Inspired by a weekly newsletter called “Gray Matters” from Virginia Hughes, I have decided to put together a regular round up of articles that I have been reading related to education. I will do my best to provide the most relevant snippets and a link to the articles I have been reading every 2-4 weeks.
August 2014
“If the hypothesis is that universal compulsory schooling is the best way to to create an informed and critically literate citizenry, then anyone looking at the data with a clear eye would have to concede that the results are, at best, mixed. At worst, they are catastrophic: a few strains of superbacteria may be about to prove that point for us.” -Carol Black @ Schooling the World
“In the American education system, the teacher is usually assumed to be the expert. We have this traditional model where one teacher stands in front of 30 kids. But the act of teaching is actually one of the most valuable ways to learn. It’s nice to see environments where children can be teachers. That’s something that Sugata has really expanded on with his Self-Organized Learning Environments (SOLEs), which a lot of times remove the teacher altogether and allow children to learn from one another and teach one another simultaneously.” -Kate Torgovnick May @ TED Blog
“When talking about Minerva’s future, Nelson says he thinks in terms of the life spans of universities—hundreds of years as opposed to the decades of typical corporate time horizons. Minerva’s very founding is a rare event. ‘We are now building an institution that has not been attempted in over 100 years, since the founding of Rice’—the last four-year liberal-arts-based research institution founded in this country. It opened in 1912 and now charges $53,966 a year.” -Graeme Wood @ The Atlantic
“If winning is the game, then risk and failure are the strategy. It’s how you move forward. The key is to fail in the right direction. Fail bravely. Fail by taking chances, not by sitting on the fence or floating adrift on a trend.Fail by trusting your own opinion, not by asking everyone else’s. Fail by staying on your own mission and not getting derailed by another company’s success.” -James Victore @ Adobe Inspire
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