Niels Hoven on accelerating kids’ education

Here’s the transcript of an interview with Mentava founder Niels Hoven, conducted and posted by James Pethokoukis, and taken from the Podcast “Faster, Please”. Kudos to Gary for the link recommend.

Thankfully there’s an examination of what the real functions of school are, as we currently conceive it. We understand that schools provide food, and healthcare, and in bad neighborhoods enhanced security, and in locus parentis. That’s in addition to the “academic” or “learning for life roles and vocations”.

But with new ways of doing the academic portion of “schooling”, the structure and balance of the. various “school” functions needs rethinking and redoing. PSA has been beating the drums for that since way back, but it’s not obvious what the new “school” would look like when all the new AI tools are incorporated into it. (Many of which can readily used outside a “school building”.)

Healthcare can be at least partially delivered at home with AI tools, some of which may eventually be virtual doctors.

Meal service is another matter, but with Pizzas being delivered all over the place today, maybe school meals could also be mobile to the home. Possibly very pricey, but drones?

What is very much more problematic is the childcare function that enables parents to leave the home for work. Who is watching the kids at that point, and where are the kid going while the parents are “away”. Robotic babysitting? Possibly , but that’s an awful lot of robots if it’s one per household. What seems more likely is that school buildings will be redesigned and remade for new balances in what gets done where.

One is tempted to ask ChatGPT how this new arrangement might work.

But for today we have some of the thoughts of Niels Hoven.

An interesting fact about school is, despite all of the problems that we all understand our schools have, schools have like an 80 percent approval rating from parents, and that’s because the job that schools do for most parents is actually childcare. It is free childcare for while the parents are at work, it is finding a place where your children are entertained and loved, and that is super important.

 

But somehow we have also layered this layer of academic theater on top of that childcare.

 

instead of saying, “Okay, these kids can play in the woods for eight hours a day, or they can play dodgeball or grow their social-emotional skills and build their friendships with a friend.” We had to say, “No, they have to be learning something – but not too fast… at this very, very slow pace.”

 

And if you look at things like homeschoolers, you see most homeschoolers do two hours of academics a day, and they have the same outcomes as kids who are going to public schools, so we really don’t need that much more time doing academics as long as that time is being spent efficiently.