I wouldn’t call it “no big deal” to lose it… but losing something that’s on track to scale and grow its impact seems like a different order of magnitude of loss from losing something that performed beautifully in a microcosm without escaping it.
In parallel, I wouldn’t call it any less of a loss to lose a local artist than a globally recognized one, but it’s a very different magnitude of impact.
I made my initial comment in the hope that someone could either explain how actually it had a wider impact than I understood from the post, or retrospect on why it never spread, so that I could learn something about what forces prevented the thing that was good for some people from being good for more.
There’s also a layer of seeking a counterexample to my resentment that urban east-coast people have and hoard this utopian high school experience—it sounds like it would have changed my life if it had been available to me, yet the happenstance of being born to rural west coast parents seems to imply that someone in my situation would never have been allowed to even try for it in the past or in the future if it had not been lost. This smells wrong, but the easiest way to disprove it would be to learn why it might have been on track to become more widely available, or to learn how I could update on lessons learned from it to increase the likelihood that similar programs would ever become available to people like me.
I am not sure how to bring elite schools to areas where the density of talent per square mile is low. I mean, mathematically, if you need 500 students per school, and you want to make a school for one-in-hundred talent, you can at most have one such school per 50 000 kids of school age—and that’s optimistically assuming that all potential candidates will want to join your school; otherwise you need to add another factor of 10 or 100.
Perhaps one day this objection will become moot if we somehow switch to fully online education or AI tutors.
An alternative is that instead of building an online school you only make an online club, for example a mathematical club for children gifted in math. A boring school (or homeschooling) in the morning, remote elite education in the afternoon.
I wouldn’t call it “no big deal” to lose it… but losing something that’s on track to scale and grow its impact seems like a different order of magnitude of loss from losing something that performed beautifully in a microcosm without escaping it.
In parallel, I wouldn’t call it any less of a loss to lose a local artist than a globally recognized one, but it’s a very different magnitude of impact.
I made my initial comment in the hope that someone could either explain how actually it had a wider impact than I understood from the post, or retrospect on why it never spread, so that I could learn something about what forces prevented the thing that was good for some people from being good for more.
There’s also a layer of seeking a counterexample to my resentment that urban east-coast people have and hoard this utopian high school experience—it sounds like it would have changed my life if it had been available to me, yet the happenstance of being born to rural west coast parents seems to imply that someone in my situation would never have been allowed to even try for it in the past or in the future if it had not been lost. This smells wrong, but the easiest way to disprove it would be to learn why it might have been on track to become more widely available, or to learn how I could update on lessons learned from it to increase the likelihood that similar programs would ever become available to people like me.
Fair points.
I am not sure how to bring elite schools to areas where the density of talent per square mile is low. I mean, mathematically, if you need 500 students per school, and you want to make a school for one-in-hundred talent, you can at most have one such school per 50 000 kids of school age—and that’s optimistically assuming that all potential candidates will want to join your school; otherwise you need to add another factor of 10 or 100.
Perhaps one day this objection will become moot if we somehow switch to fully online education or AI tutors.
An alternative is that instead of building an online school you only make an online club, for example a mathematical club for children gifted in math. A boring school (or homeschooling) in the morning, remote elite education in the afternoon.