Sloane Mak's List: Future of Education

• But I believe there's a second climate crisis,
• not natural resources,       though I believe that's true,       but a crisis of human resources.
• Very many people go through their whole lives       having no real sense of what their talents may be
• because education, in a way,       dislocates very many people       from their natural talents.       And human resources are like natural resources;       they're often buried deep.
• You have to create the circumstances where they show themselves.       And you might imagine       education would be the way that happens.       But too often, it's not.       Every education system in the world       is being reformed at the moment.       And it's not enough.       Reform is no use anymore,       because that's simply improving a broken model.       What we need --       and the word's been used many times during the course of the past few days --       is not evolution,       but a revolution in education.
• Innovation is hard       because it means doing something       that people don't find very easy for the most part.       It means challenging what we take for granted,
• That there are ideas that all of us are enthralled to,       which we simply take for granted       as the natural order of things, the way things are.       And many of our ideas       have been formed, not to meet the circumstances of this century,       but to cope with the circumstances of previous centuries.
• But our minds are still hypnotized by them.       And we have to disenthrall ourselves of some of them
• One of them is the idea of linearity,       that it starts here, and you go through a track,       and if you do everything right, you will end up       set for the rest of your life.
• there are things we're enthralled to in education
• human communities depend upon       a diversity of talent,       not a singular conception of ability.
• At the heart of the challenge       is to reconstitute our sense of ability       and of intelligence.       This linearity thing is a problem.
• The other big issue is conformity.
• The other are things like Zagat and Michelin restaurants,       where everything is not standardized,       they're customized to local circumstances.       And we have sold ourselves into a fast food model of education.       And it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies       as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies.
• aptitudes
• It's about passion,       and what excites our spirit and our energy
• passio
• You know this, if you're doing something you love,       an hour feels like five minutes.
• If you're doing something that doesn't resonate with your spirit,       five minutes feels like an hour.
• We have to recognize that human flourishing       is not a mechanical process,       it's an organic process.
• So when we look at reforming education and transforming it,       it isn't like cloning a system.
• It's about customizing to your circumstances,       and personalizing education       to the people you're actually teaching.

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• Rankings do little, however, to tell students how they will react to the learning environment of a campus, how much they will be stimulated both in and out of class, or how much they will be stretched to excel. By all odds the best indicator of whether a campus will feel right for a student is a campus visit.
• When possible, prospective students should spend time on any campus they are considering. They should listen and learn from current undergraduates, for their experiences are good guides to what life will be like. It's important to check out not just the curriculum, but also the extra-curriculum and the campus climate. Students should trust a combination of their heads and their hearts in determining how and how well they will engage at a college or university. In fact, there is lots of evidence that campus visits are the most important determinant of student choices.
• If so, they may be able to obtain valuable insights about the extent to which students find the academic work challenging, the degree to which they are active learners, the extent of student-faculty interactions, the richness of the out-of-class experiences, the overall campus environment, the exposure to diverse cultural experiences, and the scope of technology uses.
• students should determine what environment will best support them in becoming successful learners, and which institutions will meet their needs and interests

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• openness is a basic feature of organisms that allows for input from the environment.
• A system closed to the environment will disorganize and eventually perish because it does not accept new input. This condition is called 'entropy'.

  • taa daa...the fallout of schooling
• It may take centuries as in the case of biological evolution, or it may be rapid as in the case of technological advancements.
• Change begins as a result of a minor fluctuation that a system at first attempts to suppress.
• The preservation of some key features establishes 'points of self-reference,' constants which are crucial to its continued existence.
• the greatest generator of information is chaos.

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• how technology could improve education in the next five to 10 years.
• For his audience of students and professors, Mundie focused on how technology could improve education in the next five to 10 years.