Spin-off

When we think about fixing Education, we come out with lots of ideas. They range from making teachers move away from being lecturing machines to coaches and mentors facilitating the learning. We have MOOCs and Apps that bring scale. We have numerous ways to present and discuss content on any topic. In short, there is no dearth of material nor thoughts to allow any one who can be self taught on anything. Yet, as a society we tend to follow the same path of exams and universities and degrees.

We need to enable this alternate system of self-taught individuals being offered position and jobs. Towards that we need to set up a more concrete evaluation process for such people by enabling formal systems supporting publications, projects etc.

In addition to spending tons of money on building colleges and universities, Governments can allocate budgets that enable self-taught students to conduct research, build prototypes, work on theories and publish their thoughts on various subjects. This can slowly bring an alternate stream where brilliant young students who are capable of going in a faster lane on subjects that interests them to not be impeded by the one-size-fits-all system of Education we have.

After all, going through this formal Education we end up producing individuals of similar or same thoughts that stalls the overall progress of humanity. We need diversification in terms of thinking, radically new outlook on problems to solve long standing issues of humanity like Poverty, Health, Energy, War, Climate change etc. We need more people working on problems at a human scale rather than artificial, microscopic often imagined problems fueled by relentless consumerism and politics that brings in incremental material comfort.

We desperately need a spin-off from where we are to even sustain where we are in the long run.