http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2012/09/scaling-quality-through-the-missing-institution/

Much as the entire tech revolution, 1960-2015, would have been invisible and unimaginable in 1960 if the entire world had been Soviet.

Hanson has endorsed the view that schooling is about conformity, and conditioning children to grant deference to authority and fit into modern industrialized work patterns. But it seems to me that people (especially young boys) find formal education and typical work patterns equally unnatural settings and that ‘dealing with behavioral issues’ is coincidental in both contexts – using similar human disciplinary techniques that work on most humans in most contexts. That is, his claim is the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. Just because work follows education, and both require similar systems of adjustment and behavioral influence, doesn’t mean that the earlier is for the sake of the latter.

I’ve both been a work-supervisor and instructor of very young men (18-20), and whether one is trying to focus their attention and keep them on task or impart familiarity of some knowledge or improve their performance of some skill, the techniques are largely the same. And yes, plenty of experience and coaching / mentoring in these techniques can be very helpful to one’s effectiveness.

He spent decades building systems that teach teachers how to teach.

It is a interesting study in someone who was empirically successfully at achieving results at scale. Sadly political success did not follow.