Empowered Education

The story of humanity is propelled forward by our unique ability to convert imagination into reality. We take the things we imagine and create them, whether out of curiosity, necessity, or desire.

Each creative act requires us to learn new knowledge, skills, and tools. During this iterative process of creation, we imagine new possibilities based on our newly gained technology, and begin the cycle again.

The imagination to reality conversion process is fueled by the curiosity and desires of each individual, and so necessarily, learning occurs at the level of the individual. If there is no desire to achieve a goal, or a curiosity to explore, there is no learning, only passive participation. The more curiosity or desire, the more learning.

Education

Education is a word that exists between learning and school.

An “education” in the strictest sense of the word is the accumulation of learning over time, whether the learning occurs in a kitchen, a library, or a classroom. Someone who walked across the United States over the course of a year would obtain an “education” in American Sociology better than any Sociology class at the most elite college. However, when people say “education”, this type of learning is not really what they have in mind.

Instead, an “education” commonly refers to the process of learning knowledge, skills, and tools that have been chosen, sanctioned, and certified by a school, college, or university. As a society, we have largely, and unconsciously, delegated the burden of personal learning to institutions that are granted the authority to certify whether a topic is worthy of being called an “education”.

Education and Status

Unfortunately, since we have allowed institutions to sanction whether or not something is an “education”, we have unintentionally enabled the creation of a zero-sum status game, that everyone is supposed to play. The status game is driven by competition to associate ourselves with the brand or reputation of a particular school. This game has been zero-sum, because historically, there were a limited number of chairs, classrooms, and teachers, and hence, the so-called “best” schools had a limited number of students they could accept.

However, this paradigm is now obsolete.

First, the acquisition and utilization of knowledge, skills, and tools is no longer zero sum. Literally everyone can learn to read, or cook an omelette, or build a website, and no one is worse off because of it. Thanks to the internet, the information required to read, cook, or write code, is also available to nearly everyone, for free. School, colleges, and universities no longer have a monopoly on this information.

Second, it’s now possible for individuals to demonstrate the knowledge, skills and tools they possess, without relying on a school for the certification process. Instead, individuals can now certify their “education” by demonstrating and showcasing their learning and work in the real world. This is what Isaac Morehouse, the founder of Crash, calls “being your own credential”.

However, even with the amazing tools at our disposal, sometimes it might be easier or faster, for an individual to learn in a school, rather than alone.

School

In the past, schools have taken advantage of their monopoly on information, to only certify and teach the knowledge, skills, and tools that were interesting to the schools, administrators, and teachers, themselves.

However, in the Age of Individuality, schools must serve the learning goals of individuals. After all, schools are places where individuals choose to spend their time and their money in order to achieve their own learning goals.

In the Age of Individuality, the ideal school is one that enables an individual to pursue their specific goals: this might be to build a model airplane or learn about spiders (for children), or to gain the skills necessary to work as a nurse, accountant, or welder (for adults).

I call this new model of education, Empowered Education, because the educators are empowering individuals to achieve their own, personal goals.

Last year, on the Skill podcast, I interviewed the founders of 2 schools that embody the ideals of Empowered Education.

At Sora Schools, Garrett Smiley, Indra Sofian, and Wesley Samples are enabling young adults to pursue their own learning goals in a project-based environment. At Sora, high school students can start their own projects, choose their own timeline, and set their own evaluation metrics.

At Holberton School, Sylvain Kalache and Julien Barbier, are creating a unique learning environment for students with the specific professional goal of becoming a full-stack web developer. At Holberton, students are given increasingly difficult programming challenges to solve with minimal initial directions on how to solve them. As a result, Holberton students learn for themselves, how to look for the theory and tools they need, how to understand them, how to apply them, and how to work as a team to achieve them.

These are two of the many examples of Empowered Education that exist today. My belief is that the Antiquated Education model of providing standardized, generic, information to each student, regardless of their personal goals, is a model coming to an end, because it’s a model built on the monopoly of information, which no longer exists.

Here are a few more differences between Empowered Education, and the Antiquated Education models that still exist today:

Unlike the top down, grade focused schools of yesterday, where what you “should” learn is chosen by committees, today, new schools are being created that leverage technology to empower individuals to achieve their unique goals, as quickly, and inexpensively as possible.

This is Empowered Education.