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Once Ciro was at a University course practical session, and a graduate was around helping out. Ciro asked if what the graduate did anything specifically related to the course, and they replied they didn't. And they added that:Even though Ciro was already completely disillusioned by then, that still made an impression on him. Something is really wrong with this shit.
One has to put the bread on the table.
Other people that think that the educational system is currently bullshit as of 2020:
- Einstein, quoted in The New York Times, March 13 1949, p. 34:[ref]
- Ron Maimon
- Xavier Niel: fortune.com/2018/11/30/billionaire-xavier-niel/ "Want This Billionaire's Attention? Drop Out of School" (2018). He also created 42.
- Year On
- by Zach Caceres
- Anand Raja submission "Students and Universities": publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200809/cmselect/cmdius/170/170ii.pdf, www.linkedin.com/in/anandraja/.
- xsrus.com/life-school-and-the-80-20-rule. Also GPA 2.0 linked from xsrus.com/ to xsrus.com/gpa-2.0 but down now
- A Mathematician's Lament by Paul Lockhart www.maa.org/external_archive/devlin/LockhartsLament.pdf
- www.learningforreal.org/quotes/ quotes Elbert Hubbard:She's somewhat focused on the performing arts, but what she says applies basically equally well to the natural sciences. A talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggYL9gQeVEk She talks about authentic learning.
- www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY Do schools kill creativity? by Sir Ken Robinson (2017)
- Erik Finman thinks school is broken
- sociable.co/technology/silicon-valley-education-students-entrepreneurs/ Bringing Silicon Valley into Schools: How to Make Students Entrepreneurs of Their Own Education (2016)
- hackeducation.com/2015/04/25/factory-model The Invented History of 'The Factory Model of Education' by Audrey Watters (2015)
- www.forbes.com/councils/forbescoachescouncil/2025/04/17/the-ai-fear-factor-why-leaders-resist-and-how-to-move-forward/ The Single Best Idea for Reforming K-12 Education by Steve Denning (2011)
The problem with education by Ciro Santilli
. Source. In this video Ciro Santilli exposes his fundamental philosophy regarding why Education is broken. This philosophy was the key motivation behind the failed OurBigBook Project.
The true value of snake oil is intangible as well.
David Deutsch on Education interviewed by Aidan McCullen (2019)
Source. Key quote that hits the nail:
So right... the purpose of education is not to teach facts. The purpose of education is to propose ways of thinking, which students themselves must try to apply and decide if it suits them! And use the patterns of thinking that are useful to reach their goals.
Like Noam Chomsky, he proposes education has been a system of indoctrination more than anything else e.g. twitter.com/daviddeutschoxf/status/1406374921748496386:At twitter.com/DavidDeutschOxf/status/1051475227476185089 another good quote by Churchill:
All compulsory education, "tough" or not, "love" or not, in camps or not, and whether it "traumatises" or not, is a violation of human rights.
Headmasters have powers at their disposal with which Prime Ministers have never yet been invested.
Quote selection by Charles Bukowski (2016)
Source. Generally speaking, you're free until you're about 4 years old. Then you go to grammar school and then you start becoming... oriented and shoved into areas. You lose what individualism you have, if you have enough of course, you retain some of it... Then you work the 8 hour job with almost a feeling of goodness, like you're doing something. Then you get married like marriage is a victory, and you have children like children is a victory... Marriage, birth, children. It's something they have to do because there's nothing else to do. There's no glory in it, there's no steam, there's no fire. It's very, very flat... You get caught into the stricture of what you're supposed to be and you have no other choice. You're finally molded and melded into what you're supposed to be. I didn't like this.
If school weren't bullshit, 99% of students would be in gifted education for what they truly love and are good at.
What is sad about many programs is that they are exclusivist and non scalable, selecting people some how and non scalably educating them. We need a more "here's some projects let's do them whoever can" approach to things, maybe like Google Summer of Code.
Related programs:
Basically the same remarks as for university, just 10 times more useless, see also: Section "Motivation".
As of 2020, university has the following very important applications:Notably, Education is an IQ test, not a way to learn useful and beautiful things.
- meet an intelligent sexual partner (see also: Section "Sexual selection", Section "The main function of university is sexual selection") and or have fun and or come out of the closet
- get you in debt if you are from the United States
One major issue is that teachers don't have the right incentive to, nor are selected to, teach well. Thus the existence of Rate My Professors! But we can do better...
Which is why Ciro Santilli wants to destroy its current format with OurBigBook.com. He believes that we can find a more efficient organization to achieve both the social and research functions of university, by first doing as much as possible online
Exams as a prerequisite for a degree are useless. Exams as part of a degree must be abolished. And degrees must be abolished. Ultimately the only metrics that really matter are money and fame. See also: motivation.
The only thing exams should matter for is as a screening tool to select people with specific abilities that you care about as an employer or principal investigator. If:then exams are useless for your purposes. then might as well just go by interviews (basically what all employers do already, though not PIs). Degrees are too course grained to mean anything to anybody. Employers and PIs likely only care about very few specific subjects.
- you have no idea about what the content of specific exams are (and you don't because they are all ad-hoc university secrets)
- or don't have a way to machine learn what grades correlate with your desired performance (you don't because where's the data?)
Once the question of an exam has been formulated, the usefulness of the problem is already been completely destroyed, because formulating the problem that matters is the most important part of things. And any problem with an answer, is useless to put effort into: give answers.
Furthermore, preventing people from searching for answers while answering an exam, AKA preventing "cheating", also makes absolutely no sense. In the real world, we want people to find answers as quickly as possible! We should be teaching people how to "cheat"! What we should teach them instead is what a fucking license is, and what you have to do to comply with it.
And if you must absolutely have exams, they must be open to anyone who wants to applies. Then people have to pay to take the exam, with subsidies for "official course takers", who are spending 100x more anyways due to not living with their parents.
And those exams must be applied by professional test application companies to ensure no cheating and to factor out the anti-cheat work, while still making the tests available to people anywhere.
A quote from Richard Feynman present in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman chapter O Americano, Outra Vez!:
The only metric that matters is "to feel that you've satisfied youre curiosity". When one studies for that, it can take a lot more time to actually learn everything, because it is sometimes not as clear when you should stop. But it is the only way to go deeper.
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 2. You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either OurBigBook.com or as a static website.
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally. Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension. 
- Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact