Category Archives: education
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
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 […]