I Wish It Was That Simple

I rewatched the movie The American President the other day; an excellent picture. How beautifully made and how.. naive. The movie feels like a throwback from different era almost, when we thought the system worked - if we could just place the “right people” in “right” places somehow, ah then, then, we can accomplish “good” things. Michael Douglas in his A game plays a charismatic President who wants to fight crime and talks about going “door to door to collect all the guns”. Yeah. Good luck with that. That would be a whole another movie that I would love to see.

After UK riots, we started seeing similar naïveté in display. The system is fine, but people, the families are the ones at fault here.. Can’t you see it? Ultrafast life breaks apart marriages, the economy concentrates people in jobs away from home, single parent sometimes has more than one job, there’s noone looking after the kid, kid gets out on the street and causes mayhem, but no – it’s the parent’s fault. Dummy.

Kids are concentrated in schools that have zero chance in delivering quality education en masse, kids have no hope in future, and whose fault is it? The families’ fault. Of course. Go door to door to fix everyone’s moral collapse problem. Good luck with that. Moron.

In the power triad knowledge, money and violence, knowledge is the most important item and the least equally distributed of all. People are talking about redistributing wealth, about budgets increasing and shrinking, but that is the least important issue here. If schools are turned into certification factories then by definition, this system cannot be scaled up because schools’ reason for being has become supplying that certification to select few. Especially in a competitive environment, this is asking for trouble.

Schools should compete to put their free content out there -in the form of video lectures, homework problems, free ebooks-, as fast as they can and try to entice students by providing the best self-studying, best research, best mentoring environment, so a budding researcher (a kid) can bring their many ideas into fruition. You focus on projects from day one and on day thousand. Learning should not be measured, or certified. It should be free, available electronically, on demand, 24/7. Schools, universities can then capitalize on ideas, projects, new enterprises made possible, generated with their help.

Governments or philanthropists should aim to supply tablet or laptop computers to all students, so they can follow that free content as they see fit.

We can and should build living centers that people go in and out, drop their kids off where they can study, play around, or do whatever. Put an electronic bracelet on the kids if you want and outsource “watching after your kid” to this giant complex. This can be a profession. This new place can be a mix of a school, an outdoor mall, a playground, a lounge area. People with skills can volunteer their time in these places and mentor others.

But this requires looking at the problem differently. Better schools won’t fix the problem, better parents won’t fix the problem, well they would, but in the current system, you will get neither, at least not in numbers that will make a difference. The current system will not scale in quality. It can only scale in quantity.

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[1] Certification of expertise, when necessary can easily be handled using on-demand online tests. These tests wouldn’t even have to be regularly updated. In any given topic, a testing site can collect over a thousand questions and they can generate a test on-the-fly, even if the test taker had all those questions, being able to answer any of them, in a limited time requires knowing that area of expertise. Or we just look at the Stackoverflow, Whateveroverflow score. Non-concentrated, non-central, non-standardized options are many, especially in the Internet Age.