The Future of Education

Freire. Bloom. Froebel. Five questions on the theorists and ideas that pushed back against the status quo. Hope everyone in the US had a wonderful 4th of July!!!

There’s an old joke that certain education reformers enjoy sharing about today’s classrooms to illustrate how resistant teachers and schools have been to innovation and technology: After a 100-year slumber, Rip Van Winkle awakens and is baffled by what he sees in modern society: from cars to smartphones to operating rooms, nothing is recognizable. But a school is the one place he recognizes. There are multiple problems with the joke (one I know I’ve made myself—mea culpa).

Gutenberg to the UN Literacy Decade. Six milestones in the world’s long journey toward universal literacy — in order.

Before we celebrate the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence here in the United States (and yes, after kicking off the festivities here in Lexington, Mass. over a year ago, I’m still excited), Jeff Selingo and I wrapped up our ninth season of Future U.

Correlation isn’t causation, as Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and author of The Digital Delusion, tells us, when it comes to education technology. Yet despite that caveat, he’s pretty sure that technology writ large is causing us as a society to get dumber. And state legislators are lining up behind his work to ban technology in schools with the blunt axe of one-size-fits-all policy.

56%. 7. Less than 5%. Some of the most surprising facts in education are numerical. Five questions. How many can you get?

This piece appeared originally in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In the startup world, there’s a measure that founders and investors pay close attention to: the burn rate. Before a company is generating positive cash flow, the burn rate measures how much money a company is losing each month as it uses its available cash to cover expenses.

Four of my former Harvard master’s degree students—Ruben Villarreal-Halprin, Matthew Millikin, Jaysan Shah, and William Wiltshire—joined me to discuss their independent study project exploring seven diverse microschools across the United States: the Village School, Elizabeth City-Pasquotank Public Schools microschool, NuVu, the Levitt Lab, Khan Lab School, Red Bridge, and Alpha School. Several of these I’ve featured here before; others are new.

From the Troy Female Seminary to the year women first outnumbered men on college campuses — six moments, one correct sequence.

For those who follow college athletics, it’s not news that the system is changing rapidly. It’s hard to keep track as money changes hands in a variety of ways, athletes (er, students) transfer schools, schools switch conferences, and the underlying rules shift continually. It all has huge ramifications for the business and academic models of colleges at all levels.