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Education. Everyone knows it's broken,not effective anymore and literally a waste of time and money. More so if you had the oppurtunity to experience what educ

Education. Everyone knows it's broken,not effective anymore and literally a waste of time and money. More so if you had the oppurtunity to experience what education means in third world countries.Spoiler alert : it's a joke that will make you cry. It needs to be fixed as quickly as possible and research needs to be done for alternatives to help people in the process of learning.Online education is a good start, but we need something more effective. By not fixing education, we are creating generations of people with just pieces of paper(called degrees), having no real knowledge or even the thirst for knowledge. Maybe I am not vocalizing my thoughts well enough, but you just need to look at the state of education in third world countries to understand my depression about education.

ethbro 11y ago
This. In keeping with Gates' philosophy, when working effectively with non-governmental levels of capital it's critical to make sure you leverage as much as possible to effect real change. Things that play out across a long timespan (relative to a human lifespan) are an excellent opportunity to accomplish that. Education: We've had teacher-run schools. We've more recently had test/metric run schools. Let's (in the US) finally try and effectively fuse those two into better outcomes per dollar for kids in public schools. My personal pet peeve: develop a modeling technique that predicts an "average" educational outcome for a student given his or her family's socioeconomic status and other inputs. Then at least we have a basis for a fair measure of teacher success -- no teacher can turn every child who grows up without a single book in the home into Albert Einstein or Marie Curie. Economics: Post-scarcity minimum / basic income, as mentioned. Democracy: Follow on and unify the various open-* voter information efforts (example: http://votesmart.org/ http://votesmart.org/ ) and find the best and most unbiased way to communicate that. Democracy only works with an informed electorate, and we can do much better than throwing our hands up and letting the most ad buys have the strongest influence. Nutrition: There's a huge amount of bogus advice out there. Synthesizing this into actionable, individualized suggestions and helping people eat healthier by unifying food and recipes with budget. Eating healthier for one day does you no great help -- eating slightly better for your entire life does.
aylmao 11y ago
Education isn't ideal now, but I don't think online education is a good start or even a viable model. Training more and better teachers is the way to go, especially in "third world countries". Not only is there big issues with motivation and the whole social/interactive/distant aspect to moocs; what do you do when you don't have internet, or your device breaks? Now your education depends on a machine that costs a couple hundred bucks, instead of a notebook, pencil and early morning. Idk, I don't see online education as any more than just a sometimes-useful alternative.
- dineshp2 11y ago
  Online education is a great way to democratise access to the very best teachers/classes/content and I see it as a great way for learners to discover new topics/subjects quickly without needing to enroll in any physical classes. I don't think we will reach the point where we have great teachers everywhere. That is just not practical and too idealistic. That's exactly why we need to start innovating in the field of education to try and make it a more meaningful experience and one which positively impacts society. I see online education as one of the pieces of the education puzzle.
- m0nty 11y ago
  > I don't think online education is a good start or even a viable model Let's suppose you open-sourced education, so rather than it being controlled by an elite and passed down to the masses in varying degrees depending on how much money the recipient has, it's controlled by everyone. People can design their own courses in the same way you make a Linux distro or other open source project. Courses could be stored somewhere like Github and downloaded, forked and merged like we currently do with software. Suppose people taking those courses could contact the developers or their helpers if they don't understand something, or just want to discuss it -- email, Skype, Slack, etc. So many people want to learn, and so many others (like me :) would be happy to help them if there were the right structures and support systems to make it possible. All these things could come together to become something far more than just "online courses", just as open source software is so much more than software you don't have to pay for. Imagine we're at the Apple II stage of online education, but the iPad version (30 years down the road) will be unimaginably cool and powerful. Let's just imagine a world where you expect people to be educated to a decent level, just as we increasingly expect a base level of computer literacy. You're right that the infrastructure is not there at the moment, but let's not get hung up on that -- it will spread and increase, so what good things do we want to follow it? If online education stays where it is, you're right -- it's not good enough. But, respectfully, I hope you're wrong, and we're seeing the start of something extraordinary, the next phase in the democratisation and distribution of knowledge. I hope universities start to look more and more like museums, and education becomes a lifelong endeavour for everyone: learners, teachers, and all points in between. Personally I think this would be a tremendous thing for PG&Co to research. Hopefully, we're just getting started :)
JoshTriplett 11y ago
What about a serious attempt at an apprenticeship model, similar to the one used in Europe for students who don't go to "university"?
ams6110 11y ago
Education was pretty well figured out 100 years ago. It's broken now because of all the effort to try to improve it.
- zepto 11y ago
  What model from 100 years ago are you talking about?

ethbro 11y ago

This. In keeping with Gates' philosophy, when working effectively with non-governmental levels of capital it's critical to make sure you leverage as much as possible to effect real change. Things that play out across a long timespan (relative to a human lifespan) are an excellent opportunity to accomplish that. Education: We've had teacher-run schools. We've more recently had test/metric run schools. Let's (in the US) finally try and effectively fuse those two into better outcomes per dollar for kids in public schools. My personal pet peeve: develop a modeling technique that predicts an "average" educational outcome for a student given his or her family's socioeconomic status and other inputs. Then at least we have a basis for a fair measure of teacher success -- no teacher can turn every child who grows up without a single book in the home into Albert Einstein or Marie Curie. Economics: Post-scarcity minimum / basic income, as mentioned. Democracy: Follow on and unify the various open-* voter information efforts (example: http://votesmart.org/ http://votesmart.org/ ) and find the best and most unbiased way to communicate that. Democracy only works with an informed electorate, and we can do much better than throwing our hands up and letting the most ad buys have the strongest influence. Nutrition: There's a huge amount of bogus advice out there. Synthesizing this into actionable, individualized suggestions and helping people eat healthier by unifying food and recipes with budget. Eating healthier for one day does you no great help -- eating slightly better for your entire life does.

aylmao 11y ago

Education isn't ideal now, but I don't think online education is a good start or even a viable model. Training more and better teachers is the way to go, especially in "third world countries". Not only is there big issues with motivation and the whole social/interactive/distant aspect to moocs; what do you do when you don't have internet, or your device breaks? Now your education depends on a machine that costs a couple hundred bucks, instead of a notebook, pencil and early morning. Idk, I don't see online education as any more than just a sometimes-useful alternative.

dineshp2 11y ago
Online education is a great way to democratise access to the very best teachers/classes/content and I see it as a great way for learners to discover new topics/subjects quickly without needing to enroll in any physical classes. I don't think we will reach the point where we have great teachers everywhere. That is just not practical and too idealistic. That's exactly why we need to start innovating in the field of education to try and make it a more meaningful experience and one which positively impacts society. I see online education as one of the pieces of the education puzzle.
m0nty 11y ago
> I don't think online education is a good start or even a viable model Let's suppose you open-sourced education, so rather than it being controlled by an elite and passed down to the masses in varying degrees depending on how much money the recipient has, it's controlled by everyone. People can design their own courses in the same way you make a Linux distro or other open source project. Courses could be stored somewhere like Github and downloaded, forked and merged like we currently do with software. Suppose people taking those courses could contact the developers or their helpers if they don't understand something, or just want to discuss it -- email, Skype, Slack, etc. So many people want to learn, and so many others (like me :) would be happy to help them if there were the right structures and support systems to make it possible. All these things could come together to become something far more than just "online courses", just as open source software is so much more than software you don't have to pay for. Imagine we're at the Apple II stage of online education, but the iPad version (30 years down the road) will be unimaginably cool and powerful. Let's just imagine a world where you expect people to be educated to a decent level, just as we increasingly expect a base level of computer literacy. You're right that the infrastructure is not there at the moment, but let's not get hung up on that -- it will spread and increase, so what good things do we want to follow it? If online education stays where it is, you're right -- it's not good enough. But, respectfully, I hope you're wrong, and we're seeing the start of something extraordinary, the next phase in the democratisation and distribution of knowledge. I hope universities start to look more and more like museums, and education becomes a lifelong endeavour for everyone: learners, teachers, and all points in between. Personally I think this would be a tremendous thing for PG&Co to research. Hopefully, we're just getting started :)

JoshTriplett 11y ago

What about a serious attempt at an apprenticeship model, similar to the one used in Europe for students who don't go to "university"?

ams6110 11y ago

Education was pretty well figured out 100 years ago. It's broken now because of all the effort to try to improve it.

zepto 11y ago
What model from 100 years ago are you talking about?