I used to be a schoolteacher, so whenever I read about someone's shiny new EdTech idea, I can't help but think that it's a tarpit idea.

Every developed country has a set of professional standards for teachers, and teachers who don't live up to those standards are pushed out, sometimes by having their teaching accreditation revoked. In Australia, for instance, there's a set number of hours of 'professional development' that teachers have to do every few years, and if you don't complete them, you lose accreditation and have to find a new career. The professional development activities and courses that meet the requirements are audited by the Department of Education, and have to draw on the latest research in educational psychology: keeping up with the latest research is the entire point of that professional standard.

When I did my teacher training, the first thing we were told in the first lecture was to never cite any research older than ten years, because it would be out of date. Now, if you've trained in the sciences - I was a physicist - you should be troubled with this, because a discipline can't really accumulate knowledge about the world if it throws everything out after ten years. That's why, when I broke the rules and searched through the databases of academic literature going back more than ten years, I saw the same ideas being reinvented under different names in different decades.

So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, probably because someone's seen a paper on spaced repetition. That's nice, but you can't build a business around this. It doesn't matter if all the thought leaders are all in on spaced repetition this year, because next year they'll have moved on to something else, because they need to have something new to talk about. In Australia and the UK at least (I don't know the figures for other countries), half of all teachers leave the profession within five years of joining it, so most of your user base is overenthusiastic twenty-somethings with no life experience (yes, I was one of these) who will do whatever The Research tells them, and the ones who stay long enough to gain leadership positions tend not to grow out of this, so the classroom side of EdTech is basically a bunch of fads, so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space.

If you want to sell software to schools, go and work in a bunch of them, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.

Interesting. I don't mean to detract from your main point but as someone who's deeply into spaced repetition for the past 5-7 years (Daily Anki user + built my own spaced repetition systems for learning various skills), I find myself disagreeing with you on some things that you mentioned:

1. Spaced Repetition is not a fad. It's the most consistent and reliable way we we know for rote memorization (conditions apply). And it's not a new thing either. It's been around since the late 1800s. It just wasnt practical until the advent of computers and mobile devices. So I'm skeptical that there is another "something else" to move on to that is as impactful as SRS.

2. Not sure what the state of education in Australia these days but speaking strictly from my school days in India (1980s-1990s), something like spaced repetition would have been a godsend for every single student. And I'm 100% sure a vast majority of schools and teachers still havent heard of it.

3. I've been learning German for the past few years from some of the top private institutes in Vienna, Austria and let me tell you that neither the teacher, nor the students have any idea about spaced repetition.

That said, you're probably right about the business-viability of such ventures because of the difficulty of selling to the decision-makers, I just strongly disagree about Spaced Repetition being a "flavor of the year"

I partially agree with what you just posted, but — walking along your train of thought, I take a bit of issue with the following paragraph (sliced for emphasis):

> So there seems to be a bit of a trend for people to build flashcard-type tools at the moment, [...] so it's impossible to build a stable business in this space.

I am of the radical idea that lots of things should not be for-profit businesses (doesn't mean that it can't be profitable — just not exorbitantly so), and that economist's mistaken goal of exponential growth expectations is criminally separated from the sigmoid limits to reality.

So, therefore, while I agree that EdTech is a bunch of fads, I think the fact that EdTech is a thing is wrong.

And I agree with your main point that we should be chasing accumulation and refinement of knowledge, and not doing some sort of spring-cleaning every 10 years.

> If you want to sell software to schools, go and work in a bunch of them, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.

I think this principle generalizes to: If you want to sell software to X, go and work in a bunch of X, find some obscure administrative problem, and solve that.

Although some people seemingly have a talent for selling products into industries they have no idea about. I always assume that means a highly motivated buyer.

There's also a different angle: EdTech doesn't have to sell to schools, but could also be learner-facing.