Gigaom AI Minute – October 9

Transcript

Our K-12 educational system, that has predominated in the last couple of hundred years, has served us well. However, it's starting to show its age. As it currently stands, primary education is not that different from its 19th-century German roots, where it was invented. Even some of the terminology remains the same; the first level of education in the United States is called kindergarten, which is German for "child garden."

The K-12 system was designed to create good factory workers, and it is modeled after a factory. You have a manager, the teacher, who gives you assignments. If you have questions, you raise your hand and ask your manager for clarification. Your manager tells you if you did a good job or not. A bell rings, and you are given a new task and new instructions. Another bell rings and you go to lunch. Performance reviews come at regular intervals and are standardized, they are called report cards. In fact, the entire process is designed to produce homogeneous workers, able to function in a homogeneous factory environment.

This system has been enormously effective, as today's rising literacy rates and growing standard of living attest. It will not, however, be well-suited for the coming decades. Increasingly the abilities that are needed for success relate to communication and teamwork, as well as the ability to teach yourself new skills and to objectively evaluate the quality of your own work. An educational system designed to produce homogeneous factory workers will not work well in a world like the one we're going to be exploring in the upcoming decades.