RE-COLLEGE:
THE 3 PILLARS OF FUTURE EDUCATION
Lessons learned from Plato and my experience with thousands of “startup students”.
“Colleges around the world are deprecated”
Being a lucky survivor of the highly selective French education system, I wanted to look back at it. Upon reflection, I realized how much time I wasted learning things I would never use, or worse, not understanding some of the most fundamental concepts — concepts I would have to figure out myself years later…
This is because French education isn’t about learning; it’s about selecting the few who will make it to the Ivy league schools (HEC, ENA, Central, X, etc…) Finally in France, as Mr de Broglie (a French Nobel prize winner of Physics) expressed it, “French education is too dogmatic.”
This is not unique to France; it became obvious that we learn more outside of colleges thanks to internet and personal experiences. Of course, education in the United States has the extra challenge of student debt; now reaching more than 1 trillion dollars ☹
Before we begin, let’s assert the obvious: technology will be the support of the college revolution. Next gen social networks, indoor geolocation, Natural Language Processing, Watson, software such as Wolfram Alpha, wearable devices, network infrastructure, mobile, etc… The purpose of this article is to focus on a more meta-level: The curriculum.
Get ready for the re-invention of education powered by new technology!
For the lazy ones (I know you are out there!) I’ve made a simple 2x venn diagram. Hopefully, this will give you the big picture of what 21st century colleges could look like
SKILLS BASED
Why do we allow students to graduate without next steps or purpose?
In Plato’s time, Akademia was the sanctuary of Athena, the goddess of wisdom and skill. It was a “community”; this is where the word college came from; junior and senior members without any other distinction would learn and teach to each other. The 21st century academy will go back to this model, powered by social networks and local density.
Graduation will happen when a student decides he now know what he wants to achieve. He will have to demonstrate his mastery and understanding of a specific field in front of his community, including people who are working in the field ( implying connecting colleges with corporations and vice versa). Therefore, when you graduate you’ll have a job and a purpose instead of being already “obsolete” and lost …
CURIOSITY DRIVEN
Why can’t we learn what we are curious about?
Education should start with a goal based on student curiosity or interest. If you want to study quantum physics, let’s just start with that, like professor Feynman did at CalTech. The flip here is to replace the classical top-down education (teacher to student) with a “curiosity driven” curriculum, where the learner can orient their own curriculum based on will and interest naturally leading the student to self-motivation and empowerment.
By the way, did you ever wonder where curriculum came from? Who makes them? Why? How? This is a mystery for me, too, but one thing is certain, a lot of them are full of mistakes. As Samuel Abersman, illustrated it in his book (the half-life of facts) knowledge is something that can depreciate relatively fast (did you know dinosaurs were actually not green?)
Curriculum should be a combination of smaller blocks of knowledge, optimized on a daily basis, based on impact, with results shared in real time between a network of “re-colleges.”
Ultimately we will increase the efficiency of every curriculum, allowing us to produce an ideal and adaptive curriculum for each student.
Example:
Let’s assume you want to learn about quantum physics, and at one point you find an article mentioning this equation :
Curiosity driven curriculum being flipped curriculum, there is almost an infinite number of ways you could learn more:
a. You could go for the fastest way to practically apply this equation using Mathematica.
b. You could choose to understand the history of it, who was Schrodinger or Dirac and how they come to this?
c. You might want to explore the math concepts behind it, why is it complex? what’s a wave function, what’s nabla (fyi)
Today you would need to wait many years before getting to play with it in a formal college education. Even worse, you might never learn about it if you haven’t been “selected,” or if you’ve chosen the wrong orientation…
FASTER EDUCATION
Why should we wait up to 4 years before learning something we care about?
Colleges sometimes feels like this excellent xkcd cartoon, you’ll be punished if you’re trying to learn new things outside of the curriculum.
Whenever you would like to go back and study something new, you should be welcome and encouraged to share your practical learning with others; oh, and by the way, age should not matter neither.
Some curriculum are already following this model ( General Assembly or some MOOC model) but they have not been optimized yet.
And that’s the question every people disagning curriculum should ask
“What is the shortest path to knowledge?”
Time is precious; we should always focus on finding the shortest amount of knowledge one needs to be able to practice an activity. Education is currently uncompressed: we learn math, physics, philosophy, sociology as blocks and all of them are dense and full of things we will never need, or worse, dislike.
This is obvious in your everyday life: one doesn’t need to understand quantum physics to use a computer.
The hypothesis here is simple and had been applied to many Startup Weekend events: density and constrain on time helps a group to with more optimized solutions.
Applying the equivalent of Startup Weekend principles in College we should be able to obtain a Ph. D. in 3 years instead of 7 (or more.) Or, to learn how to code simple (yet useful) projects in less than 3 months etc…
CONCLUSION
Many colleges will face extinction, the ones that will have the courage to re-invent themselves (like Harvard did centuries ago)will prosper. Let’s not forget, There is also a tremendous opportunity for new institutions to rise in Asia or Africa where rules about education allow better and more efficient competition.
Transforming college curriculum powered by technology making them faster (thus cheaper), driven by curiosity and valued by a community outside of the college, is a chance we should all be excited about.
We now can go back to what the greeks envisioned thousands of years ago: Providing students wisdom and skills. It is time for the best teachers to drop out to start this movement. Let’s re-college!
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—Franck
