This thread is intended to provide a space for 'crazy' ideas. Ideas that spontaneously come to mind (and feel great), ideas you long wanted to tell but never found the place and time for and also for ideas you think should be obvious and simple - but nobody ever mentions them.
This thread itself is such an idea. Or rather the tangent of such an idea which I post below as a seed for this thread.
Rules for this thread:
- Each crazy idea goes into its own top level comment and may be commented there.
- Voting should be based primarily on how original the idea is.
- Meta discussion of the thread should go to the top level comment intended for that purpose.
If this should become a regular thread I suggest the following :
- Use "Crazy Ideas Thread" in the title.
- Copy the rules.
- Add the tag "crazy_idea".
- Create a top-level comment saying 'Discussion of this thread goes here; all other top-level comments should be ideas or similar'
- Add a second top-level comment with an initial crazy idea to start participation.
A portion of a student's first two years salary (say, 10%) should go to the people who taught them the hard skills necessary to get that job (relative to how much those skills are needed on the job)
Details;
Companies could use relative importance testing to figure out which skills they valued to which degree, and teachers could keep track of which skills they taught students, and use standardized microdegrees to prove they had taught those students those skills.
immediate prerequisites would get say, 3% of the that 10%, and pre-pre-requisites would get 3% of that. So that when you get all the way to their kindergarten teacher who taught them all how to count, he's getting only a tiny fraction of that salary (but of course, almost ALL his students will be using the skills he taught, so he might still make a decent amount from it)
Rationale: -Teachers have a HUGE positive externality in that they don't capture MOST of the economic value they create. The best teachers not only teach the material - they foster a deep love for what they teach, and may cause their pupil's to take on careers related to what they teach.. This incentive scheme captures that distinction, which I believe is a huge criticism right now of incentive schemes based purely on standardized testing.
Here are some perspectives on education: