Everything Comes Back to Education

by Nathaniel Whittemore · 2009-04-15 12:39:00 UTC
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Delegates at the Global Engagement Summit discuss their projects

On yesterday's "Scale" vs. "Diffusion" post, the conversation in the comments quickly turned to our fundamental need to educate people differently for a wildly different economy. When the rules of the game keep changing, what can even be taught?

There are lots of wonderful thinkers out there who are thinking in both specific and broad terms about how to shift education. Our education blogger Clay has a wide array of guests who debate the merits of ideas like the charter school movement, and who talk about the ecosystem of education that extends far beyond the classroom, for example.

But I think that education, like climate change, is an "issue" that quickly sheds its confines and implicates everyone. Quite literally, the way we structure education now will fundamentally impact every aspect of our society; it's something we all have a stake in. I'm glad to see initiatives like Echoing Green's Be Bold and Ashoka's Changemaker Campus program that are connecting a "socially entrepreneurial" way of seeing with classrooms and career offices. I'm glad to have conversations like "Education Entrepreneur" on this site and "Universities as Agents of Change," hosted by Social Edge. And I'm glad programs like KIPP and Teach For America are challenging conventions; whether or not they have the answers, the challenge matters.

But I think this is a "can't wait" issue. We don't have ten years or even four years to change things. Whether our education system prepare people with collaboration skills and iterative mindsets, or continue to mine them for specific domains of knowledge and lock them into silos will have dramatic and far reaching impact.

So what I'm looking for now is the subaltern education that's springing up in the wake. I'm looking for the Academic Earth's democratizing access to knowledge, and the Global Engagement Summits and GlobeMeds that are building communities of learners based on the pursuit of understanding rather than the pursuit of grades. These are the institutional equivalents of "that teacher" we all have in high school who is the not-so-secret rebel against the stupid parts of the system and inspires us to continue learning. And I'm looking for the people recognize, incubating, and biggifying those innovations to let people thrive.

Please use the comments to share what you think are the most exciting education projects out there, and how we diffuse a new way of thinking throughout the system. And enjoy this wonderful video of Sir Ken Robinson discussing how education stifles creativity:

Nathaniel Whittemore is the founder of Assetmap. Previously he was the founding director of the Northwestern University Center for Global Engagement.
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