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I cannot imagine doing this today, although there are still places that need a secret university. However, I wonder if we have the solution, at much less risk.

I wonder if, 30 years from now when a whole new generation has grown up, we will discuss poor countries (or, say, people under the Taliban, or in North Korea) learning from the Khan Academy, Coursera and the like in the same way.

"What was it like, mom?"

"Well, kid, they didn't have these fancy holographs. First you had to find a really good 'connection' ..."

These "clandestine courses" certainly exist in rich nations, and are secretly held during lunch and in private homes. For example, to avoid bosses knowing.

Skilled human tutors, free from school/university bureaucracy, can get into your head and figure out effective ways to inspire learning. Leads to faster and surer learning, for those lucky enough to have it.

It also helps that if you're seeking it out, you're going to be a lot more motivated than if it's compulsory education.
People find the need for clandestine sex education in plenty of parts of the West today, where the official curriculum seeks to maintain ancient prejudices.
Unlikely. Those people don't have the luxury of time needed to put any serious efforts towards their education.
You'd be surprised. A good friend of mine is an Afghan who grew up sleeping on a dirt floor alongside his 5 siblings. When he was 15, his parents sent him off to their family village in order to fight the Taliban.

I first met him at our PhD program orientation in the US. He speaks four languages and and is one of the most well educated people I've ever met. Granted, he's an exceptional person but by no means of a unique one.

Edit: can't help sharing something that just happened last week, I was with my wife in Athens, where she had just started her thesis research, interviewing Afghan refugees in one of the big Greek refugee camps. She befriends a 17 year old Afghan kid named Javad, no family or money, speaks nothing but Dari, and one of the first things he asks her is "can you send me a PDF of an intermediate to advanced level mechanical engineering textbook?" We're planning on sending him an ipad with a bunch of PDFs and sci hub articles.

I realize these are just two personal anecdotes but they have definitely changed my mind on this subject. Curious people tend to be curious regardless of their life circumstances.

This is not a terribly substantive comment, but a Kindle Fire might make a little more sense than an iPad. I'm thinking it's less likely to be stolen, more likely to have extra available charging cables.

I wouldn't have guessed this, but after looking it up it seems the battery life of the iPad mini is advertised at the same length as the Kindle Fire.

That's an awesome story. How was Javad planning to receive / read the PDF? Or did he want a paper copy?
His cell phone. He buys data 5 euro at a time from a shop in the town or goes to cafes to download English and engineering textbooks. That's what my wife's thesis project is about - specifically figuring out the best ways to share useful information with refugees who have cell phones but not much else, especially women who might not have a chance to go out in public much, or have a formal education. It's not my field at all but I find her work to be fascinating.

If you're interested, This American Life just did two whole episodes from a Greek refugee camp. In the second episode they interview a guy who patched into a power line under a tree to charge 6 cell phones at once! The group that both TAL and my wife were talking to is really doing good work, they're called the Greek Forum of Refugees.

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/592/a...

This is a salutary anecdote which I wish we could convey to all those people who think that having a smartphone makes you "not poor". It's the exact opposite: it's so useful that even people who have not much else will go through hell or high water to keep their link to the world.
Wouldn't a Thinkpad be a better idea ? You can get used ones for fairly cheap.
Recommending an x220 with a new battery / ssd / ram. Probably still cheaper than an ipad.

Although the ipad / or I'd suggest android tablet may be the better way to go. Charging from battery packs is easier than a laptop.

Anthropologically speaking their was a lot of free time in ancient agrarian societies. I wouldn't be surprised if their is in fact a fair chunk of time that could be diverted to education if the resources were both available and accessible.

From a study of modern Asian and Pacific "free time" [1]:

"People in Cambodia (note the caveat of age – the sample is of those 5 years and older) and Pakistan have the largest amounts of free time (Figure 1.4). Cambodians have more than 16 hours of free time per day (1 000 minutes), whereas in Mongolia, which is the country where people work the longest, people have only 13 hours (800 minutes) of free time. Generally speaking, men have slightly more free time than women (Figure 1.5), reflecting longer total working time for women (Figure 1.1)."[2]

[1]: "Free time" is defined as time not spent working, and can be subdivided as "personal care time" and "leisure time". Furthermore, personal care includes time spent sleeping and accounts for > 3/5 of "free time" usage in most cases.

[2]: https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/49306957.pdf

It's a really interesting article. It leads to the corollary of "How and why do people in poorer countries spend their leisure time differently then those in wealthier ones". My personal opinion is that the differences between both demographics where narrow down over time such as "Both poor and rich spend an average of 2hrs/day on Netflix".

> their was a lot of free time in ancient agrarian societies

Isn't it disappointing that with all the automation and advanced technology we have today, people on average have less free time?

I changed jobs recently, and at my new company, my team consistently works from 9 am to around 7pm. I feel pressured to stay as I don't want to be the only one walking out the door at 5:15pm (and since that'd be frowned upon). My commute is one hour each way, so I'm not free from 8am to 8pm.

I really wish I had more free time for intellectual pursuits and personal projects. :(

An expectation of 10 hour days? Ridiculous. You might be the only one walking out at 5:15 the first few days, but you might get followers, and improve the culture at your workplace in the process. If you're meeting your tasks and deliverables, your hours as a butt in a seat shouldn't matter.

Alternatively, start working from home 2 days a week. Approach your boss with the idea you're more productive without the commute time sucking up 1/4 of your workday

Serious question: Why did you take the job? Assuming it wasn't your only choice or you had to get a job ASAP and took the first one (if so, ignore the rest), why?

I've made the same mistake before: Working at a place where everyone works late or at home after work, or even on weekends. Not for me—I make sure to ask during interviews about working hours and expectations.

Well, people in such agrarian societies don't have a good standard of living, at least from most of HN's perspective. I think things like computers would be pretty expensive for them.
Would this study hold for ancient societies thought? There is very, very little we know of pre-historic societies.

Early farmers did not have pesticides, or advanced machinery. They were working with crops only recently domesticated, and with little knowledge of best practises. There was no social order, so bands of thieves may have been more common.

This would suggest that much time would have been spent weeding and protecting crops from pests and thieves, although there can be only speculation on this part. However, I would be cautious of accepting that ancient societies had it as good as the people in the study. Once societies formed it probably got worse, eg. the life of a farmer in ancient Egypt.

Severe sampling bias. News in the West is focused on all the bad things that happen there. That doesn't mean that there can't be a small percentage of the population that has the time and motivation to educate themselves. I've met my share of Syrians, Libyans, and Iraqi graduate students who were educated in and lived through pretty difficult times pre- and post- dictator-overthrow.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36893303 Secret library in Syria
That's a very good point.

I suppose they would spend most of their time looking for work or a way to make a living.

There might be a thin slice of people, just below the wealthy but above the desperately poor who just need the opportunity.

How tired are you after a days of works. Many of us are mentally drained, which we feel as physically drained after work.

Not only that, but physical activity plus our mental strain screws with our cortisol levels.

Personally, I used to work out a lot. Then I realized I was getting crabby all the time. I think I have cortisol problems, but not sure.

Anybody refer me to research with stress and and physical workouts and not getting enough sleep?

Interesting. I see this going on all of the time; YCombinator is a great parallel example of, while not exactly clandestine, non-institutional education collecting great minds and educating young people in an environment of relative obscurity and non-intervention from the greater culture that hosts it. I expect _more_ of this in the future.
i doubt north Koreans have access to khan academy.
If Western films make it through, it's not hard to imagine Korean educational DVDs getting in.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/12/22/north-korea...

> to a post World War II effort by Communist Russia, who once again took control of Poland

Inaccurate - it did not wait for post-WW2. Russia invaded already the second half Poland as soon as 1939 (2 weeks after Germany) and on top of that, without declaring War.

That was not Russia. That was Soviet Union. Those parts of Poland became parts of Ukrainian and Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republics (Western Ukraine, Western Belarus). Most of them are still parts of Ukraine and Belarus today. In 1938 Poland invaded Czechoslovakia together with Germany and Hungary to "protect" Polish population in Zaolzie. In 1939 Soviet Union "protected" Ukrainian and Byelorussian population. In 1938 Stalin's plan to fight Nazi Germany and protect Slavic Czechoslovakia was rejected by the West.
In 1938 Poland invaded Czechoslovakia together with Germany and Hungary to "protect" Polish population in Zaolzie

I have a keen interest in WWII, so I had to do some brief research into this claim as I was surprised and had never heard it before. A few minutes of browsing seems to indicate there is a history of dispute in the area. This area was apparently given to the Poles as part of Versailles Treaty and the Czech's took it back by force in 1920.

I now I have some reading to do.

Let's not rewrite history here: Germany invaded Czechoslovakia. Hungary and Poland annexed small parts of ethnically mixed areas to their respective countries
And Germany invaded Poland on the 1st September 1939. The problem is we signed up treaties with Czechoslovakia regulating the issue You think the eastern part of Poland was not ethnically mixed and there were no problems with this?
Zaolzie was stolen from Poland by the Czechs around 1920 (the Polish-Bolshevik war)
And you think the eastern part of Poland was just given us by Ukrainians, Lithuanians etc. voluntarily?
on a related note, why every American & European should pay strong attention to Trump & Putin at the moment, and try to collectively make the wisest decision we can make, in each of our respective nations. because all the physical laws of the universe which allowed 30's/40's Hitler/Stalin to do what they did are still true and in effect today, and many of the same political/psychological mechanisms as well.
But we have a greater knowledge of the physical laws of the universe which allows us to build far more powerful explosives and deploy them far more quickly.
Education for the sake of education, for people with a desire to learn. This pretty much has to be better than education for the purpose of credentialing.
They were mostly nobles (Poland had lots of these - almost 5% of population) or rich middle class women before feminism (so - no need to work).
First of all, number of nobles in Poland was much bigger, some say even 10% of population, which made it mostly the customary title, rarely followed by an actual wealth.

More importantly, since Poland was under Russian and German rule nobles were often dispossesed and persecuted.

Maria Skłodowska-Curie herself had to earn her living (mostly by being private tutor), as did her husband, parents and others.

So no, education was not rich women's entertainment, it was necessity.

If you read the book "More work for mother," which details 300 years of the history of housework, women have long been saddled with about 60 hours a week of housework. In modern times, if a woman works a full time job of 40 hours a week, that only falls to about 40 hours per week of housework.

I seriously doubt most of these women were living a life of leisure. Additionally, let's assume you are right: How on earth does that rebut my comment about educating people who desire to learn? Because surely the leisure class could have been bar hopping and throwing or attending wild parties instead of trying to learn something in spite of it being against the rules to get an education.

> Additionally, let's assume you are right: How on earth does that rebut my comment about educating people who desire to learn?

It doesn't, why should it?

Not necessarily no need to work, but more importantly, easily available free time to spend on learning (or anything else).
I worked on a project called Free Skool that's essentially the same thing. Even in wealthy, "free" countries, there are plenty of people that don't have access to educational resources, and can benefit from sharing knowledge with their peers. We had classes on everything from maths and philosophy to sewing and figure drawing. Education shouldn't be something that only happens when you have a ton of money and years of free time to spend on a university degree.
Do you have a website? Would you like to link to it (or send me via email?)
I worked on Free Skool Santa Cruz (http://santacruz.freeskool.org/) but we stopped a few years back. It's entirely decentralized, and there's a bunch of projects around the world. Here's a wiki page that has more links and resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchistic_free_school
The one-person stage play "Manya - A Living History of Marie Curie" is fantastic incidentally.

There's a clip here; I don't know if a full recording is available. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8GTXNkkFPs

Looking through the sources, its bit unclear if she joined before the various pro-education groups were united into a single secret university open for both sexes, or after. Before 1885 she was tutoring, but I can't find any reference if thats was connected with the university.
Fascinating how outsiders change the world. Despite their progress, it should be food for thought for our modern-era universities too.