort of balance that bill out. [1]

You know, the aristocracy of the United States are the people who went to good schools versus people who didn’t. They just had very different outcomes in life from that moment on. [1]

Given the value so many people still place on getting a college degree, do you see an alternative?

We have to separate credentialing long term from education. Filtering, credentialing, and education are all different things. Anyone should be able to take a test that proves that they’re good enough and get a stamp; it doesn’t matter whether they went to Harvard, or they went to their local school, or they didn’t go to school. You need that kind of a system to emerge. That’ll start breaking the university problem. [1]

1/ If the primary purpose of school was education, the Internet should obsolete it. But school is mainly about credentialing.

2/ Schools survive anti-educational behavior (i.e. groupthink) due to symbiosis between institutions that issue and accept credentials.

3/ Employers looking past traditional credentials can arbitrage the gap. @ycombinator made $Bs doing this for young founders.

4/ The more meritocratic an industry, the faster it moves away from false credentialing. (I.e., the MBA and tech startups.)

5/ A generation of auto-didacts, educated by the Internet & leveraged by technology, will eventually starve the industrial-education system.

6/ Until then, only the most desperate and talented students will make the leap.

7/ Even today, what to study and how to study it are more important than where to study it and for how long.

8/ The best teachers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best peers are on the Internet.

9/ The tools for learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.

10/ Educational credentials are badges that admit one to the elite class. Expect elites to struggle mightily to justify the current system.

11/ Eventually, the tide of the Internet and rational, self-interested employers will create and accept efficient credentialing…

12/ ...and wash away our obsolete industrial-education system. [11]

FUTURE OF EDUCATION

Let me give you a thought experiment:

Assume everyone in the world had maximum practical knowledge. Everyone could go create hardware and robots. Everyone can go write code, everyone could invest money, and we could all do mathematics. So if we were all maximally educated, then what happens?

I think within five years, robots will be doing all the manual labor, and we will all be doing creative work.

We would essentially all be wealthy. We’d have figured out how to program machines and use technology to do everything we need to do, other than the creative work. At that point, we would each either be furthering science, technology, and inventing things or doing creative work for each other. There are a small number of truly zero-sum games.

Most of the things we care about: cars, houses, clean water, air travel, all those things are not zero-sum, those are positive sum games. We can get really, really, really far with automation.

Remember, we used to live in an age when almost everybody was farmers. At that time, it was unimaginable that there would be a class of people who did anything other than farming, except for very, very thin layer of society. Now, farmers are like 1% of the developed world. So obviously, we've left that behind and we have already started to see much larger numbers of people in creative professions. [47]

What is the single most important skill for people to gain today in order to maximize their practical knowledge?

The people who are not technically literate are being left behind. I think one of the greatest charitable things we can do today is figure out how to retrain people to get comfortable with technology. The computer is the most powerful tool for creativity, the most powerful force-multiplier invented since the stone axe. And you don't need another human’s permission to use it.

Every other tool that we've invented since then has had a lot of impact, given people leverage, like factories and printing press -- but you need other people to give you ‘permission’ to use. With technology, that's not true.

How does what you’re doing with Angellist fit into this idea enabling people to leverage technology as a force-multiplier?

With AngelList, I'm trying to push the technology ball forward in the best way that I know how. The best way that I know is by helping every great entrepreneur realize their dream. I can't do it for all of them, and I can't do it manually, it doesn't scale. But I can build a platform, infrastructure, and a community that helps move it forward. [47]

Technology is not only the thing that moves the human race forward, but it’s the only thing that ever has. Without technology, we’re just monkeys playing in the dirt.

Technology is the application of knowledge to control the natural world. It's the greatest driver of both human prosperity and our capacity for self-annihilation. [11]

Where do we go from here?

I have to believe that we can change the system, but you never change a system by taking the existing thing and reworking it. I’ve been in Silicon Valley and tech business long enough to know that you’re better off changing it just by creating something brand new.

One fantasy idea I’ve had is, after I’m done with AngelList or if I have more time on my hands, I would like to create a successor to the One Laptop Project. In MIT, Nicholas Negroponte had the One Laptop per child project.

I saw this fascinating write-up, maybe it was in The Economist or somewhere. It was a story about how they left a box full of unopened Android tablets in a little village in Pakistan.

When they came back months later, the kids have opened up the box. They’ve all figured out how to boot up the tablets. They’ve hacked them. They’ve gotten past the user administration login. They’ve installed a whole bunch of apps. They’ve got a little economy set up. The older kids teach the younger kids. They’re teaching their grandmothers how to run businesses. They’re surfing the web. They’ve taught themselves English. Kids are learning machines. They just need the tools.

Do you have any product ideas of your own for how to create a ‘brand new’ alternative to the current system?

To that end, what I would love to do is create a very low-cost, very rugged, easily powered, cheap Android tablet that’s hard to destroy and basically distribute them around the world with prebuilt learning applications so that you can literally fire one up and it works with you interactively. In 30 seconds, it figures out what language you speak, if any, if speech is symbolic, and what level of aptitude are you at. Are you a second grader, third grader, fifth grader? Of course, it varies by discipline. Then it lets you dive into and let you learn anything you want that will make your life better.

Just on the edge of your competency?

Exactly. It always keeps you on the edge. It always keeps pushing you. Then you can network in all the teachers of the world. Anyone who wants to be a teacher can contribute. It’s not just Salman Khan doing Khan Academy.

Essentially you could network connect all of the teachers of the world and all of the students of the world using tablets and do it at the pace and level where it is essentially customized for each child. They’ll learn the things that have a practical outcome in their life. I know there’s an advantage to liberal arts education of pushing things that people don’t necessarily want to learn on their own, but they have to have some desire for it. It’s better to wait until they think they are ready and then give it all to them. I think that’s the way that learning sticks. That’s the kind of project that I’d like to work on, but I don’t think it’s solvable with the current school system.

I hope you get a chance to work on it. I think that would be a phenomenal impact to the world.

I think it would be fun. I’m thinking about this now more because I have a young infant son and honestly I don’t want to send him to school. [4]

What would be taught at “Naval University”?

The first class I'm going to run is actually on persuasive writing. The second is I'm going to send them to a school of persuasion, like the Dale Carnegie Carnegie school.

Then, nutrition. Not that you're going to tell them one way is right, but you're going to make them cook, you're going to make them log diet and see what makes them feel good. Figure out optimal nutrition for themselves because what is ‘correct’ is very dogmatic, and the target moves around so much.

Mathematics, for sure, but it's got to be fun. It's going to come through application. So, make them build instruments with physics or play in the chemistry lab, but always take a mathematical bent to make sure they understand the underlying mathematics. That's really a core foundational thing.

Fitness, but again fitness is finding some sport you love to do. Learn the basics of what builds muscle, what builds speed, what builds flexibility, and so on.

History, I would just drop. Introduce them to Google, and give them some nice books to read in their spare time. I know someone is going to get pissed off at that. But, you have finite time.

Things like history, geography, even literature -- you can read that on your own. Here's a ton of amazing literature we highly recommend you read in your spare time, when you're curled up on a couch. This way you read the literature, you're going to enjoy as opposed to the literature I just rammed down your throat that you're going to hate. Those are things that are hobbies that people do for fun, which somehow turned into school. [73]

Towards a Literate Nation (Blog Post from Naval’s site)

To reduce unemployment, we need to lever up.

Not like Wall Street did, through debt, but like Silicon Valley does, with tools.

Leverage magnifies your actions and increases your productivity. You can get leverage through:

• labor (people work for you)
• capital (money works for you)
• tools (machines work for you)

We’re trying to help labor. We don’t have much capital. We must give tools to the people.

All of the great modern tools for productivity – the printing press, the factory, the movie studio – require capital and coordination to use. The computer is the first tool since maybe the stone axe, that an individual can use to gain massive leverage, without permission from anyone else.

The modern computer can help in every endeavor – even if you don’t use a computer at work, you’ll soon carry a $50 smartphone in your pocket. You’re banking online, learning online, communicating online. The computer, and now the smartphone, make everyone more productive.

This is why Silicon Valley doesn’t have enough people, when the rest of the nation doesn’t have enough jobs.

Now computers are simpler. More ubiquitous. Cheaper. More accessible.

And we can teach people how to use computers, through computers, using tools like ShowMe, CodeAcademy, Bloc, and so on.

Let’s create the world’s first, completely Digitally Literate Society. Not a nation of programmers (maybe someday) but a nation of people who are comfortable with the most powerful tool ever invented by mankind.

Let’s do it quickly – train them in three months from start to finish. And cheaply – for free.

We can create the program at Stanford, MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, etc. We can teach basic proficiency – use online applications like Google Apps, Search, DropBox, Email, Online Banking, Travel, Ordering supplies, etc. Some basic creation – create your own website. Research questions. Solve problems. Learn to learn.

Google, Amazon, and Apple will loan us the tablets. Companies will pay us to have people learn to use their apps. An app marketplace where companies pay society to educate society.

Apple, Square, DropBox, Twitter have created beautiful software interfaces. iPad and Android have made the hardware accessible. Today, it is not just cheap to build a company. It is cheap to rebuild a person.

Let’s create the world’s first digitally literate society. The world’s most desirable workforce. If that won’t generate employment, nothing will. [67]

There is unlimited demand for great programmers. The set of useful, complex programs is nearly infinite. That won't change until General AI arrives. [11]