Education: The Next Frontier

In the recent article by Michael Malone in the Wall Street Journal, The Next American Frontier, he seems to say to me that forging towards the frontier in cowboy-like fashion continues today in the form of entrepreneurial activities.

"But there has never been a nation in which the dominant paradigm is entrepreneurship. Not just self-employment or sole proprietorship, but serial company-building, entire careers built on perpetual change, independence and the endless pursuit of the next opportunity.
"Without noticing it, we have once again discovered, and then raced off to settle, a new frontier. Not land, not innovation, but ourselves and a growing control over our own lives and careers."

One of the examples he gives of this is how people are increasingly educated their children differently by either homeschooling or sending to private schools. I was talking to a friend of mine about how children learn and she made a comment that children don't grow in a smooth line upwards, they do it in spurts, and you never know when one is going to come along. Additionally, each child is different in terms of their interests. Finally, each child has a different learning style, as we discussed a couple of weeks ago. So, how in the world could we possibly teach in one classroom the same thing to all children, oh, and also ask them to sit all day in rows with minimal contact with each other or even the teacher? It is ludicrous. A small amount of children do well in this but the majority certainly will not. Out of those, best case scenario is that they are merely bored. But there are worse cases.

What this makes me think about is how we are evolving from the beginnings of industrial society to now and all of the inventions and scientific findings and progress along the way. Just a couple of years ago TrendWatching named the trend Minipreneurs about customers able to make their own products along with the company. What this means is that a person has a say in customizing a product to their taste, from cookies to clothes to cars. It was so simple back then and we were happy.

But once we got a taste of that, where will we go next and what will we change and tweak to make life more to our tastes? Education seems to be the next big frontier, among others. But what a difference it would make if we could actually provide a way for more kids to actually like to learn. What would that kind of world be like?