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3 posts tagged education
3 posts tagged education
The vision:
Development of skills instead of the memorizing of information. For example, teaching you how to think, not what to think. Pieces of information become outdated more easily than an array of skills.
Renaissance style Curriculum: Excessive specialization would be discouraged in favor of a more well-rounded approach. Philosophy, Music, Arts and Sciences as well as physical activities will make an essential part of one’s development as well as real life skills usually neglected at mainstream educational institutions, like:
The Art of Love & Seduction
Knowing Yourself
The Art of Listening
Understanding Women (30-year course. Pre-Requisite: The Art of Listening)
Understanding Men (30-minute course)
Project Based learning – You’d learn by doing not by regurgitating what other people have done. Your projects would be aimed to be as “real world” as possible, legitimate enough so that they can become part of your future CV. By the time you’re out of school you already have a “track-record”.
Entrepreneurship: The approach: “I get an education, then find a job” is outdated. Every week you will be encouraged to create your own company with the assistance of mentors who are successful in the real world giving you cutting edge advice on how to build and grow your idea into a business, whether profit or not profit. By the time you’re done with your degree you wouldn’t need to find a job because you would already have one.
Online Tools: The university would employ the latest array of Web 2.0+ tools for harnessing the collective intelligence for the benefit of all. Use the ideas of Bootstrapping as suggested by Doug Engelbart. The scope should be global and scalable.
Directed at All Ages: Learning is a life-long process. It’s not something you do when you were young and then are done with it. Older people need to have a way of re-educating themselves without leaving their current job & responsibilities. Multi-age classes sometimes make for a much richer learning experience for all.
Based on Alternative Business Models: Education should be accessible to all for free while at the same time being economically self-sustainable. Alternative business models are essential for achieving this vision. For example, students could pledge that a certain percentage of the profits or equity (1%-5%) that would come from their future activities will be donated back to the University that enabled them to pursue them.
Main Ability Cultivated: The ability to perceive, challenge, nurture and create value. It would help if you’re able to provide it to your fellow human beings in a form they can recognize and are able to reward so you can keep providing it. That reward need not be exclusively monetary.
Ultimately, a proper education should enable people to actualize their full potential, discover what is valuable in life and help them create it.
You can see my talk on the topic at the BIL conference that happened in Long Beach, CA on Feb. 7-8 2009 below:
Or the class (using the same presentation) I gave at StartupSchool.
A loving thank you to Elektra Schmidt for inspiration on this topic.
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The sort of education given, especially in Italy, to those who are educated (who, to tell the truth, are not many) is a formal betrayal ordained by weakness against strength, by old age against youth. Old people come and say to young people,
‘Avoid the pleasures natural to your time of life, since they are all dangerous and contrary to good behaviour, and because we, who have enjoyed them as much as we were able, and who would do the same again if we could, are no longer capable of them, because of our years. Do not bother about living today, but be obedient, suffer, and strive as hard as you know how, in order to live when it will be too late. Wisdom and decorum require that the young abstain as far as possible from making use of their youth, except to surpass others in hard work. Leave the care of your destiny and everything important to us, who will direct everything to our advantage. At your age every one of us did quite the opposite of what we are recommending, and we would do the same again if we were young once more. But you must pay attention to our words, and not to what we did in the past, or to our intentions. Believe us, who are wise and experienced in human affairs: if you act as we say, you will be happy.’
I do not know what deceit and fraud are, if they do not consist of promising happiness to the inexperienced upon such conditions.
The interests of general tranquility, domestic and public, are opposed to the pleasures and enterprises of young people. And so even a good education, or what is called such, consists in great part of deceiving pupils into subordinating their own advantage to that of others. But even without this, old people naturally tend to destroy the young, as far as in them lies, and to obliterate them from human life, since they abhor the sight of them. In all times old age has conspired against youth, because in all times it has been natural for men basely to condemn and persecute in others those blessings which they would rather keep for themselves.
Nevertheless, it is still noteworthy that, among educators, who, if they are people of the world, profess to want their neighbours’ good, there are so many who try to deprive their pupils of the greatest blessing in life, which is youth. It is even more noteworthy that fathers and mothers, not to mention other tutors, never feel pangs of conscience for giving their children an education based on such a malign principle. This would be even more surprising if for a long time, for other reasons, trying to abolish youth had not been regarded as a meritorious work.
The result of such pernicious culture, intent on benefiting the cultivator with the ruin of the plant, is either that the pupils, having lived like old people in the first bloom of their lives, make themselves ridiculous and unhappy when they are old, by trying to live like young people, or rather, as happens more often, Nature wins, and young people, living as young people despite their education, rebel against the educators, who, if they had encouraged the use and enjoyment of youthful faculties, would have been able to regulate them, through the confidence their pupils would have had in their teachers, which they would never have lost.
The point of education should not be the memorization of true sentences or beliefs. Because what we thought was true may prove false, and we are now stuck with memories of falsehoods. The point of education should be good judgment. If you have good judgment you do not need to remember the good judgments of others because you have one yourself. Your knowledge is not a passive retrieval of memories, but an active judgment for what is true, good, beautiful and useful. It is the difference between being given a fish and fishing for yourself. The former makes you dependent on the fish giver; the latter makes you free.
