Hello internet. Recently YouTube invited me to California for a conference with a bunch of really interesting people.

There were many talks and giant balloons and much discussion of what the future of education might look like,

which is no small issue because how society raises the next generation of scientists, doctors, and programmers shapes the future of human civilization.

It was an amazing few days days and if you'll tolerate my

ramblings, I'd like to share some of my thoughts on this as someone who's worked as an educator

both in and out of schools. This is how schools have pretty much always looked, a guy in

the front who knows all the things and students who don't, so the guy tells them.

But a teacher explains things at the right pace for maybe one student in the room during a lesson.

Everyone else is either bored because they already understand the material or lost because they're missing knowledge they should already have.

But at the end of the lesson, regardless of student understanding, the curriculum marches relentlessly on.

And whether the teacher uses a blackboard, whiteboard, or smart board, and whether the students use tablets, paper, or tablets again, this system isn't really any different. It's just technology doing the same thing in a shinier way. But the internet is different, and behind the scenes, something interesting is happening that hints at the shape of things to come. In a perfect school,

each student would have a personal tutor, like Aristotle to Alexander the Great. But if your

education policy is Aristotle for everyone, then there are three big problems with this. First,

there aren't enough humans on earth to individually tutor every child, and even if there

were, it would be horrifically expensive. And even if neither manpower nor money was a problem not everyone is as good a

tutor as Aristotle but technology is solving these problems starting with number

one for who needs humans when the internet can teach you all the things want to

learn calculus get started need an AP Biology course? Go watch this one

along with hundreds of thousands of other students. The internet massively multiplies the audience of

potential teachers and solves the manpower problem. But isn't cheerleading the internet the same thing I was

complaining about before? New tech doing old things just with more shiny after all if

you were a pre-internet child with bookish inclinations there's always been a place to

...