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Education is privatizing itself. It's not that public education is inherently bad - it can work beautifully and does right now in some parts of the world. But in the United States, at least, something isn't working. Private universities know that degrees are effectively mandatory so they're jacking up their fees, and many public universities are in states with budget issues. Additionally, standards are so low that I got in. I'm not that smart and I sure as hell wasn't good at being a student. Depending on where you are, high schools are not graduating large fractions of their students and those who graduate are not always that successful. On the west side of Austin, a rich high school has a $2M jumbo-tron for their football field. On the east side of Austin, I once volunteered at a school with moldy textbooks. 7 mile difference. There is a push toward private, micro-schooling. It's a natural progression of post-industrialization. We have free materials: Khan Academy, TED, millions of informative blog posts about everything, Wikipedia (needless to say), etc. I think that much is obvious. Why not just get study groups together with good books and free lectures and teach ourselves? It's a great idea. The only problem I see is that many people who are interested in this are autodidacts, a group in which I include myself. It's not about being better or worse than other students, it's simply a learning style. The problem for many people, though, is that they need a kind of push in the classroom. There are a few startups working on education which focus on making lectures easy to share. That's great, but interactive collaborative and meaningful projects - projects with depth and which require a thorough understanding of the material - are essential to igniting a students' curiosity. I would dare say that autodidacts are simply people good at coming up with their own projects. A truly good teacher is still necessary in the post-industrial education system I see forming but (at least for STEM) we need teachers who know the Moore method. We need teachers who assign the lectures for homework and can lead three different discussions in three different sections of the class, or who know the material well enough to pivot based on student needs. A good teacher will be just as effective when she is not speaking as when she is (perhaps moreso). Classrooms should be student run but framed by the teacher. That takes way more skill to get right than simply talking about problems in isolation. I always rant about this subject. I guess my plea to education startups is this: help teachers share ideas and full curricula, help people train in the Moore method, and help create a parallel in-person presence to complement the impersonal digested presence of KA et al. Many bright people simply need socialization and tangible projects to form correct mental models. Skillshare seems to be a good start on this. |