Man says: “Why can’t I profit from teaching kids?”
I say: “Pay for web design degree, then we’ll talk”
- May 8th, 2012
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The internet has filled my head with more crap than I care to admit, but it has also been a great source for useful information as well as a great source for entertainment. While I get traditional entertainment like most folks from Netflix or other providers, it also provides non-traditional (dare I say new?) forms of entertainment, such as the “I can’t believe what people do” type of entertainment. This is one of those moments…
While reading an article about the future of education and it’s technological improvements and how investors were looking at new ways for our kids to learn, one thoughtful commentor felt it necessary to talk about his own experience in education:
If we could just get over this fundamental problem of not being able to get rich off of educating our children, this business would really take off…
While I applaud your openness in being a “for profit guy” and declaring that “people are not willing to pay a subscription for internet content” I don’t think these are the main reasons you aren’t rich yet. Certain levels of education have no place to accommodate a for-profit-person and I shudder to think of a business initiative to stake a claim in this space involving our children. How would you feel if all of the teachers at your kid’s schools (assuming you have them) were “for profit” people? You are hardly hobbling along like a teacher, you appear to be trying to get rich doing what teachers are doing but not actually interested in the teaching part (you make no mention of being a teacher, so I am only left with your self description as a for profit guy). You want to get rich doing something that everyone is generally expected to participate in, and somehow feel you are doing the same thing that teachers are doing. You, as an entrepreneur and potential exploiter of information, are hardly the same undervalued resource that our teachers and faculty are in primary education. In fact I am quite certain the value of your contribution to education is made apparent by the amount of money you have made from said contribution to date, and to associate yourself with those folks (assuming you are not a teacher yourself) is kind of an insult to teachers. It is not prudent to try and monetize the education of our children, and hasn’t been for hundreds of years. Education does not “struggle” or even aspire to being a “for profit business opportunity” except at a certain level, which I will explain now.
Since you’ve wasted 15 years on this “problem” let me help you understand. This fundamental problem of people not wishing to pay for knowledge has nothing to do with you or your desire to profit from information that is free and that you are trying to sell, it has everything to do with the age of your target demographic and the level of education you are attempting to peddle. Society at large has determined that in order for said society to improve, it must give a certain amount of information away for free to ensure progress. Education itself is not valuable, but educated people are, so it is fruitful for society to create as many educated people as possible. There are costs associated with teachers, public schools, and facilities to educate children, and those don’t generally get over funded, because as a society we aspire to make a certain level of education as accessible as possible and in most cases this means that the closer it costs to free, the more likely we will have educated people. That’s why most endeavors for educating children don’t involve profitable business models, but people who actually care about making as many of our children as smart and educated as possible and getting paid and making a living doing so is just an added benefit of someone’s passion for helping to create a better society. The day people stop caring about educating our children, is the day that you can swoop in and make your millions.
There is an age and level of information that we have established thresholds for charging for information and that age is adult hood and that level of information is at colleges or universities. There are so many private and public institutions of higher learning, operating as businesses, making dollars hand over fist, that I could write about them non-stop. It literally includes every institution by name that ends in College, University, or Institute. They make millions every year and has even become a topic of conversation as of this writing (the rising costs of student loans) that might even prove that this threshold is rising still.
All that being said, I was thoroughly entertained by your commentary, and I recognize that people are certainly “ambitious” enough to try and profit off of anything, so in your endeavor, I wish you good luck and offer these helpful tips:
- Target the demographic that is actually willing and able to pay for education. Start an online university, don’t target kids who literally don’t want to learn in the first place. Imagine if cigarettes made you puke and were not addictive at all. You are basically selling the same thing, so I suggest a new target market.
- Hire a web designer. I assume that there is a certain amount of cost to building an education website… SME’s, instructors, course content, server hosting, payment processing, and so on, but honestly that doesn’t add up to $500,000 even over 15 years. And by looking at your website, it is stuck with the same 1997 design brainstormed during the beta days. Someone is walking around with $400,000 in their pocket and you are clearly not getting your money’s worth.
The point of this story is two fold:
One, people are still trying to get rich any way they can, but have the balls to actually complain about why they are not able to monetize fundamental pieces of our evolving society. And two, it is good to see technology advancements in education (from the article, not the commentor) that will ensure that we are still thinking of each other and that for the most part, most people want to make the world a better place.
~jookyone

