“Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire“
William Butler Yeats

“Educated, confident, creative people are dangerous to the status quo, dangerous to a centralized economy, dangerous to a centralized system of command and control. Those in power don’t want you educated. They want you schooled.”
PS Pirro, 101 Reasons Why I’m An Unschooler

Great discussion about education with Philippe Tarbouriech and Salman Farmanfarmaian at our latest entrepreneur gathering. It started when we discussed Philippe’s trip to India to make pictures of Hole in the wall, a project we all discovered at Lift07 and that has, since, inspired Slumdog millionaire.

Sugata’s project showed that a model we took for granted (an adult teaching kids) could be reinvented in an unexpected way; and that in some cases (rural  India) there was actually no other choice than coming up with something new for millions of kids in need of knowledge. Education is evolving, and these shifts are of course driven by new needs, namely:

• In the rich world, the need to adapt to a generation of kids who are more unique, social, connected, autonomous, and collaborative, who sometimes know more than the professors themselves.
• In the developing world, the need to adapt to the social context of millions who are left out of the traditional system.

The debate will certainly rage in the coming years. Interesting ideas are emerging:

• Self education is not new
  We think that self-education is unintuitive and a bit weird. It might even be dangerous to leave kids alone, having to sort out the good from the bad?
  But isn’t it the way we learn how to speak? As babies we hear adults who speak good or bad, dirty or classy words. In the end we make sense of all this and learn by ourselves one of the most complicated thing in the world: a language.
• Collaborative learning beats top down processes
  Learning does not have to be a lonely, humbling, boring, painful experience.
  One of the biggest contradiction of our system is that it wants to prepare us for professional life but creates a different framework than the one we will find at the end of our studies. Why don’t schools tolerate two of the resources one has to master to survive in a corporate environment, namely information retrieval (Google, encyclopedias, books) and collaboration with co-workers. Why can’t we call a knowledgeable person or use Google during exams when we can at work?
  Collaboration is being experimented, notably in computer games. Students are together in a virtual world, each facing a mathematical or logical challenge. When a student is done with his challenge he can help others who are slower. No one can go to the next level unless every single puzzle has been solved. Interesting idea.
• Education can be free
  Bing Gordon at a recent “hacking education” event: “Knowledge is a non-rival good. If I eat an apple, you cannot also eat that same apple; but if I learn something, there is no reason you cannot also learn that thing“.
  Just as software and music tend to become more open and accessible under the assaults of new distribution channels (the web) and vanishing barriers to entry, knowledge is held by a large number of persons who, bearing a well designed and rewarding framework, will want to share what they know, and make it accessible to the world. Things like the University of people or Open Course Ware are already happening.
• Diplomas are increasingly irrelevant
  We know how the most admired entrepreneurs in the world don’t have anything else than post-fame honoris causa diplomas. Steve Jobs, Paul Allen, Bill Gates. Our very coveted paper certificates are challenged in that way, but not only. What if our credentials were stored online and freely accessible via Google, replaced by powerful references like peers and clients endorsements, online portfolios, press articles, etc. Why not have decentralized certification mechanism, one where you get a diploma after a certain number of trusted sources (universities, but also clients, co-workers, bosses, etc) endorse you? Follow a class at MIT, do an internship at Microsoft, write an article for the New York Times, get a degree from these three institutions. I even think there is a nice business model here…

Education is a fascinating topic, one that is hard to deal with because everybody has an opinion on how it should happen. We are about to see a brutal evolution, because what we have in front of us might be one of the biggest ever gap between two generations, between the digital migrants and the digital natives.

Who will vehemently resist these ideas? Teachers of course! Like journalists when they saw millions of web users invade their territory, they will instinctively want to fight back and protect their experts status. It is a lost war, the wrong approach. Educators will eventually settle in their new - and improved - place in society. After all, isn’t it more rewarding to collaborate than to direct, monitor, grade, and punish?

Links (thanks Salman!): An Unschooling Manifesto, Hacking Education.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 11th, 2009 at 11:42 am and is filed under education, society, innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.