Ask HN: Software with biggest potential for positive impact in 5 years?
I think adult education needs reform. We prioritize childhood education, but kids don&#x27;t choose their parents. Affluent kids have access to better education, and there&#x27;s no later-in-life educational safety net for adults without those early childhood benefits. If you went to a crap high school because of where you lived, you have limited options after graduating, and even less if you dropped-out.<p>Your current options as an adult are to take a course online, take a course at a community college, or buy books and watch YouTube videos all on your own. The problem with these approaches is that all motivation must come from within. There&#x27;s no <i>requirement</i> that you learn. As soon as you get bored, you can quit. A large majority of kids, even stellar students, study because they are required to do so, out of a fear of the consequences imposed by their parents, by their teachers and even by their peers.<p>Imagine if you had to learn a subject outside your comfort zone. How attentive would you be to an online classes? Even basic courses like algebra are very uncomfortable to adults with minimal mathematics knowledge. It&#x27;s not enough to hope adults who enroll will &#x27;do their best&#x27;, you have to motivate them to stay and push them to excel.<p>Now...I don&#x27;t know what such a system would look like or even if it&#x27;s possible to implement on a large scale.