What eating locally has to do with eduFire
Eating local is all the rage these days as books like The 100-Mile Diet become increasingly popular. But eating local is only necessary because over the last few centuries (and especially the last couple of decades) it has become possible to have a meal composed of foods that have come to us from all around the planet. And while in some ways this can be a very good thing people are starting to realize that shipping foods thousands of miles has a cost as well.
So what the hell does this have to do with eduFire? 
Well, when it comes to our education most people have been on a 100 Mile Diet, or rather a 10 Mile Diet, for their entire lives? Think about it…how many of your teachers growing up lived more than 10 miles from you? Chances are, for most of us, that answer is either zero or at most a small handful.
Why is that important? Well think about the food example…imagine if you grew up eating only foods produced within 10 miles of where you live. And then all of a sudden…you now could eat any food produced anywhere on the planet! How would that change things? The answer is obvious…it’d be a radical shift in how you view your food.
I feel the same is true for education. The fact that most people have learned most of the their lives from people in close proximity to them means that there’s a good chance that they’ve developed a somewhat limited set of perspectives. And there are certainly hundreds/thousands/millions of people that they could have learned from who weren’t available to them for purely geographical reasons.
We’re aiming to change that.
Imagine how different your childhood would have been if in the morning you would have had a physics lessons from rock star geophysicist in Germany, then learned Mandarin from someone in Shanghai in the afternoon, then wrapped up the evening with a lesson in South American history from someone living in Buenos Aires. How frickin’ cool would that be?
The technology to do this has only recently emerged. And I don’t think any of us (myself included) fully realize just how much it’s going to change things. Just like the dude at the start of the century couldn’t fathom eating golden pineapple from Hawaii and goji berries from Tibet I don’t we can fully fathom just how much things are going to change in the upcoming years and decades.
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