I’ve been sitting on a bunch of good news links, and I’m passing them on in bulk:
Schools bid farewell to textbooks, embrace iPads instead.
John Stossel on some exciting alternatives to public schooling. More, from Stossel’s Stupid in America TV special.
There’s more: Nolan Bushnell, father of Atari, is building computer games that will push smart kids through high school in one year.
Meanwhile, Fox News tells us that the internet will bring down the cost of higher education.
Ya think…?
Here’s what’s really happening: People all over the world — of every age — are taking control of their own education.
In the Stossel special, you will see children doing math years beyond their “grade level,” all thanks to videos distributed for free on YouTube. Small, cheap wireless computers will carry those videos — and Bushnell’s games and all those thousands of apps — everywhere.
The funny part in the Stossel video is the lazy uneducator bragging about how easy her job is, now that it’s being done by someone who actually knows math.
What is the right name for that unionized mis-educator? Unemployable.
The error in Milton Friedman’s original appeal for school vouchers and every subsequent argument is compellingly obvious: Once you’ve taken government money, you’ll never be rid of the government.
Vouchers and charter schools may work better than public schools, for now, but when the unemployable masses of mis-educators realize that their current scam is about to fail, they will latch onto the schools that should have been fully-private all along and turn them into the next generation of sinecure factories.
But that won’t matter much, in the end. Thanks to Steve Jobs, to Nolan Bushnell and to millions of very smart people all over the world, we are all about to be home-schooled — with incredible rigor, at astounding speeds.
What about kids who don’t want to learn? At least they won’t be disrupting my education.
What about all those stone-ignorant school-teachers out there? At last they will have the chance to compete for jobs they can actually do.
Do you hate every bit of this? I take no joy in your frustration, but I am beyond delighted that you won’t be able to do anything to stop it.
This is the Agora in action, this is the human mind unchained. Excelsior!
