What is Education?

“Education: the path from cocky ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”

- Mark Twain

Like most Mark Twain quotes, I love it while the optimist in me cringes. He certainly was a cynical bastard, but it's hard to argue with what he has to say.

The Best Thing for Being Sad

"The best thing for being sad," replied Merlin, beginning to puff and blow, "is to learn something. That's the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then—to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never alienate, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting. Learning is the only thing for you. Look what a lot of things there are to learn.”

― T.H. White, The Once and Future King

Kids and Self-organized Learning

Kids are amazing. They can adapt to almost anything, and their lack of preconceptions gives them an astonishing (and humorous) perceptive power. I was reminded of this watching Sugata Mitra's inspirational TED talk about using the cloud to build self-organized learning environments for children. The capabilities that some of the kids in this video demonstrate, with nothing more than a question to solve and a computer, are quite astonishing, and really do point towards a new way forward for teaching and learning.

It's All Too Much

Daniel Indiviglio, writing for the Atlantic, points to a Fidelity study that reveals how much parents need to save in order to send their kids to college. The answer: Yikes!

Parents with a combined income of $55,000 would have to dedicate 9% of their pay to a 529 account. If their combined income is $100,000, then the payment is still 5.5%. If they have two kids, double that, and so on. Oh, and those percentages are of gross income. The families still need to pay their taxes, medical insurance, housing, food, and any other living expenses. They would also presumably want to be saving for retirement for those 21 years.

As he points out, these numbers are unsustainable. At some point, colleges are just going to have to start lowering their costs since there's only so much debt that students can take, especially nowadays when there's no guarantee of a job upon graduation.

Life Skills

I still wish that my High School had presented us with a class like this one. The closest they came was a Finance class, but didn't really talk about budgeting or credit cards.

Amazing, really, that public eduction doesn't focus on these commonsense things.