Ciro Santilli @cirosantilli  40

This is the most important of all points.

Don't set goals for your students.

Ask students what they want to do, and help them achieve that goal.

If they don't know what to do, give suggestions of interesting things they could do.

Once they have a goal, just help them learn everything that is needed to achieve that goal

If they don't have a goal, any attempt to learn is a total and complete waste of time.

This is because the universe of potentially useful things that can be learnt is infinite, and no human can ever learn everything.

The only solution, is to try and learn only what seems necessary to reach your goal, and just try to reach your goal instead.

This approach is called backward design.

Also, setting overly ambitious goals, is a good idea: the side effects of ambitious goals are often the most valuable thing achieved.

"Graduating" and "getting a diploma" are not valid goals, because they are useless. A goal has to be either an amazing specific technological or artistic development.

Grouping by age as done in traditional education as of 2020 is useless.

Rather, we should group students by subject of interest; e.g. natural sciences, social sciences, a sport, etc., just like in any working adult organization!

This way, younger students can actually actively learn from and collaborate with older students about, see notably Jacques Monod's you can learn more from older students than from faculty.

This becomes even more natural when you try to give students must have a flexible choice of what to learn.

This age distinction should be abolished at all stages of the system, not only within K-12, but also across K-12, undergraduate education and postgraduate education.

This idea is part of the ideal that the learning environment should be more like a dojo environment (AKA peer tutoring, see also dojo learning model), rather than an amorphous checkbox ticking exercise in bureaucracy so that "everyone is educated".

Perhaps, even more importantly, is that we should put much more emphasis on grouping students with other students online, where we can select similar interest amongst the entire population and not just on a per-local-neighbourhood basis.

Tell students to:

Praise those that do this very highly, and give them better grades if you have that superpower.

This is part of a larger concept Ciro Santilli holds dear: don't just consume, but also produce.

Whatever you do, even if it is playing video games: if you manage to produce related content that will interest other people, and possibly allow you to get paid, it will much much fun to do that thing.

If you give a course in a classroom, you reach 10 people (the others were sleeping).

If you make a perfect course online, and answer questions online, you reach 10 thousand.

Not doing things online is a waste of time.

You are a highly trained professional, and your time is extremely valuable.

Even if it takes twice as long to create the material than giving course, you are still more efficient by a factor of 500.

It is as if there were 500 little copies of you working full time. It is a superpower.

Give students answers to all questions.

Explain in extreme detail how each result was reached.

Students have the amazing capacity of not looking at answers if they don't want to.

And when they've had enough, then can read answers and understand while the problem is fresh in their minds.

If you don't give answers, no one will be able to use your online material without you being there to hold their hands.

Forbidding students from publishing their answers also goes against let students learn by teaching.

By writing in English you reach more people.

Writing in any other language is a waste of time.

The reason is simple: English speakers control a huge proportion of the world's GDP.

English is the de-facto Lingua Franca of the second half of the 20th Century, it is the new lingua franca, the new Latin, and there is no escaping it.

Students who don't know English will never do anything truly useful in science and technology. So it is pointless to teach them anything (besides English itself).

See also: having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

Text materials are generally superior to video because they:

Only produce video material if:

Never create videos of people just speaking hardcore content for long amounts of time.

If you have to use videos, make them as short as possible, and index them with a textual table of contents.

Also consider using sequences of images or GIFs instead of videos, since those are cheaper.

Search a lot first, and only create your own when you can't find something that suits you.

Someone else has already written everything you can come up with.

And if you do find something useful that you want to modify, propose your modifications to the author: they can also be useful to them and others.

Once you have crated something awesome, you have to advertise it, otherwise no one will ever find it.

This means:

Eventually, people will find you on the front page of Google searches, and then you will know that you've truly made something useful.

Then, if people find errors, or have questions, they will write a comment near the content itself.

Then, next person that comes along and has the same problem, will also find that comment, and your answer will solve their problems too.

The perfect way to do this is to use GitHub issues

For example, if you write LaTeX files for you PDFs, give both PDFs and the LaTeX.

This allows other people to:

People will be more interested if they see how the stuff they are learning is useful.

Useful 99% of the time means you can make money with it.

Achieving novel results for science, or charitable goals (e.g. creating novel tutorials) are also equaly valid. Note that those also imply you being able to make a living out of something, just that you will be getting donations and not become infinitey rich. and that is fine.

Projects don't need of course to reach the level of novel result. But they must at least aim at moving towards that.

This is one of the greatest challenges of education, since a huge part of the useful information is locked under enterprise or military secrecy, or even open academic incomprehensibility, making it nearly to impossible for the front-line educators to actually find and teach real use cases.

This way people have to link back to you, which makes you more famous.

And they can't steal your material without giving anything back.

This is what Wikipedia and Stack Exchange use.

When you do get face to face time with students, don't teach a large group.

Everything you want to teach is already online.

And if it is not, then you are wasting your time saying it face-to-face instead of creating such online resource.

The only goal of meeting students is talking to them individually or in small groups to:

and letting them do the same amongst themselves.

If you talk to a large group, you will only reach / understand a very small percentage of the group, so your time is wasted.

It is better to deeply understand what 25% of the students feel and adapt the course material, than to talk to everyone at once, and have only 5% understand anything.

There is only one thing that can truly motivate you to make good materials: becoming famous.

Strive for that. Make good materials. Publish them. Get good reviews. Loop.

This generates a virtuous loop, which makes you produce better and better material.

Just make it very clear what you've tried, what you observed, and what you don't understand if anything at all.

This will already open up room for others to come and expand on your attempt, and you are more likely to learn the answers to your questions as they do.

And there's a good chance someone who knows more than you will come along and correct or teach you something new about the subject. For example, this has happened countless times to Ciro Santilli when doing Ciro Santilli's Stack Overflow contributions.

Perfect is the enemy of good.

See also: there is value in tutorials written by beginners.

Examples of famous fails:

See: Section "Exam".

The only thing that matters is that students aim towards the goals described at explain how to make money with the lesson.

Any "homework for which the student cannot use existing resources available online" is a waste of time.

The ideal way to go about it is to reach some intermediate milestone, and then document it. You don't have to do the hole thing! Just go until your patience with it runs out. But while you are doing it, go as deep and wide as you possibly can, without mercy.

This is actually how Ciro Santilli learns new subjects he is curious about, even as an adult! Some examples:

The Moonshots in Education project also has a fantastic related quote:

Other people with similar philosophies:

Finding a complete basis such that each vector solves a given differential equation is the basic method of solving partial differential equation through separation of variables.

The first example of this you must see is solving partial differential equations with the Fourier series.

Notable examples:

What big companies have been created in Europe after World War II, that have not been bought or utterly defeated by American or Japanese companies?Because of all these failures, much fanfare was made as Spotify reached a $50B market capitalization in 2020. An art company, so cute!

As of 2023, the LVMH was the most valuable company in Europe by market capitalization^[ref]. Luxury goods. An area of industry that borders between the useless and the evil.

Europe has basically become an outsourcing hub for the United States. The fact that its starts are all sold if they become large enough just means that R&D is also outsourced.

ASML, and perhaps more meaningfully its parent/predecessor ASM International from 1964 is perhaps the biggest exception.

The key problem is that there are so many small countries in Europe, that any startup has to deal with too many incompatible legislation and cannot easily sell to the hole of Europe and scale. So then a larger company from a more uniform country comes and eats it up!

Talent mobility is another issue:

So why can't Europe unify its laws?

Because the countries are still essentially walled off by languages. Europe is the perfect example of why having more than one natural language is bad for the world.

There isn't true mobility of people between countries.

You just can't go study or work in any other country (except for the UK, when it was still in the EU) without putting a huge effort into learning its language first.

Without this, there isn't enough mixing to truly make cultures more uniform, and therefore allow the laws to be more uniform.

Europe can't even unify basic things like:

Equally so, it can't force little fiscal paradises who effectively benefit from being in Europe like Ireland, Luxembourg, Monaco, Switzerland ("not European", but should that be allowed?) and Cyprus (the EU can't even maintain its territorial integrity, let alone fiscal) to not offer ridiculously low taxes and incentives which make them entry points for foreign companies to rape Europe.

For this reason, Europe will only continue to go downhill with the years, and the United Kingdom will continue to try and endosymbiose into a state of the United States (although at times it seems that it would rather endosymbiose with China instead). On 2025 the British parliament beautifully put it that the country:

Historically, this disunion is partly due to the European balance of power, whereby countries would form alliances with old enemies to prevent another country from taking over. Also linked are failed military unification attempts by Napoleon and Hitler, though we are likely better off without the latter succeeding!!! Though those also partly failed due to wider balance of power issues involving the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union and USA, not only due to internal balance. Of course, none of that matters anymore after World War II, where other more unified Europe-sized potencies rose, first the USA and the Soviet Union, and then China, and now European disunion is nothing but a burden.

Evidence such as those makes it clear that the European Union is a failure.

One thing must be said in favour of Europe's mess however: it favours international collaboration in huge projects as a more neutral middle ground. This can be seen more clearly in the ITER and the fiasco that was the Superconducting Super Collider that was cancelled a couple of billion dollars in partly because it failed to attract any foreign investment, compared to the Large Hadron Collider which went on to find the Higgs boson as mentioned at www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-supercollider-that-never-was/.

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