15. Cost of Public School vs. Homeschool
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Cost of Public School Year Cost of K12 Homeschool Year
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20. Unhappy College Grads
People expecting to work in
fields related to their degrees
who aren’t
The dreamers and explorers
who would love to change the
world but can’t
21. “In an increasingly complex world, sometimes old
questions need new answers.”
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24. “The Half-Life of Knowledge is decreasing
at a furious rate”
“Innovation is necessary in the current and
coming world of high-velocity education”
-futurist Jim Carroll
Education is seriously broken! The system is failing on at least three counts: efficacy, cost and access.
Disclaimer:Some of what I’ll say here today you might not want to hear, you might not believe. If you’re a parent who doesn’t want to consider challenging old notions of education, you might not like me much after this. My perspective is decidely biased. And my unique brand of bias is that I don’t really like institutions. So, if your kids are in a school and it’s working for them, GREAT…I’m not talking to you.
Here’s a tiny piece of my own story. This photo was taken in 1965 by dad as a joke. I was never tested and I don’t identify as PG but I was curious learner, excited to learn and I wanted to be challenged…I was given the impression that school would be the place When I got to kindergarten I was supremely disappointed. I kept waiting for the learning to happen and waiting. Instead I was offended from early on by the expectation to memorize and regurgitate. BUT, I figured, once I got to college it would all change. At college I'd find intelligent conversations and philosophical debates; I'd be engaged in a radical thought-provoking scholarly experiences and be able to go deep into my interests. Lo and behold when I got there it was all football games, beer and fraternities. I figured I’d picked the wrong school so I tried a different one, finished that year and left. How many conversations have you had or heard here at PGR or at home with friends about the lack of the school systems ability to meet the needs of our kids? But here’s the thing, It’s not just our kids. This probably won’t come as a big surprise but the Education System is failing us.
One problem is that, in spite of massive changes in technology, needs, expectations and attitudes, instituionalized education hasn’t change much since the invention of the printing press. Consider the history of the lecture. Which was an educational practice that grew out of the medieval university in which the instructor read from an original source to a class of students who took notes on the lecture since there just werent’ that many copies of the original source material and what existed was expensive. Reading from original sources evolved into the reading of section of an original text and then more generally to lecture notes. The basis of our system is built on the premise that There’s Only One Book when these days we couldn’t be farther from the truth.
But our school system hasn’t seemed to notice. It still based on the premise that one person has the book and must interpret it for us and pass his thoughts on the book down to the masses.
So we’re boring our kids with an irrelevant system.
And this happens at all levels of school.
Sometimes we’ll even do it to adults. Schools like so much of our culture is based on a top-down model. We’ve convinced ourselves and our kids that someone else knows better, all the time. That someone else has the power and that we must all be the obedient children. And even though we might try to conform it just doesn’t work much of the time and so we check out.
Earlier I warned you that all of this may not apply to you or your school situation. On the other hand, in some cases I might be preaching to the choir. The reality there’s much that is wrong with the education system but for the purpose of this talk let’s sum up the lack of effectiveness of many schools by saying that facts, tests and credentials OVER learning, engagement and competency.
Those of us here know first-hand that learners come with different learning styles, needs and interests and that most schools simply can't individualize due to the numbers of students in the room.
Standardized testing keeps institutions focused on lower level skills at the cost of higher order thinking and more life and meta-skills. So some kids go out into the world without the skills they need to be effective in the world. But it doesn’t have to be that way. I know as a college drop-out, as the parent of two kids who aren’t in institutionaized education, as the co-founder of 1000+ homeschooling group that we can opt out. That learning can happen outside of institutions. And sometimes it’s even more effective that way. Data demonstrates that those who are independently educated generally score between the 65th and 89th percentile on these measures, while those in traditional academic settings average at around the 50th percentile. Some of us just know the odd homeschoolerIt turns out that achievement gaps between sexes, income levels, or ethnicity—all of which have plagued public schools around the country—do not exist in homeschooling environments.Tangent: “homeschooler” vs “independent Learner”. I believe that we can apply some of what Independent Learners already know to Higher Ed?
This is a picture from the children’s story Frog and Toad. Michelle Kane made this analogy on the topic referencing the story in which Toad plants the flower seeds and wants desperately for them to grow. He waited, he talked to them, he yelled at them to grow, he insisted. When Frog found him insisting and yelling and staring and waiting he said “You are shouting too much,” said Frog. “Leave them alone for a few days. Let the sun shine on them, let the rain fall on them. Soon your seeds will start to grow.” Sure enough when he woke the next morning little green plants were coming up out of the ground. This is what we’re doing to our kids.
Yet surprisingly, the average expenditure for the education of a homeschooled child, per year, is $500 to $600, compared to an average expenditure of $10,000 per child, per year, for public school studentsThe number of children who are homeschooled has increased by 75% since 1999 - Education NewsIndependent Learning is growing 7x faster than the number of children enrolling in K12
While institutionalized learning costs too much across the board, where there’s been an increasing amount of awareness is in the area of higher ed.It’s my belief that young people are being sold a false bill of goods by the big business that is Higher Ed. The story goes that a degree guarantees success in the form of jobs and higher wages. But the reality is that student debt averages $24,000 per student,half of current graduates are jobless or underemployed and…
The Center for Labor Market Studies reports that 36% of recent college grads are working jobs they’re overqualified for that are unrelated to their degrees. CNNMoney reports that many of these kids are working in retail sales, or as waiters or bartenders, clerks or customer service or in construction or manual labor.
In 2012 the cost of college dept in the US was close to 1 Trillion dollar, surpassing credit card debt but with one key difference. Student dept is the only unforgiveable debt. Even in a bankrupcy it does not go away.
College tuition outpaces median family income by a lot and according to research by the Federal Reserve Bank, almost 2 million people 60 years or older are still paying student loans.
Jim O’Neill from the Thiel Foundation points out that this overwhelming debt is a huge cost to us culturally in terms of the loss of innovation we’re forcing our kids into. He says that in addition to the college grads working in low paid jobs because they can’t get a job in their field, are the dreamers and explorers who would love to change the world with some invention or innovative company, but are stuck in a boring corporate job because they can't quit while they are still in debt.
SO what do we do? It’s clear to me that our learning system needs a redesign. And it’s hard to see how to proceed.Partly because we're stuck in the idea of "school" and pretty attached to the way things have been in the past. If you’re a parents, know that it’s not uncommon to think, but I had such an incredible time in school. But ask yourself how much it cost you and how that compares to the cost of tuition now. Am I saying that no one should go to college? No! Go to college if:1) You can get into a school that will truly meet you’re needs as a learner.2) You’re clear on what you want out of it and ready to take advantage of the opportunity3) you can do it without bankrupting your parents or going into major dept
School's out. In fact, school as we know it is dead or quickly dying. American education - at an annual cost of $400 billion - has become a solid-gold life jacket: The longer we cling to it, the deeper it will sink us. In his revolutionary book School's Out, Lewis J. Perelman shows that instead of education, what we need is genuine learning: more, better, faster, cheaper. In fact, there is a learning revolution taking place right before our eyes - and largely outside of school classrooms. A new wave of knowledge technology has put the access to enhanced learning at our fingertips. This "hyperlearning" (HL) technology can enable anyone to learn anything, anywhere, anytime, with grade-A results. And HL technology is getting rapidly cheaper and more powerful, while classroom teaching gets steadily more expensive and unproductive. Universities will be radically, unrecognizably altered. Don't get me wrong; the few at the top won't be as effected...Stanford, Harvard and other upper echelon universities will remain unchanged for longer (unless they are very smart) . I'm often in rooms where people love to argue about the future of B&M universities and whether or not they'll continue to exist. The best line I've heard recently was "universities will exist like orchestras exist". In other words there will be a few, elite, expensive, high quality examples but most of the population won't relate to or benefit from their existence. The rest of them will be enormously altered.WHY NOW?There’s a great article published yesterday by futurist Thomas Frey
Consider the kids in this picture. Most of them will work in careers that don’t yet exist; they’ll have multiple careers throughout their lifetime; they’ll constantly have to upgrade, enhance and rebuild their knowledge; they’ll find themselves having to grab new knowledge on a “just-in-time” basis. Providing for such a reality requires a fundamental rethinking a lot of the current assumptions that are fundamental to the education system.a survey of consulting engineering students revealed that most of them thought a long term career was one that lasted from 2 to 5 years“Workers of the future will change jobs 19 times during their lives — and parallel careers become the norm as people extract themselves from professions that are becoming extinct.” That’s from the Daily Telegraph“the top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004… We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist… Using technologies that haven’t been invented… In order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.”
In 2008 the amount of new technical information was doubling every 2 years so for students starting a 4 year technical degree that means that half of what they learn in their first year of study will be outdated by their third year of study. The rapid rate of knowledge growth is leading to rapid career change – - hence, the Australian observation that “65% of children in pre- school will be employed in roles and jobs that don’t exist today.”
Why NOW?The Millenials! They are different…and amazing.In addition to getting hip to the debt issue, they are realizing that the emporer has no clothes.But they want a different sort of approach from their parents’ generation when it comes to education.Millennials insist on:active learning methods. When they are not interested in something, their attention quickly shifts elsewhere. Interestingly, many of the components of their ideal learning environment – less lecture, use of multimedia, collaborating with peers – are some of the same techniques research has shown to be effective, Price said.Just in time culture: Theirwillingness to flex schedules to meet someone else’s time and place requirements is shrinking. Especially when we have a more convenient option.Relevance and application: Millennials have grown up being able to Google anything they want to know, therefore they do not typically value information for information’s sake. Content is not king. As a result, the professor’s role is shifting from disseminating information to helping students apply the information. One of the greatest challenges for teachers is to connect course content to the current culture and make learning outcomes and activities relevant, It’s my contention that that is very hard to do in institutions as they currently exist.Agency:Millennials were raised in an open-source culture and don’t accept authority based perspective unquestioninglyRelaxed: Millennials prefer a less formal learning environment in which they can informally interact with the professor and one another. In interviews with students, the term “laid back”was used repeatedly.Rapport: Millennials are extremely relational. They are more central to their parents’ lives than previous generations and know that relationships which used to be formed in colleges will be replaced with other relationship-building systems Technology is pushing the issue and making so much more possible.
Lewis Perelman author of “ “Learning is what most adults will do for a living in the 21st century.”More screen timeFlipped Learning modelTeachers and professors will be less important than facilitators, coaches and mentors.The line between learners and teachers will blurCustomizationLearning will be cheap and efficient, effective and creative. It will have to be. The cream rises to the top and the rest will go away.There will be less separation between academia and the real world. And hopefully a greater blend of work, learning and life.Learning will be much more learner-empowered and autodidactic.Technology will make physical presence an option. Brick-and-mortar learning spaces will exist as an exciting opportunity not an obligational seat-time experience. Learners will access both to varying degrees depending upon their interests, goals and learning inclinations.Crowd-sourced content will be king. We ain't seen nothin' yet. Learning will be for life. From cradle to grave. 24/7.
Learning with increasinglyGranular and CustomizedLearners will select courses or even more granular forms of learning to fulfill their personal goals rather than stressing over acceptance into an entire (oh, and did I mention, costly?) program. They will choose based on quality of the offering, personal interest and relevance to their own long-term plans. And this is just….
Granular…Learning will be modularized. Learners will select courses or even more granular forms of learning to fulfill their personal goals rather than stressing over acceptance into an entire (oh, and did I mention, costly?) program. They will choose based on quality of the offering, personal interest and relevance to their own long-term plans. And this is just….
Granular…Learning will be modularized. Learners will select courses or even more granular forms of learning to fulfill their personal goals rather than stressing over acceptance into an entire (oh, and did I mention, costly?) program. They will choose based on quality of the offering, personal interest and relevance to their own long-term plans. And this is just….
Granular…Learning will be modularized. Learners will select courses or even more granular forms of learning to fulfill their personal goals rather than stressing over acceptance into an entire (oh, and did I mention, costly?) program. They will choose based on quality of the offering, personal interest and relevance to their own long-term plans. And this is just….
Add in the MOOCs
If your kid is not likely to be a degree seeking student in college within the next four years, you should consider any planning you might do to be irrelevant -- things are going to change too much. Kids should concentrate on having fun and working hard on things they love. If they don't love anything, they should concentrate on trying lots of stuff and figuring it out. -Jon ZComparing growth of Kahn to the growth of Coursera.
The wonderful thing about technology is that it only gets better. MOOCs today are as bad as they are going to get, but they've still passed the threshold of being pretty decent. Imagine what they'll be like in a couple of years! I'm pretty with increased virtual reality that more interaction will be a part of online learning.There is already face-to-facesupport for meet-ups for study groups, on-line study groups, and feedback via online forums with roving TAs. OneCoursera economics class has a lab where the students show up at the same time and they ran a simulation/experiment in which they all participated. --My guess is that twenty years from now the then current students will be wondering how back in the day we could call things classes that didn't include talks from visiting professors, group interactions with students all over the world, assessments on demand with automatic grading, certification of achievements in micro-disciplines, tutoring on demand, etc. etc. etc. All delivered at home and at my convenience. Things are changing.
Do you feel overwhelmed by all of the options or excited? Or a little of both? All of this content screams out for imcreasedcuration. The sheer volume of digital information that is available makes it increasingly challenging to find the information you are interested in. Curation in a digital world isn’t a luxury; it’s a necessity.“Curation replaces noise with clarity. And it’s the clarity of your choosing; it’s the things that people you trust help you find.”"We are in the Search Economy" Alicia D. (curation)We need skills ourselves but we’ll also increasingly utilize:personal recommendations and networks Crowdsourcing,Dedicated tools--Aggregation: The gathering and sharing of relevant content. It releases the individual worker from needing to seek out the content.Filtering: Instead of simply aggregating content, filtering shares only those resources that are most relevant and valuable.Elevation: Recognizing a larger trend in the sea of seemingly less-important content.Mashups: Merging two or more unrelated pieces of content to form a new message.Timelines: Organizing random pieces of content in chronological order to show the evolution of an idea.
Credentials will be replaced by alternative signaling systems, which will undermine the institutional monopoly on credentialing. The biggest changer game in the edu space, the Holy Grail, so to speak, is the creation and establishment of an alternative credentialing system. Currently, the institutions have a firm grasp on their remaining "brass ring", the degree. They won't let go easily but it will be forced out of their hands. This is the opinion where I get the most push-back; SO many people can't believe this could ever change but I'm very confident that it will and I think it's going to happen sooner than people think. I've been advising start-ups in the edu space and I know many people who are working on alternative signaling systems. It's a huge problem but once it's solved in a way that allows for adoption, and once more and more people decide to consider competence over signals, much will change.So, from a futurist perspective I'm pretty convinced that a university degree won't be nearly as important as it has been in the past, or even as important as it currently remains. Degrees will be replaced by an emphasis on competence and experience. More hiring will be done on the basis of competence, skills or other desirable traits, following in the example of Atari, which founder Nolan Bushnell says hired for enthusiasm. I consider changes to the world of Learning fitting into five categories which I call the 5 C's of Future Learning. They are Control, Content, Community, Curation and Credentialing. TheMOOCs address Control (given power to the learner AND massively increasing access), they are rocking Community and they are currently grappling heartily with Credentialing (this one's the holy grail of the edu movement IMO). ... As more students arrive with online learning in their knapsacks, it could change the direction and duration of their college experience. Students might pivot into research sooner or pursue more advanced courses that enhance their education. Ultimately, it raises the question of whether college needs to last four years. "Why not two or five?" asks Dr. Agarwal of edX. And he wonders: "Is the degree the right currency? I'm not sure."Such talk ultimately gets down to the most basic question of all: What is college even for – earning a credential, learning skills, networking, growing up? As important as dispensing knowledge is, O'Brien and others also highlight the value of mentors, peers, and personal growth that an on-campus education provides.... The idea of tailored lessons and quality content is not lost on MassBay President John O'Donnell. He feels pressure from employers to refine what courses the college teaches. "We think in terms of degrees, but business and industry is starting to say, 'Can you credential the skill set?' That is very different than a degree." MOOCs from places like MIT and Harvard offer brand-name content, he says, that interest students and provide consistent quality.
Nolan said that some of the best projects to come out of Atariwere from high-school and college drop-outs.
Private sector changes will lead the way. Entrepreneurs and tech innovators, realizing that there's a huge market for supplemental and direct-to-consumer learning, will provide improved solutions which will in turn force reform in slower-to-change institutions. Direct-to-consumer learning will be more common than mediated education.
So do we prepare our children? It’s my belief that we need to prepare our kids (and ourselves) to be master learners, to understand our learning processes and to have the skills to be self-directed and effective creators and contributors. Spencer story.One thing is for sure: to be independent and self-directed, whether as a student, an entrepreneur, and artist or a parent which are situations where no one else is telling you what to do or how to do it. And therein lies the opportunity and the challenge! Being your own boss and your own guide comes with a lot of responsibility and it's very likely that no one has taught you the skills you need to guide yourself through the fairy land of opportunity and personal freedom.Meta-learning skills will be increasingly important for learning and re-learning as the world continues on a path of exponential change. Successful people will be those who have learned the skills to take responsibility for their own learning, including effective time management, parsing of data, goal design, time management and content curation as well as effective communication skills and social-emotional efficacy. Equally important will be the skills of creating and utilizing communities and self-advocacy and expression.The great thing is the same skills needed for being an autodidact and self-directed learner (my particular passion and focus) and the same skills which will help young people succeed in college should they chose to go that route, or be successful in any endeavor in their lives.I see it as the skills needed to be a learner, because as a consultant for families, change-agent and speaker on the future of education, and the mother of two independently educated kids, what I care most about is the kids loves of learning and their ability to learn whatever they want or need. The reality is most of us will change jobs by choice or necessity more than any other generation. It's hard to even imagine how quickly new skills will be needed for our kids, kids. The bottom line is everyone will need to be a life-long learner. And content is simply no longer king.The great thing is the same skills needed for being an autodidact and self-directed learner (my particular passion and focus) and the same skills which will help young people succeed in college should they chose to go that route, or be successful in any endeavor in their lives.One thing is for sure: to be independent and self-directed, whether as a student, an entrepreneur, and artist or a parent which are situations where no one else is telling you what to do or how to do it. And therein lies the opportunity and the challenge! Being your own boss and your own guide comes with a lot of responsibility and it's very likely that no one has taught you the skills you need to guide yourself through the fairy land of opportunity and personal freedom.
