> Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right". Marketeers are catering to what people want, educators are trying to deal with what they think people need (and this is often not at all what they want). Part of Montessori's genius was to realize early that children want to get fluent in their surrounding environs and culture, and this can be really powerful if one embeds what they need in the environs and culture.
This is so true on so many levels. Schools and university came to mind immediately. For me, the most striking fit is to educational articles and blog posts on the web.
When the www was young it was full of stuff that catered my intellectual curiosity.
Nowadays content creation is driven by keyword research, search volume and CPC. After three paragraphs I usually know this will end in a call to action.
Not that there wouldn't be any interesting stuff out there, but it is drowned in a sea of ever repeating trivialities.
The web now presents mainly economic activity and validation of currently held opinion. When we were both younger, the web and I, the ideas and opinions expressed by it were on a wider spectrum. It feels like it went from 4:2:2 down to a 32 color fixed pastel palette.
I remember that when I started googling, I would often go to page 2,3,4,5 to find what I wanted. These days I never go past the first page. I actually had to check now that there was still a page switcher...
What changed the most? How good I am at formulating a query? What kind of information I'm looking for? How good Google is at curating the first page? How much information is available?
Sure hope its not that my queries are more trivial, or that my preferences for answers favors simpler,easier ones...
Thankfully I still get lost on Wikipedia (and Youtube), in a kind of what-is-all-this-I-need-to-know-more learning spree.
- we became impatient if not lazy
- google does a huge job at parsing complex queries
- the content is more organized in itself (html semantic markup, meaningful css classes, etc etc)
The other day I tried a tails/tor and .. i cant recall.. ipfs probably. This network is bare, so bare I felt excited just like the 56K days. It quickly went bad because there's a huge % of bad / crazy content, but still I felt entering a more interesting territory as a visitor.
> Thankfully I still get lost on Wikipedia (and Youtube), in a kind of what-is-all-this-I-need-to-know-more learning spree.
I know what you mean, but should we be thankful? Learning is stimulating, but are we just indulging in it with little or negative results because we are acquiring misinformation?
Yes, absolutely. I use DuckDuckGo and it feels a lot like the early Google. The only thing I still use Google for is local searches, like opening hours, this is where the filter bubble shines.
Find DDG like early Google days in that a bit harder to find things where today Google will have it in the first page. Google has got to a point where it is just amazing how accurate it is.
Suspect part of it is also me and knowing how to phrase searches. Bit that just does not work to the same level on DDG.
> Socrates didn't charge for "education" because when you are in business, the "customer starts to become right". Whereas in education, the customer is generally "not right". Marketeers are catering to what people want, educators are trying to deal with what they think people need (and this is often not at all what they want). Part of Montessori's genius was to realize early that children want to get fluent in their surrounding environs and culture, and this can be really powerful if one embeds what they need in the environs and culture.
This is so true on so many levels. Schools and university came to mind immediately. For me, the most striking fit is to educational articles and blog posts on the web.
When the www was young it was full of stuff that catered my intellectual curiosity. Nowadays content creation is driven by keyword research, search volume and CPC. After three paragraphs I usually know this will end in a call to action. Not that there wouldn't be any interesting stuff out there, but it is drowned in a sea of ever repeating trivialities.