Education: System is out of Sync

Sir Ken Robinson touched on a number of points that I think are important in terms of revolutionizing education. One is that the current education paradigm was conceived in a different age. In his talk about changing education paradigms, he shows a chart of instances of prescriptions given for ADHD by state in the United States. According to the chart, you are more likely to have ADHD the farther East you live.

At the same time this "medical fashion" is taking shape and spreading, kids are growing up in the "information age". They have had cell phones, the internets, youtube, social media, netflix, cable tv packages, video games and a million other interactive, personally significant sources of information and we expect them to sit still and in silence while a teacher tries to lecture them abstract, intangible subjects.

Our kids are living in an age that no one could fathom even 10 years ago, yet we are still trying to teach them in the same manner as our grandparents and their grandparents were taught. The system of eduction was conceived during the industrial revolution to meet the demands of growing job markets. It came to be in a time when a people rarely travelled more than 20 miles from home their life times; when  if you wanted to talk with some one, you had to find them or write them a letter; when the closest thing to avoiding reality was reading a book or the newspaper.

People were use to long conversations and taking time to be entertained. They had to be patient because nothing was immediate. There was no central source of information available to everyone everywhere all the time, so people had to swap books, stories, and gossip, and if information had to reach the masses, the masses had to find a central location to be reached.

Now, the wealth of the world's information is in each kids pockets and at their fingertips at every moment of the day. If they want to know something, kill time, organize a get together, find a location, go out to eat, or anything else, they just pull out their phones. Furthermore, they do not have to spend an hour getting lectured. They can find a reliable source of information and get a succinct description or watch an informational video/tutorial.

Today, we are using the "technologies" (really, the methodologies) of past ages and penalizing kids for not conforming to it while outside of the classroom, students live in a different culture.

Changing Education

One of the reasons I started this blog is that I feel education needs to be changed. This not a new unique sentiment that few others share. I hear about it all the time. One person who feels this way is Sir Ken Robinson [1], [2], [3], an international advisor on education in the arts. He says that change is not enough. We do not need the system to evolve. If the foundation and fundamentals of the system are broken, then the evolved system will still be fundamentally broken. What we need is a revolution.

The problem is that despite all of the people that are passionate about educational reform, very little is taking place, especially at the college and post-graduate levels. The change within the sciences is even slower because a scientist wants to see scientific results that one set of educational methodologies is better than another. It is sort of a Catch-22. Where is the scientific method here?

So, my plan is to highlight education programs that are doing something new, reaching out to a larger audience, concerned with social and global issues, etc., as well as platforms for education, creative and new ideas, and outreach programs -- because education should not only be better, it should be available at a high quality to everyone, regardless of geographic, economic, and demographic factors.

Just as a start, I already partially introduced TED.com and their "ideas worth spreading" with the Sir Robinson videos above. TED is a conference that tries to feature people with great ideas and inventions. They oublish new videos weekly on their website.

Additionally, there is the Studio School, a new type of school for 14-19 year olds in England that turns the classroom into a hands-on environment in an attempt to bridge the gap between classroom skills and workplace skills.