Public Education: Start Again

If you could start from zero, what would public education look like?

Posts Tagged ‘agrarian age education’

A Glimpse Of The Future Of Education

Posted by Stephen Dill on May 5, 2011

Salmon Khan is a remarkably humble man. He just did what he was able to do in his free time. Then some guy named Gates caught on to what he was doing and felt he should do it full time. And the Khan Academy was born. Watch this TED Talk and ponder the potential that both Khan and Gates speak of:

Doesn’t this address some of the most pressing problems that All New Public Education faces?

  • How to make a difference in the capital-intense, building-dependent system we are currently laboring under?
  • How to help people see the value and potential of a borderless classroom?
  • How to facilitate a transition to student-centric learning environments that are less dependent on the teacher and more on the student’s innate ability to learn?
  • How to understand where time and attention from parents, learning partners, coaches, and mentors can best be applied?
Maybe I have just been too close to this issue for too long, but the thrill I feel when I hear and see what Sal has done is overwhelming. What do you think? Do you agree that is this the leap forward I sense it is?

I’m off to brush up on my calculus, I’ll keep an eye out for your comments.

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Sir Ken on Why Education Kills Divergent Learning Skills

Posted by Stephen Dill on October 15, 2010

Here is a very compelling presentation by Sir Ken Robinson, of TED Talk fame, animated on a whiteboard as he delivers it to a live audience. The presentation is just under 12 minutes long and it sets the stage for the premise of this website and its fundamental question: why does the world continue to invest in a public education system based on old and outdated precepts that are ineffectual and misguided? If we could start all over, what would we base our new system on and how different would it appear to us today?

Grab a snack or drink, commit to not looking at email and sit back for the 11 minutes to watch this and the 5 minutes your head will be swimming after watching it:

For those readers here for the first time (welcome!), there are some ideas elsewhere on the site on how to fix this predicament we find ourselves in, I would encourage you to read and ponder them. And if anyone has access to Sir Ken, would you suggest that he ring me up so we can stop agreeing on what is wrong and begin figuring out how to build a new system, test it, refine it, then launch it? Thank you!

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