Education Should Be OPEN — Introduction to AGES, Part I
Saving the world with an Alternative Global Education System
By MARTIN REZNY
Do you enjoy learning? Did you enjoy learning at school? Well, I didn’t. I have spent about 20 years being a student at one kind of school or another. I mostly excelled at everything, thanks to my natural talents, but I had realized pretty early that excelling at school doesn’t matter.
Don’t get me wrong, I believe that excellence does matter, but it really depends on what it is that you’re excelling at. If all that the school requires of you is to pass tests that are based on memorizing lists of authorized facts and opinions, you being excellent at that means very little.
In my early adulthood, I have spent a lot of time teaching languages and the art of rhetoric, but I had to do it outside of the official educational system. Somehow, the standard curricula, bureaucratic requirements, and the whole structure of education would only let me teach badly.
To list but a few of the obstacles, the classes were too big to teach effectively; there was never enough time to teach anything properly; I would be distracted by pointless paperwork (that I’d be expected to do for free); I’d be forced to teach things I can scientifically prove are useless.
Some subjects I couldn’t teach at all, despite every person who ever met me agreeing that I obviously am an expert and good teacher regarding the subject. I would have to waste the time of my life and money I didn’t have getting meaningless certificates or bad education I didn’t need.
To try to help improve the system, or at least patch it up a little, I got involved with a couple debating NGOs, visiting dozens of schools and helping host debating tournaments and international exchanges over the course of more than a decade. Well, it did some good, but changed nothing.
At this point in my life, I guess I could decide to give up, but that tendency has never been in my nature. Instead, I decided that the only way to fix education anywhere is to fix it everywhere. Along with Luke Macmichael, a burgeoning Canadian philanthropist, we are going to try to save the world.
After brainstorming and podcasting about it for over a year and a half by now, we determined that part of the solution has to be an educational reform, or, to be more precise, a reimagining of what an educational system should be. The development of what that means will be ongoing, but I’ll be sharing it here step by step, starting with basic principles.
The first of four core principles of what we call Alternative Global Education System (AGES) is openness. What follows is a specific explanation of what it requires. If you’re interested in perusing the whole thing, see the state-of-the-art version of the AGES charter.
Open education system must be…
Free for all students
How wealthy or poor any individual student is should never affect their level of access to any limited resources within the system, only their level of passion or excellence should matter.
To the extent to which the system would have necessary expenses, it should be paid for from a combination of sources like the UN, national governments, corporate scholarships, private donations, or some kind of global universal income or dividend scheme (see the GPIB page for details on that).
Initially, the expenses will only involve costs of developing and running the project website. Eventually, salaries for teachers and similar professionals should become the main type of expense, and to an extent a limited resource (mainly their personal attention). Some information may need to be purchased as well, but all information within the system must be treated as open source, making it effectively unlimited.
Global
It must be easy for any user with any national, ethnic, or cultural background to create a profile and access all the project’s content from anywhere in the world.
While we cannot control whether any countries decide to prohibit their citizens from accessing our service, we can endeavor to make the service user-friendly, including optimization of the service for performance (so that expensive hardware isn’t required to run it) and localization into as many different languages as possible.
This would mean translation of the interface and all learning materials. Failing that, all audiovisual learning content should at least be subtitled in a number of popular world languages, while all written learning materials should have at least their synopses translated into the same languages.
This is likely to be an ongoing effort, partially done by volunteers and partially by paid contractors, assuming these types of tasks won’t be entirely automated using artificial intelligence in the future. Which translation work will be paid at any given time will depend on a rational system of prioritization and overall budget.
Without age restrictions
We believe that to achieve the greatest possible benefit to society, continuous learning throughout one’s life should be encouraged. People also age mentally at different rates. For these reasons, students won’t be grouped together or their learning access limited based on their biological age.
The ongoing march of technological progress often makes some form of requalification later in life necessary anyway, in those economic and political systems where productive work is required for survival. Pushing people to study only while they’re young also appears to be interfering with their ability to start families within the optimal biological window.
Making it possible for people to decide to enroll in any type of study program for free at any point in their life is by itself likely to be a personally lifesaving change with significant rippling benefits for the global community and economy as a whole.
Self-paced
One of the less obvious ways in which old-school educational systems tend to be exclusionary is the idea that every student needs to progress at the same rate and finish a study program within the same timeframe.
This is often coupled with substantial financial penalties for not being able to meet 100% of the program’s requirements in time, which means that one arbitrary or capricious rule, circumstance, teacher, or bureaucrat can cost a student dearly, or even prevent them from completing the program altogether. This is bureaucracy for the sake of bureaucracy at its worst.
As we now do have computers and the internet, it’s no problem to track and pace any student’s progress in real time dynamically, enable them to pause and resume studying or change direction at will, and otherwise keep adapting the program to the student’s optimal rate of progress.
As the students in a global network will not be bound to a single class with a fixed set of teachers on a fixed daily schedule, Kafkaesque levels of bureaucratic masochism would be the only reason left for preventing self-paced learning.
