Probably Singapore or Sweden will be the first to embrace the next big thing in education, says a Harvard academic. And that is? Personal, individualized education through computers.
Howard Gardner of the Harvard Graduate School of Education writes about personal education on the Foreign Policy website:
With the global quest for long-term competitiveness assuming new urgency, education is on everyone’s front burner. Societies are looking for ways to make quantum leaps in the speed and efficiency of learning. So long as we insist on teaching all students the same subjects in the same way, progress will be incremental. But now for the first time it is possible to individualize education—to teach each person what he or she needs and wants to know in ways that are most comfortable and most efficient, producing a qualitative spurt in educational effectiveness.
According to the analysis of business expert Clayton Christensen, personalized education is likely to begin outside formal school through a combination of entrepreneurial vendors on the one hand and ambitious students and parents on the other. Once far more efficient and effective education has been modeled in homes and clubs, those schools, communities, and/or societies that have the ambition, the means, and the willingness to take risks will follow suit. I’d bet on Singapore or Sweden before wagering on U.S. public schools. I recall the words of Winston Churchill: “The American people always do the right thing, after they’ve tried every other alternative.”
Wherever and whenever personalized education takes hold, the resulting world will be very different. Many more individuals will be well-educated because they will have learned in ways that suit them best. Even more importantly, these individuals will want to keep learning as they grow older because they have tasted success and are motivated to continue. Let’s just hope we can keep up with the robots.
So there's still hope for old fogeys like me. I can hide behind my computer doing multidisciplinary research to write the next definitive history of rock'n'roll!
Don't miss the Next Big Thing series on the Foreign Policy website. It offers things to cheer about. The global downturn is shaking up old notions, say the writers.
The recession has led to "the unexpected triumph of the classic modern welfare state", writes Michael Lind, who expects America to weather the crisis and prosper.
The crisis may also redefine how people and governments measure success, says Barry Schwartz, professor of psychology at Swarthmore College.
Financial necessity may give us the opportunity to discover that time spent with loved ones is much more satisfying than time spent with your 76-inch HDTV. Once the crisis lifts, we may not be tempted to go back to living the way we did before,,,,
It might change the way society and policymakers assess well-being. It may become apparent that equating social welfare with GDP is not just inadequate, but more importantly, misleading. It might lead us to develop a gross national well-being measure that will supplement, or even replace, GDP as our principal yardstick of social welfare and social progress. Then, maybe we’ll discover that we were never so well off in the first place.
The most sweeping analysis is perhaps made by Parag Khanna of the New America Foundation.
Many see the global economic crisis as proof that we live in one world. But as countries stumble to right the wrongs of the corporate masters of the universe, they are driving us right back to a future that looks like nothing more than a new Middle Ages , that centuries-long period of amorphous conflict from the fifth to the 15th century when city-states mattered as much as countries…
Today, just 40 city-regions account for two thirds of the world economy and 90 percent of its innovation.
But it is both good and bad. Khanna says:
There are positive sides to a world where every man can be a nation unto himself. Postmodern Medicis such as Bill Gates, Anil Ambani, George Soros, and Richard Branson take it upon themselves to cure pandemics, run corporate cities, undermine authoritarian regimes, and sponsor climate-saving research. But the Middle Ages were fundamentally a time of fear, uncertainty, plagues, and violence. So, too, their successor. AIDS and SARS, terrorism and piracy, cyclones and rising sea levels—it is no longer clear how to invest in the future, or what future to invest in. Figuring out how to respond to this new world will take decades at least. The next Renaissance is still a long way off.
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