• 10 Nov, 2025 *

Mason started The culture of learning by paying homage to my footer directive: “Everything is a remix.” That inspired me to pay his gift forward. Whenever you have spare time, I strongly recommend watching and/or reading through the transcripts of some of Kirby’s Everything is a Remix videos. In that spirit, education is a remix too.

Your first question about Ava’s Goodbye to my math hakwon might just be, “What is a hakwon?” Well, a hagwon (the word’s proper romanization or Latin script representation) is a Korean for-profit private school. It’s like a cram school that usually focuses on a single subject or exam.

Ava’s explanation for quitting her math hagwon boils down to those kinds of schools having a perverse “quantity over quality” valuation. Students forgo understanding content. Instead, they blindly solve easy questions by rote memorization, get chased and bitten by deadlines, and forget material from prior grades. That differs from “quantity over quality” done right, which emerges quality variance by accumulative iteration and analysis toward the asymptote of perfection.

Ava’s math teacher presents a sympathetic perspective from the other side of the classroom:

“many hakwons say they’re going to prepare you for tests. however, all they do is throw you an intolerable amount of questions to increase the chance of guessing what will be on the test. this is good for hakwons who only care about their students’ grades. however, this is way too time-consuming for students who have to study other subjects and do other things besides just studying.”

Hagwon students aren’t just their grades; they are people like you and I with pastimes, interests, and feelings too. How many of them drown under hundreds of shallow questions a day, let alone for a single subject? A clear lack of learning style diversity likely degrades material retention and reception even more. For that matter, how many hagwon students even care about math taught through this framework?

Compare those failure modes to how Mason likens his learning model to Ms. HJ’s learning model from Ava’s why does the system rule us all:

Ava also mentions:

i wanna reflect on what ms.hj (english hakwon director) said. she told me i should delve deeper into things. go on rabbit holes, read books, form opinions, make things, and most importantly, record what i did and learned.

Which is very close to what I think my learning is, driven by the dopamine I someone squeeze out from reading the wikipedia page on grass or watching a youtube video about how concrete is made.

Both Mason and Ms. HJ frame learning as self-directed loops of multimedia practice, abstracted from typical learning motifs like homework and hagwons. Their models intrude way less on students’ temporal sovereignty. In turn, students can afford more salient, connective, and longer-lasting understanding than the rote memorization of exam prep. How much does recording what you did and learned this way map to what Human Invariant has to say about paramount agency in The Structure, Incentives, and Negative Externalities of “You Can Just Do Things”?

In reality, truly agentic people are overwhelmingly better across the board. Talk with any person at the top of their field and you’ll quickly learn how deep their thought processes apply to other parts of their lives. How you do anything is how you do everything.

I find Ava’s disapproval of systems, like schools or jobs, being predominantly treated as gospel to involuntarily worship instead of tools to optionally use fascinating:

i haven’t stayed in school for a long time, and i’ve never tried to get a job or gotten one. however, according to a lot of people: school yells, “if you follow me you’ll be better off when you get a job!” however, the things you learn in school do not benefit you in your job. and your job yells, “if you stick to me you’ll get money and be better off in life and be happy forever!!!” but no. the system’s just the system. and life is life. maybe the system might bring you a little bit closer to a better life, but it’s just a tool, not the only and always correct way to the Best Life Ever™. as soon as the system’s more than a tool, it seems to break down. if you’re not fit for the system, congrats you’re a failure! if you’re happy with something but it’s not relevant to the system, throw that away it’s a waste of time! if you got depression, well i guess you didn’t follow the system correctly, your fault!

If you have encountered the failure modes she outlines, do you think they were deserved? Could your surroundings having treated systems more as tools led to more self-respect, confidence, and ultimately, happiness?

She added:

and i shouldn’t forget that the high school’s just a tool.

Enrolled in an Australian public school, Mason showcases yet another tool that highlights the cultural difference between his and Ava’s surroundings:

Most people in my school would drop out given the first opportunity and pick up an apprenticeship in some random trade and never see an educational facility again.

Yet, even with an abundance of tools at our disposal, do any of them serve human students well enough? Angadh’s Huxley says Education is a Technology claims that education can work better by adapting to individuals’ needs or abilities, so they can find meaning and fulfillment. I wouldn’t be surprised if many or all of the people I mentioned above agreed with him. How can we remix education to transform fitting into pre-existing molds into realizing our potential?

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