Supercool School

Good Schools For The Rich, The Rest For The Rest

Pretty much everyone that I met in Thailand that has money (the kind of money that can provide you with a very comfortable lifestyle any place in the world) is sending their kids either
    a) to ultra-expensive international schools in Thailand or
    b) (more likely) to study overseas (usually in England or the USA).

And to me, it's pretty obvious why. I can't tell you how many people I met that have a master's degree in English, whose command of the English language can be summarized like that:

"Hello, how are you?"
"I'm fine, thank you, and you?"
"Sorry."
"What is your name?"
"Excuse me please."
"Yes."
"No."
"Handsome."
"Beautiful."
"Happy."
"Smile!"
"Do you like Thai food?"
"Very good."
"Speak Thai."
"Sing a song."
"Drink whisky."
"Enjoy!"
"Welcome."
"Bye, bye."

Considering the fact, that they achieved this amazing amount of fluency in just six years of high-school and four years of university education, I think that is pretty impressive. It's a pretty impressive evidence of incapacity - what do these universities do to slow down the learning process so much? No wonder that "hi-so" (high society) children are sent to either overseas or to international private schools with five-star amenities behind high walls.

I mean, keep the high-school aside - who remembers anything they learned in high-school, right? But four years where you do nothing but study English, and this is the result? What do they do with these students? Freeze them for four years, wake them up, play them a 15 minute English introduction CD and hand them their diploma?

Well, one thing I know is that they are taught to avoid mistakes like hell. If that means not trying to get it right, so you risk not making a mistake, then so be it.

You think we can do better than that? You bet we can! The kids growing up are all tech-savvy, the internet is their new playground. Once Supercool School reaches it's tipping point, I hope that nobody will have to waste four years and many years of savings to learning something that can be learned in one Supercool Class for free.

Dibidabadoo,
Ramin

PS: An expert is a man who has made all the mistakes which can be made, in a narrow field. - Niels Bohr

"Generally speaking I have graduated an academy" Guestpost by Andrey Prihodko

Dear Supercool Friends,

I am happy to announce a guest blog post by Andrey - a cheerful Supercool School enthusiast from Ukraine. This is a post in our series of guest from all around the world writting about education and learning from a global perspective!

Andrey is a selfmade Ruby on Rails Programmer. One of his recent projects is: http://fanparty.ru/
Enjoy reading.

"Generally speaking I have graduated an academy":

Hello, everybody.

I think everyone will agree with me, if I’ll say what every man at Earth is learning everyday during his life.

Personally I have a little child and he has started his education too. He already knows how to sit and how to stand up, how to play with his toys and how to cry very loudly. But he does not know yet how to speak and how to walk, how to read and how to dig deep into the Internet... He does not know a lot, because his life is started only 8 months ago. Hope he will get the best education as any father wishes for his children.

Many people in the world do not know a lot, because they do not have the possibility to learn at school, college or a university of their dream.

I would like to write about education in the former USSR countries. I live in the Ukraine and have graduated from my academy 10 years ago. So I can only imaging the real picture in the education today and you can correct me in case I'm wrong in my brief description.

Let’s start with a small step back into history.
USSR was a great country, great in the most industries, especially in science and education. It was so, because of the Cold War and the competition with USA. That competition required a lot of investigations in such sciences as chemistry, physics, mechanics and mathematics. As we know - the USSR has lost the competition and as result we have several independent countries: Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, etc. It is hard to trust in a new competition, but all of us will be witnesses of it with a bit different team cast: USA, Russia, and one more player – China. Who will be the first this time, we will see in a several years.

Current situation in the education of the post USSR countries is not good. I did not use the word “bad”, because I hope it will be better. Yes, I’m optimist, but at the same time I’m realist - several years ago it was better than today. Good education requires good teachers, good teachers require good salaries. My friend works as a lecturer in the academy here at Ukraine.

He was a good student and he has become a candidate of science and going to be a doctor. His salary as a lecture is poor and will be the same in the nearest future, because our government does not care about the education and science at all. The only possibility to get a better living for lectures is making some commercial research for plants and factories. But such source of income unfortunately is not a constant.

Students image the salary size of their lecture, and as result they do not want to continue their education in a postgraduate course. I was one of such students 10 years ago and have decided working in the software development industry. Today I see what the situation in the education did not changed in the better direction and it is still poor.

If you are a student and going to get the best education you have to start looking at the alternate sources of education.

You could try to get education in the top world universities, but such way requires a lot of money and you may already know the reason of such expenses after the reading of previous paragraph.

Internet is a great thing that could help you and a lot of people get the education of your dream. You can sit at home in front of your notebook and talk with many people in the world. By the way, you have to know at least one more language – in most cases English will be enough.

Supercool school is only at the start of its way to the success, But today it offers several benefits in the area of remote education. For example, with Supercool school there is no need to fly through the ocean and rent an apartment, there is no need to exchange your sweet home to the foreign country. The only things you need are: computer, microphone, webcam (all of them are already included in any new notebook) and an Internet access. And you should have one more very important thing – the wish to get a better education. If you have all of the mentioned above, you will get the possibility to graduate possibly best online school in the world! :)