Education system is an outcome from Human civilization’s need for daycare, from need for prisons for college age people who would otherwise cause a lot of havoc if left uncontrolled. This system came in the era where books were rare, knowledge was rare, daycare was rare and crime was common, young minds needed to be protected from getting infected by violence . Back then, there was no such thing as self-guided learning.
Now we have the Internet, which is the greatest weapon of knowledge ever created, completely interconnected. It’s very easy to learn. If you actually have the desire to learn, everything is on the Internet. You can go on Khan Academy. You can get MIT and Yale lectures online. You can get all the coursework and get interactivity. You can read blogs by brilliant people. You can read all these great books.
The ability to learn, the means of learning and the tools of learning are abundant and infinite. It’s the desire that’s incredibly scarce.
Schools don’t matter for self-motivated students! What the schools matter for is wanting to keep the kids out of the parents hair while the parents go to work. It creates socialization because kids want to be around their peers and they want to learn how to operate in the society of their peers.
School plays an important role in creating uniformity of knowledge that is critical for social participation in our communities and generate employment. Major part of school education is to help society build and conserve common knowledge. if it’s purely about learning, that can be done much more either on your own or through the Internet or by uniting through the Internet with like-minded groups.
The problem is what do you choose to learn? If we completely rely on educational system then unfortunately it has to have a one-size fits all! model.
Don’t get us wrong, School is critically important for elements of learning that needs a group setting of same age likeminded peers but life’s important lessons (critical elements of human learning) requires 1-to-1 attention (that is only available with parents or immediate caregivers) that is hard to scale consistently in the world of one-size-fits-all plan of education (i.e school).
We think that as the technology improves and more human brains ignite in consciousness of this topic, we will eventually find a way to help our next generation define the future of learning systems.. Till then we will keep asking our mission question:
