We Need to Educate to Create New Knowledge

Education is a system that was designed over 100 years ago and it’s completely antiquated and outdated for what we need to do today.  Sir Ken Robinson does a great job of reminding us that in the old days, during the Industrial Revolution, the bell would ring and you would move from one workstation to another workstation. You would sit and you would absorb and have to regurgitate what you learned. That’s the way schools are today, even though on search the information is instantly there.  The notion that you should have to memorize it is antiquated.

The issue is learning the best questions to ask and learning how to interact once you have the knowledge to create new knowledge.  So we have to change education in a fundamental fashion.  The cloud and mobile computing should allow education to become literally free and allow all of us to have access to the best minds and the best teaching technologies around the planet. 

So there is a revolution in education that’s upon us, it just hasn’t happened yet. But I think it will happen potentially first in the developing world.  It will happen in places like Africa and India, which don’t have the unions and the embedded infrastructure that we have to overcome. Or it will happen after school, in places where you go to learn and then bring it into the classroom afterwards.

Either way we can see in the next 10 years a real transformation in how we educate. 

In Their Own Words is recorded in Big Think’s studio.

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