John Taylor Gatto is my New Hero
I read Dumbing Us Down over the Labor Day weekend. Now this article from Fast Company. Yup, John Taylor Gatto is my new hero.
Want a clue about what we’re building at EduRev? Read his stuff. He describes it perfectly. 
What we’re reading
A few selected articles that have come across our wire recently:
Microsoft’s Class Action - Very interesting look into the impact that technology can have on the classroom. It’s also interesting to see the movement of corporate America (in this case Microsoft) into public education and ponder what that means.
Does Easy Do It? Children, Games, and Learning - Want to see the future of education? Look at gaming. This article gives some hints as to why the way people learn in the future will look a lot more like the way people “play” today.
Diversity in Learning: A Vision for the New Millennium - Interesting to see how and why traditional education not only does not serve to increase diversity in learning but rather serves to squash it.
Come across more articles like these? Post them in the comments or e-mail them to jon @ edurev dot com. Thanks!
Putting More Now Into The Internet
Great article from the man himself, Peter Drucker.
Education is already grabbing a major chunk of America’s gross national product. I believe that the U.S. now spends around $1 trillion on education and training. This number will increase rapidly, but the growth won’t be in traditional schools, which currently take about 10% of the GNP (kindergarten through high school, 6%; colleges and universities, 4%). The growth will be in continuing adult education.
Are schools necessary?
It’s been a while since we’ve posted so I figured I’d chime in with a provocative title. (BTW, little to no blog posting usually means we’re getting lots of work done so that’s generally a good thing.). Anyway, was pondering today the future of schools and whether they are really necessary and relevant. Absurd? Perhaps…but consider the following 10 points:
1. Think about what happened to banks. 50 years ago it would have been difficult to imagine not going to a bank to withdraw money, make deposits, etc. Nowadays, with the exception of a few oddball things, most of us never visit a bank. We’ve found that technology can do a much better (or at least a more efficient and cost-effective) job of servicing most needs than human beings can. This increases the convenience factor, reduces the cost structure for banks and gets us out of having to stand in that annoying line on Friday afternoons. Certainly teaching children and performing financial transactions are different activities but I wonder if there aren’t at least a few parallels here.
2. Over one million students in the U.S. are now home-schooled. That represents a very significant percentage of our population who have answered this question “No.” The rise in homeschooling is an interesting trend because it is self-reinforcing. The more parents homeschool their kids the easier it is for additional parents to homeschool. My cousin homeschools his seven (yes, seven :)) kids and they’ve been very encouraged by the increased acceptance of homeschooling and resources geared towards people who make this choice for their children.
3. Schools are the product of a by-gone era. If you wanted to train people to work on a farm or on a shop floor what kinds of skills and behaviors would you try to instill? You’d want people to learn conforming behavior (don’t ask a question unless you raise your hand, ask permission for everything you do), have a lot of attention to detail, “color inside the lines” and generally not raise to much of a ruckus (which is the surest way to get labeled ADD and put on Ritalin. Of course, it’s this behavior that is exactly what schools teach. Anyone else see more than a little problem with this? The skills demanded in today’s society are much different than those demanded 50 years ago. Yet schools have changed precious little during this time.
4. Schools don’t teach technology. Perhaps the biggest reason for the growing gap between rich and poor is the ability to understand and utilize technology. Let’s put it this way. If you’re a young person and don’t get how e-mail works your ability to land a well-paying job is next to nil these days. The problem here is that schools don’t really teach technology. Sure, you’ll have the occasional CAD class or web design skills class on the docket but I’d venture to say that 99% of the technology kids learn is done outside the classroom environment. They figure out how to e-mail, IM, social network, etc. on their own. This makes schools much less relevant than in the past where the only way to learn the important stuff was in the classroom.
5. Schools don’t do all that great of a job of teaching positive socialization. A common argument against homeschooling is that kids won’t learn proper social skills. However, that assumes that schools do a good job teaching proper social skills when in reality that’s not often the case. Schools definitely produce kids who know how to bully and tease and give in to peer pressure. They do a less than stellar job of teaching leadership, emotional intelligence and teamwork. I’d offer that extracurricular activities like sports, drama, music and arts programs do a *much* better job of this. However, schools are not a necessary component here as many homeschooled kids who play on area sports teams and belong to clubs could attest to.
6. Knowledge changes ridiculously fast nowadays. In the past, people could graduate from college and become a teacher and rest assured that they wouldn’t have to learn all that much more in the future to do their job adequately. Today? Not the case unless you are teaching basic skills. Instead, knowledge refreshes ridiculously fast. Want examples of that? Watch this video:
7. Teachers aren’t prepared for that rate of change. I’d love to be all Pollyanna-ish and pretend that a relatively high number of the best and brightest people in our society decide to become teachers. However, the numbers just don’t back that up. For example, check this out:
(GRE) scores of future elementary school teachers fall near the bottom of all test takers, with GRE scores 100 points below the national average. Source
Sure, the GRE isn’t a perfect predictor of intelligence but wouldn’t it make sense for society that our best and brightest and the one imparting wisdom to future generations. Sadly, that’s not happening. Not even close.
8. The quality of free educational materials is nearing and will likely soon surpass the quality of traditional educational materials. Teachers use material (e.g., textbooks) they feel most comfortable with. That worked pretty well up until the last few years. However, with things like Wikipedia arriving quickly on the scene that doesn’t work so well anymore. Textbooks are next. Some teachers welcome Wikipedia and will adopt other new things quickly. However, many more are resistant to change. As the quality of non-traditional materials improves and surpasses that of traditional materials students learning from the latter will receive an inferior education to those learning from the former.
9. Schools simply don’t work. Here’s a fun (or not so fun depending on how you look at it) stat for you: Of every 100 ninth-graders, only 68 graduate high school on time and only 18 make it through college on time (Source). We don’t tolerate mediocrity like this in any other industries. So why do we so with what is arguably the most important sector of society. Complacency might be one reason. For years the U.S. has been at the top of the economic heap. Now as the world’s economy gets more competitive than it’s ever been (China and India: Enter stage left.) we’re rapidly falling behind (e.g., China and India collectively graduate 12 times more engineers than does the United States). The big problem is that we won’t figure out that we’ve lost the race until it’s too late to do anything about it. I’m the last person to be territorial or ethnocentric but I feel bad to think of the missed opportunities for people in the U.S. because they didn’t receive a good enough education.
10. There will be better alternatives. I know people who are building them. We’re building one. I’m not suggesting that EduRev or any of the other companies that see incredible stagnation in a $2 trillion industry as a big opportunity for financial gain and positive social impact will necessarily single-handedly makes schools obsolete. However, I think collectively the landscape for education will be much, much different in 20 years than it is today. Given the general state of disarray around education I think that’s a really, really good thing.
Would love to hear comments!
UPDATE on 08/27/07: Kareem sent me the following links. Really good stuff which is aligned with many of the points above. Looking forward to reading more Gatto!
http://www.tysknews.com/Depts/Educate/public_school_nightmare.htm
http://www.noogenesis.com/game_theory/Gatto/Gatto.html
College Will Kill Your Entrepreneurial Spirit…
Interesting perspective.
College Will Kill Your Entrepreneurial Spirit While Simultaneously Turning You into a Worker Bee
Not sure I agree 100% but the fact is that our current educational system doesn’t incredibly bad job of preparing people for the world that we live in. That’s in large part because the current education system was developed in a period in time where the skills required of people coming out of college were much different than the skills that are required today. Today most of the most successful and fulfilled people today are entrepreneurs living out their dreams and following their bliss. However, schools don’t really teach that. In fact, they pretty much teach the opposite of that.
I’m excited to help “be the change” on this one. I encourage you to do likewise.
One Laptop Per Child: Why We Do What We Do
Was at my buddy Amir’s place last night and he had Tivo’ed a 60 Minutes segment for me about Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child initiative. Watch it and prepare to get chills.
What If Every Child Had A Laptop?
The possibilities here are endless. This will change the world. I’ve written about this before in our first blog post on Edurev as well as in some posts inspired by the book The End of Poverty over on LearnOutLoud.
My eyes got misty last night thinking about what this all means. A real possibility to lift millions of people out of poverty and allow them to learn the things that will allow them to become self-sufficient and break the cycle of economic hardship. This can happen within our lifetime. I can’t think of a better legacy to leave to future generations. Time to get back to work.
Grockit is going to Killit
Major kudos to my buddy Farb who just announced that they’ve been funded by Benchmark (easily one of the top 5 VCs if not top 3). I met Farb about 8 months ago and he’s brilliant. I love where they’re taking Grockit and look forward to the launch of their MMOL (love that acronym!) product.
Also, I love seeing stuff like this because it’s great validation of the space. You have Tutor.com funded by Intel Capital, Tutorvista funded by Sequoia and now Grockit. Who’s next? 
Great Ray Kurzweil Quote
Kareem sent this over. Very apropos for what we’re building…
“I’m an inventor, and I became interested in long term trends because
an invention needs to make sense in the world in which it is finished,
not the world in which it was started.”
Educational Tastemakers
We have tastemakers for everything in life. Food critics (and increasingly food bloggers) to tell us where and what to eat. Fashion magazines to tell us what to where and what shops are hot (not that I care about any of that crap). A million people telling us what music we should be listening to (I find myself increasingly turning to Fred Wilson here).
Why shouldn’t we have tastemakers for what we should be learning? Recently I sent off e-mails to a bunch of my friends to ask them what books I should be reading and what blogs I should be keeping up with. These people were essentially educational tastemakers for me and the lists they gave me were pretty damn hot (see the list of books here).
But I don’t want to stop there. I want to know what you’re learning. Yes you. I want to know what crazy thing you just found out and who you found it out from. I want to know when you read some article that blew your mind (like this one). I want to know when you had an incredibly productive time of learning and growing and I want to share in that experience.
I want a Social Learning Discovery Service so that when I meet someone who is ridiculously smart in some area I can “subscribe” to that person’s knowledge stream. Some services are getting closer to this. Delicious. Sphere (kinda). But there’s still a long way to go.
Look at what’s going on in the music biz right now and you’ll get the best glimpse of what I think is possible. See how people are adopting the iLike Facebook app and think about what that means. See how services like last.fm and the Hype Machine operate and how they are fundamentally changing the music business. And why the fact that I’m listening to a great live version of “Misunderstood” by Wilco from Fred’s playlist as I write this gives me tremendous hope for the future of education.
SLDS: An acronym this time
When we tell people what we’re doing we often get questions like “Oh, kind of like Tutor.com or (insert your favorite other online education company here).” Those comparisons are interesting in that it’s great to get a sense of what people think is the current state of online learning. But at the end of the day comparing what we’ll build over the long-term to sites like those is kind of like comparing Facebook to Walmart.com. Not very meaningful…
My friend Farb introduced me to the concept of the Borg, a mythical creature that rapidly assimilates the collective knowledge of other Borgs. In other words, what one Borg knows all the Borgs know. It would be the equivalent of saying since you learned tie your shoes yesterday I now know how to. True knowledge amplification.
I love that concept but we’re probably a ways off from that. In the meantime there’s something more real on the horizon that’s very interesting: Social Learning Discovery Services.
Think about how the new Facebook stuff is working (click here to catch up). It’s a real interesting new paradigm for the discovery of content and applications. But here’s what I find really cool. Imagine if every time someone you knew learned something you were made aware of it. That ain’t Borg-world yet but it’s getting close. The funny thing is we’re getting there very quickly in so many other areas like music and movies. It’s only a matter of time before this permeates all areas of our lives.
That’s a good thing.
Life is social.
Online learning is about to be.
