Category Archives: education

A Tale of Two Tails…

The pace of change in the world is increasing. Therefore primary skill – the type of literacy that we need to teach – is the ability to teach oneself. My wife and I have homeschooled our four sons. Two are still at home being homeschooled, two are in college. A particular episode with my oldest […]

Backing Up Civilization

One of the tragedies in the history of human learning is the destruction of the Library of Alexandria. There are conflicting accounts of the library’s destruction attributed to various perpetrators, beginning with Julius Caesar in 48 BCE and ending with the Muslim invaders in 642 CE. However it was destroyed, it was a tremendous loss. […]

Contacts and Credentials

While we’ve written and talked quite a bit about the education bubble over the past few months, a recent announcement from MIT may prove to be a game-changer.

As the Bubble Bursts

It’s been widely noted that, over the past couple of decades, higher education costs have skyrocketed far out of proportion to the economic benefits that degrees provide. Higher education looks like a bubble, not too unlike the dot-com and real estate bubbles that preceded it. Not everyone is comfortable with such a characterization. Framing a […]

Itsy Bitsy Pieces

Salman Khan, of Khan Academy fame, has been in the news a lot lately as his novel approach to education gains traction and funding, and even begins to be applied in traditional classrooms. I have been eagerly anticipating this kind of paradigm shift in education for a long time, and I think the consequences are […]

Will formal schooling become obsolete?

I hope so. Consider the fact that primary schools, high schools, colleges and universities were established when information production and dissemination was very expensive, while at the same time gathering teachers and students together in one location was comparatively inexpensive. The economics (in the bare-bones sense of the term—what’s easiest?) of the situation demanded the […]