What is education? It is an easy question with an answer we know but most of us including myself don't understand. Exactly what our education teaches us: knowledge without purpose. It confuses me ... Is Education a way to earn a living? Is Education a way to earn respect in the society or is to get married in a good family? What do you think?
I would like to share one incident that changed my life and helped me to find and feel an understanding of what education really is. Not too long in college I failed to clear a subject. Suddenly I was subjected to severe criticism and mobbing by my peers, my friends and parents. I was increasingly depressed and doubted myself. Negative thoughts conquered my mind turning it into a helpless weaping sponge. Finally the only action I felt content of was suicide.
Crushed under the weight of what seemed to be the entire Himalaya Mountains I broke and this moment changed everything. I let go and gave up to hold on to something I am not - I finally became myself. I felt as if a fresh breeze in my face suddenly replace this weight. I looked around the world and found that I am not alone. Many people followed their bliss and eventually changed the world - like Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Marc Benioff, Steve Jobs and so on. All dropped out off college to pursue their passions. That day I found an almost spiritual fullfilment in choosing the path of entrepreneurship which is all about never fearing and giving it your best shot in each time you try. Thinking back in time, I am happy now that I failed this class. Had I not failed, I wouldn’t have realized my true potential and abilities, I wouldn’t have achieved so much as I have done and lastly though it may seem hilarious I wouldn’t have been writing this blog post.
I learned that education is not just about burning the midnight oil to get a MIT or Harvard degree. Education was originally encompassed to enlighten people’s minds and thinking and help them grow as an individual. But sadly enough, today it’s a huge contrast. Students just mug and mug to get more marks and grades. When I see my parents spending hundreds of dollars on my college, it hurts me badly from inside because I see no value for it. Over the past 4 years of my graduation, I know I haven’t learnt a single thing from college education that I can value. All that I have learnt have been during my internships, interactions with diverse people and exploring avenues myself. The best way to learn is to do real time work and not being into notes & books .There is no use getting a A grade in physics if you love photography and have a passion for doing it. I feel all of us have some passions and interests in life. Very few in this world are able to recognize it within them. In India, where I feel education system limits one’s personal ambitions and dreams, there is a drastic need to change the system. Though steps are being taken to change the system, it’s a long process to make a significant impact.
Projects like Supercool School are a great step in transforming people’s thinking and thoughts. For those of you who haven’t seen the movie Accepted (2006) starring Justin Long, it’s great manifestation of what I am trying to say here. You should surely grab a
copy of it of you believe in what I am saying here.
My vision is of a world where all that matters is your passions and dreams. Just imagine. No marks, no exams, no Harvard, And students don’t have to commit suicide due to failing in their exams. Just you and your dreams. I hope during my involvement with Supercool School, my aim would be to work together to make this dream a reality. So believe in what you do, follow your heart and intuition, have the confidence to do what you like irrespective of other’s opinions because you are living for yourself, not for the people. And as Steve Job
Technology education startups are aspiring to be moderately popular in the last couple months. I have the pleasure to be surrounded by couple them. Recent comments by Bill Gates or the Kauffman Foundation stating that "Education is a more than $1 trillion market..." drive the aspiration of hundreds of entrepreneurs to enter into this market in order to make 100 millions of dollars. The most prominent and clearly visible markets they are targeting are the K12, University and Corporate Training/Continuos Education market. The majority of startups will try to get a piece out of these three spaces by offering some kind of incremental improvement. In the consumer facing space the improvements range from better & more learning material, to better methodologies, to more transparency and better learning management. An example for that could be the Kahn Academy with a great variety of tutoring videos or Knewton - they developed an impressive adaptive learning technique or schoology which is yet another learning management system with a little bit more functionality. Its an illusion that the education market will stay in these three markets and that the value chain will or should stay the same. But all the startups named above will certainly not help to change anything - they successfully help repairing the existing flawed system. The closest to being disruptive are startup like the School of Everything or Supercool School. Both of them democratize and decentralize the less rigid continuos education space by creating an entirely new education infrastructure.
The sad truth is that most people do not understand the meaning and mechanics of education at its core. I just recently met an entrepreneur who literally switched from building an ad network to starting a education company. There is nothing wrong with that. But if you see the education market as just another market where you can make hundred millions of dollars using mobile, localization and new funky realtime technologies - then you will literally improve nothing for anyone. The misunderstanding begins with mixing up the real need for education with the needs of our existing education market. Little understand the context of why and how our education system has developed over the last thousands of years to what we have today, what the implicit & explicit values or our current system are and why education generally is crucial for our society. Until you really understand - your perceived innovation will go as far as digitalizing content, fancy lms or using mobile phones and ipads instead of a blackboard. The disruption of education system requires the understanding of how learning really works and the awareness for the actual demand. I will write in more detail in the coming weeks about that. For now ...
----
1. Lets kick it off with a definition :)
Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another. Etymologically, the word education is derived from educare (Latin) "bring up", which is related to educere "bring out", "bring forth what is within", "bring out potential" and ducere, "to lead".[1](Source Wikipedia)
2. Now look at your personal learning curve: When, where and from whom have learned the most in your life?
I personally have learned roughly
- 90% from my friends, family and people I worked with.
- 5% I learned in school, university, trainings, seminars, kindergarten, etc.
- 5% I learned from books, forums, blogs, various communities, wikipedia, ted, etc.
3. Now add five of my assumptions to that
1. content will be abundant and instantly accessible online (wikipedia, quora, twitter, google, open courseware, itunes u, etc.)
2. institutional certification will be replaced by community driven reputation (linkedin, twitter, odesk, github, etc.)
4. the half life of knowledge is exponentially accelerating (the amount of time that has to elapse before half of the knowledge in a particular area is superseded or shown to be untrue)
5. the borders between learning, innovation and work are rapidly shrinking (google 20% rule, ideo, etc.)
----
Why I feel our education system is long overdue
As education has the purpose to prepare you for the labour market - let me start with that. Out of more than 50 people I hired in the last 6 years - I didn't hire one single person because of their university education - some didn't have one. I admit a CS degree from Stanford or MIT is a great indicator but it doesn't help my at all to define wether or not he/she is a talented engineer. Already today a great github profile or "10 five star ratings" for HTML5 projects on Odesk are way more valuable than a CS degree at any University on this planet. For a pr person a 100.000 followers on twitter are not just a way better indicator than any university degree they are also an invaluable asset for any company from the first day. I work with a couple of wonderful people on odesk that I chose based on their ratings, the chemistry and some sample work - one of them turned out to be a Professor from India another one is a young girl from the Ukraine that wants to become an actor. Both are doing the same work.
I personally have learned all about how to build an internet business by following hacker news and living & working in the Silicon Valley for the last year. I doubt within the next 5 years there will be one university course that will even partially incorporate my learnings. But I am sure the learnings will be accessible to entrepreneurs in even in the most remote areas of Kasachstan through communities and online resources.
A good friend & one of the most talented and creative engineers I have ever worked with is a high school dropout. In fact from my experience good grades at a university generally tend to be more of a negative indicator than a positive. Top students were typical people who created massive social friction in my teams, under delivered and were very slow in adapting to change. Long term studies have shown that almost 50% of the children that attend a school for retarded children in Germany are actually genius. All of you reading this know how painful & destructive school is for a free mind. Its great news that Peter Thiel - a respected Silicon Valley investor - decided to pay students under 20 up to 100.000$ to drop out of school and work on their own projects.
Now - just for a moment close your eyes and imagine a world without an education system - no High School, no Harvard. Imagine you would have to invent education for your children - how would it look like?
The frightening suspicion that may arise inside of you is that our traditional education system in fact already lost its entire fundament. Subsequently our traditional education markets are in fact really large bubbles that will not just burst within the next 10 years - they will burst, implode and shrink to a bare nothing of what they were before.
Of course this hypothesis sounds incredibly arrogant today and 99.999% of all mothers out there will not take their children out of school and to have them watch TED videos, work at odesk and socialize on irc and github. Although I would bet my life that the kids personal development would accelerate 10 fold being "home schooled" + they would be happier :)
The illusion of the trillion dollar education market is unfortunately based on assuming that the existing market-size would simply transform and be taken over by new, more innovative companies. In fact the new education market will be deeply engrained into the evolving social ecosystem of massive knowledge sharing, collaborative work & online communities. Step by step the education market will become less and less distinguishable from everyday and work communication. If you want to empower and accelerate this process then you need to anticipate a completely new education ecosystem and value chain. For example there will be no market for monetizing educational content - all content will be digitalized in realtime and will be accessible or free. Education is inherently social and based on action - thats why watching educational TV is not an education but little more than a visual drug that keeps your brain busy. Content that is not embedded in social context is useless. There is also no value in optimizing the process of making people reproduce content if they can actually become content creators and build a valuable online reputation. Instead people are already today more than willing to pay to be part of "global learning community". The majority of the Schools on Supercool School are monetizing with member fees instead of charging for content. More prominent life long learning communities are Palomar5, TED or Singularity University that provide not only an intense learning experience through personal interaction & prototyping but also massive recognition.
Finally - I guess the message of this is that you should think "out of the box" of the existing education market - if you really want to contribute to redefine our education ecosystem of tomorrow. If you are just in it for the money go ahead and contribute to keep status quo alive.
Technology education startups are aspiring to be moderately popular in the last couple months. I have the pleasure to be surrounded by couple them. Recent comments by Bill Gates or the Kauffman Foundation stating that "Education is a more than $1 trillion market..." drive the aspiration of hundreds of entrepreneurs to enter into this market in order to make 100 millions of dollars. The most prominent and clearly visible markets they are targeting are the K12, University and Corporate Training/Continuos Education market. The majority of startups will try to get a piece out of these three spaces by offering some kind of incremental improvement. In the consumer facing space the improvements range from better & more learning material, to better methodologies, to more transparency and better learning management. An example for that could be the Kahn Academy with a great variety of tutoring videos or Knewton - they developed an impressive adaptive learning technique or schoology which is yet another learning management system with a little bit more functionality. Its an illusion that the education market will stay in these three markets and that the value chain will or should stay the same. But all the startups named above will certainly not help to change anything - they successfully help repairing the existing flawed system. The closest to being disruptive are startup like the School of Everything or Supercool School. Both of them democratize and decentralize the less rigid continuos education space by creating an entirely new education infrastructure.
The sad truth is that most people do not understand the meaning and mechanics of education at its core. I just recently met an entrepreneur who literally switched from building an ad network to starting a education company. There is nothing wrong with that. But if you see the education market as just another market where you can make hundred millions of dollars using mobile, localization and new funky realtime technologies - then you will literally improve nothing for anyone. The misunderstanding begins with mixing up the real need for education with the needs of our existing education market. Little understand the context of why and how our education system has developed over the last thousands of years to what we have today, what the implicit & explicit values or our current system are and why education generally is crucial for our society. Until you really understand - your perceived innovation will go as far as digitalizing content, fancy lms or using mobile phones and ipads instead of a blackboard. The disruption of education system requires the understanding of how learning really works and the awareness for the actual demand. I will write in more detail in the coming weeks about that. For now ...
----
1. Lets kick it off with a definition :)
Education in the largest sense is any act or experience that has a formative effect on the mind, character or physical ability of an individual. In its technical sense, education is the process by which society deliberately transmits its accumulated knowledge, skills and values from one generation to another. Etymologically, the word education is derived from educare (Latin) "bring up", which is related to educere "bring out", "bring forth what is within", "bring out potential" and ducere, "to lead".[1](Source Wikipedia)
2. Now look at your personal learning curve: When, where and from whom have learned the most in your life?
I personally have learned roughly
- 90% from my friends, family and people I worked with.
- 5% I learned in school, university, trainings, seminars, kindergarten, etc.
- 5% I learned from books, forums, blogs, various communities, wikipedia, ted, etc.
3. Now add five of my assumptions to that
1. content will be abundant and instantly accessible online (wikipedia, quora, twitter, google, open courseware, itunes u, etc.)
2. institutional certification will be replaced by community driven reputation (linkedin, twitter, odesk, github, etc.)
4. the half life of knowledge is exponentially accelerating (the amount of time that has to elapse before half of the knowledge in a particular area is superseded or shown to be untrue)
5. the borders between learning, innovation and work are rapidly shrinking (google 20% rule, ideo, etc.)
----
Why I feel our education system is long overdue
As education has the purpose to prepare you for the labour market - let me start with that. Out of more than 50 people I hired in the last 6 years - I didn't hire one single person because of their university education - some didn't have one. I admit a CS degree from Stanford or MIT is a great indicator but it doesn't help my at all to define wether or not he/she is a talented engineer. Already today a great github profile or "10 five star ratings" for HTML5 projects on Odesk are way more valuable than a CS degree at any University on this planet. For a pr person a 100.000 followers on twitter are not just a way better indicator than any university degree they are also an invaluable asset for any company from the first day. I work with a couple of wonderful people on odesk that I chose based on their ratings, the chemistry and some sample work - one of them turned out to be a Professor from India another one is a young girl from the Ukraine that wants to become an actor. Both are doing the same work.
I personally have learned all about how to build an internet business by following hacker news and living & working in the Silicon Valley for the last year. I doubt within the next 5 years there will be one university course that will even partially incorporate my learnings. But I am sure the learnings will be accessible to entrepreneurs in even in the most remote areas of Kasachstan through communities and online resources.
A good friend & one of the most talented and creative engineers I have ever worked with is a high school dropout. In fact from my experience good grades at a university generally tend to be more of a negative indicator than a positive. Top students were typical people who created massive social friction in my teams, under delivered and were very slow in adapting to change. Long term studies have shown that almost 50% of the children that attend a school for retarded children in Germany are actually genius. All of you reading this know how painful & destructive school is for a free mind. Its great news that Peter Thiel - a respected Silicon Valley investor - decided to pay students under 20 up to 100.000$ to drop out of school and work on their own projects.
Now - just for a moment close your eyes and imagine a world without an education system - no High School, no Harvard. Imagine you would have to invent education for your children - how would it look like?
The frightening suspicion that may arise inside of you is that our traditional education system in fact already lost its entire fundament. Subsequently our traditional education markets are in fact really large bubbles that will not just burst within the next 10 years - they will burst, implode and shrink to a bare nothing of what they were before.
Of course this hypothesis sounds incredibly arrogant today and 99.999% of all mothers out there will not take their children out of school and to have them watch TED videos, work at odesk and socialize on irc and github. Although I would bet my life that the kids personal development would accelerate 10 fold being "home schooled" + they would be happier :)
The illusion of the trillion dollar education market is unfortunately based on assuming that the existing market-size would simply transform and be taken over by new, more innovative companies. In fact the new education market will be deeply engrained into the evolving social ecosystem of massive knowledge sharing, collaborative work & online communities. Step by step the education market will become less and less distinguishable from everyday and work communication. If you want to empower and accelerate this process then you need to anticipate a completely new education ecosystem and value chain. For example there will be no market for monetizing educational content - all content will be digitalized in realtime and will be accessible or free. Education is inherently social and based on action - thats why watching educational TV is not an education but little more than a visual drug that keeps your brain busy. Content that is not embedded in social context is useless. There is also no value in optimizing the process of making people reproduce content if they can actually become content creators and build a valuable online reputation. Instead people are already today more than willing to pay to be part of "global learning community". The majority of the Schools on Supercool School are monetizing with member fees instead of charging for content. More prominent life long learning communities are Palomar5, TED or Singularity University that provide not only an intense learning experience through personal interaction & prototyping but also massive recognition.
Finally - I guess the message of this is that you should think "out of the box" of the existing education market - if you really want to contribute to redefine our education ecosystem of tomorrow. If you are just in it for the money go ahead and contribute to keep status quo alive.
I had the pleasure talking with Aron Solomon yesterday. I was very impressed by the new project he is currently leading: the THINK Global School. Although the project is still in its beginnings - the message is simple and powerful: take a bunch of eager & curious students and have them understand the world by living & studying in 12 countries over the course of 12 trimesters. I immediately had to think back to this simple exchange program for children in the post 2nd world war time between France and Germany. The two countries had a deeply rooted hatred for one another at that time - comparable to Israel & Palestine. The visionary exchange program was to shape future society leaders in both countries and make them understand each others culture. It literally had a game changing effect on our world today. Now as the world is growing together and we are challenged with more cultures than just our neighboring country - THINK Global School goes one step further and builds the next generation of global change makers.
Below a quick interview with the CEO Aron Solomon.
1. Aron tell us a little about yourself and why you decided to take the lead at THINK Global School.
Lasse, first, it's great to speak with you. i think that Supercool School is, well, Super Cool :)
I've been involved with independent schools for 25 years and have done global work in education for many of them. I'm an educator, a laywer, a Ford Fellow and a graduate of the nonprofit management program at Kellogg.
As I think happens so frequently, many things bring us to a certain point in our lives. Meeting our Founders in the fall of 2008 was one of those points, as their global vision very clearly intersected with mine. The past year and a half has been an amazing ride :)
2. Why do you believe that THINK Global School change their students lives forever?
Because I believe that there is no substitute in life for experience. We can all get on You Tube (which I love) and watch a video taken at the Great Wall near Beijing. And that's absolutely awesome. Now imagine vlogging from the Great Wall. Taking in the smells and the heat and the crush of people who flock there from all over the world. And sharing your "present sense impressions" of what you're experiencing. That's true learning as it involves all of your senses and it's active. That's what TGS is all about.
3. I almost failed my 5th & 6th grade - could I have become joined THINK Global School?
There are many reasons a child might struggle in school. We're open to examining these. But, the reality is, that it's not going to be easy to travel the world. We're looking for kids who we're confident will succeed in and out of the classroom.
4. Where do you wish to see the participants in 20 years from now?
Everywhere. I want them to make great contributions to their local, national and global communities. I really don't care what this means in practice. If they're going to be doctors or lawyers or diplomats - great, we think the experience will make them that much better in their careers and in their lives. If they're going to be entrepreneurs, great - we'll give them a world-class education that will allow them to be a true social entrepreneur, to understand and appreciate the power of their initiative and creativity.
5. I couldn't imagine a better path to world peace than making THINK Global School obligatory worldwide :) How likely is that to happen?
We think that it's a good start :) I've been in very high-level meetings in my life where thought-leaders and influencers focus only on the problems. The TGS team are a group of talented, global people who focus on solutions.
The last two weeks were amazing. Supercool School received an enormous amount of love & helpful criticism from around the globe. Thank you! We tripled our schools in just a couple days to more than 400. With learners from more than 80 countries. With the help of people like Alberto Villanueva - who just recorded an entire Supercool School introduction in Spanish - or the team around Jean-Francois Ruiz who is currently translating Supercool School in French we are making Supercool School a truly global movement to democratize education.
It feels very special to empower the dreams of people with schools as "The School for Peace & Friendship" or to help Alex Castellarnau from IDEO to understand how people learn. Everybody can now learn more about security and viruses at the computer repair school or unleash their tech career at the Inspions University. The broad spread of topics, groups and different countries is super exciting and surpasses our expectations. Passionate educators, parents, infomarketers, designers or the the German union started schools to teach skills like math or values like modesty to the world. Even children have a place where they can learn how to produce their first music - at the Music Mural & Arts project school.
Much of this progress is thanks to all the coverage we received lately.
I see myself often in sheer awe listening like a child to passionate hackers like our friends Taso Du Val or David Weekly. I truly admire engineers who have this playful vision that goes beyond the hypes of what people seem to dig today and strives for what truly transforms people's lives.
In fact it is a good start … now just add to the ycombinator equation of "building useful technology" variables such as "world-changing" or "socially transforming". Because the more technical visionaries adopt a social vision the more we will have great companies like Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft, etc.
How about you? Are you hacking with a purpose, yet?
How about education? Just think about it - the majority of people worldwide have no access to quality education if any.
So why not build the next generation infrastructure for education that is scalable, fun and effective and gives everybody the same chance in life?
We are searching for visionary hackers to join the Supercool School team.
We are a small team of highly purpose-driven individuals from Europe with an outstanding expertise in education and a strong entrepreneurial background. Vlad our - current technical chief - has lead the development for 8 venture backed ROR Startups in Europe & US.
We are all driven by our believe in the power of learning. We believe that education is the answer to all the challenges that we face today. And even though we don't have all the solutions yet, we believe that they can be found in the hearts and minds of the people. So empowering them to learn and to develop their true potential means empowering the world to become all it can be: a better place for all of us.
