My contribution to ubiquity

To begin, I’ve just dropped out of school to start a company that I hope will revolutionize the way people learn. (It began as an idea for revolutionizing how people form businesses, but I will save that for the next post.) I think that we can create a system where education follows desire.

In current institutional education we use curricula to guide education instead of following people’s whims. Having people do things they don’t want to do causes a lot of unhappiness and makes for a very poor form of knowledge. Often enough, the knowledge that comes out of it is of very low resolution. After an initial drop in knowledge after the course ends, they then rebuild and add to the set of knowledge when they reach the next complimentary course. Whereas when someone’s passion is heavily married to the subject of their recent study, their knowledge has a very high resolution, and the specifics of a subject are instantly accessible.

You might say that one has to get through the unpleasant parts to get to the interesting stuff, but that is a fallacy dependent on the old educational paradigm. The system should follow your desires. Let’s say you want to learn how to engineer on the nanoscale. Your path will lead to physics and math, but the way you get to those stepping stones should not create a disconnect between each of the subjects. A curricula is a static mechanism that enforces that disconnect, through the form of time and content gaps. The solution that follows the interest of the adventurer creates no such gaps because the quest itself is a cohesive system.

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