Why School Is Becoming Irrelevant | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant congratulations to the graduating class of 2020 I know this isn't what you had in mind all these years while you were imagining your graduation but this is still a celebration of your achievement and your growth and you're flying away from the nest into the emptiness of adulthood and these uncertain times now more than ever we're in this together and heroes actually you know what screw the platitudes you guys got robbed like for real robbed grand theft diploma look I'll be honest when you get to be my age you really consider most things that teenagers get you know all worked up over to be silly frivolous crap by me this is graduation I remember graduation was everything this wasn't some lame tradition or silly rumor or whatever this is what you had been working toward your entire life as you have known it I granted in the long run it doesn't matter really but it feels like it matters at the time this is an important rite of passage and yours got taken from you and I'm sorry that sucks now on the upside this is happening during a historic moment the people are gonna be talking about for a long time to come like 20 years from now you're gonna meet somebody that graduate in 2020 and you're gonna you're gonna have a bond you're gonna be like and oh it's gonna feel so good someday down the line your kids are gonna be complaining about some minor inconvenience they're gonna be like oh yeah let me tell you what happened when I went to school to which they might respond what's a school education is changing along with everything else in the world of course education has always been changing it just doesn't really feel like it to us because it's more generational but really the education system that we all grew up in is a very very new phenomenon I guarantee that somebody watching this video because I do have some older people on here somebody watching this has a grandparent that went to a one-room schoolhouse go back just a little bit further beyond that and the entire idea of publicly funded school for everybody is just unheard of here's another way of looking at it cuneiform tablets are considered to be the first written language that was around 3200 BC so writing has existed for about 5200 years but Universal literacy the idea that everybody should be able to read is maybe 200 years old if we're being generous so when all that time that writing is existed only in the last 3.6% have we prioritized reading it in 1820 only 12% of people could read and write in their own native language today it's more like 85% worldwide and in developed countries it's closer to 100% what else has changed in that time besides everything you know I get asked all the time when I think that the singularity is gonna happen and honestly when you take the long view I think it's happening right now and has been for 200 years or so you know everything about the human condition technology population food production has all increased exponentially in a very recent and very short amount of time and it all coincides with the moment that we decided that education is a universal right it's thought that back in our hunter-gatherer days education was basically the same as play you know the kids were left to kind of be on their own devices to go out there and into the nature and discover and find their own way the oral traditions and survival knowledge was passed down from generation to generation you know teaching kids what kind of berries they can eat how to fish how to hunt how to avoid being dinner to a saber-toothed tiger bagra Cultural Revolution created more stability but it also created less free time kids had to get out in the field and start working as soon as possible but the trade that was involved in agriculture and the markets that facilitated that trade spurred the growth of language and bookkeeping systems then just created more stuff for people to learn but not for everybody society quickly bifurcated into a feudal system of wealthy landowners and serfs and slaves that did all the work for them and the wealthy landowners are the ones that were handling all the money and doing all the trades and stuff like that so they had to learn all that important stuff all the lower classes they just need to learn how to work the most efficiently so education is a formal thing was something that was only afforded by the wealthy and the privileged and ancient Egypt they had schools for future pharaohs and and people who were parts of the court Greece and Rome adopted similar systems later on and in almost all cases they only taught boys because the girls were too busy learning how to make bets there were exceptions of this rule though ancient India actually taught girls alongside with boys and ancient Aztecs provided school for every boys and girls and even the slave classes very progressive the Aztecs granted they were mostly learning how to chop off people's heads and roll them down the sides of pyramids but hey that was pretty much my middle school experience but for most of the world and for most of human history education was something that was only for wealthy people and that was usually done through private tutors and yes in the Middle Ages we saw the birth of universities like Oxford and Cambridge and Salamanca and Bologna but again those were only for wealthy people and only for men education was not for everybody but that began to change in the 1500s due to a couple of key developments one is the invention of the printing press the other is the Protestant Reformation Johann Gutenberg invented the printing press in 1440 which for the first time made reading material available for everybody so yeah I mean back in the day all the books were kept in elite libraries and monasteries at universities and whatnot even if you had the ability to read even if you were lucky enough to know how to read there wasn't anything to read so yeah if you want to talk about how technology has changed education that's the perfect example but it was because of this technology that Martin Luther was able to distribute his 95 theses all across Europe starting with the first one that he nailed on a church door in 1517 this led to the Protestant Reformation which was something of a populist movement in the church and they really valued universal literacy they wanted people to be able to read so they could spread their message around so starting in the 17th century the Lutheran Church started opening up public schools for everyone and this began the tradition of hey European centric much let me just stop for a second and acknowledge that yes this is a very European focused and Western focused overview of the history of Education there are many other educational systems around the world they all have their own interesting backstories and whatnot but I come from the United States so that's kind of what I'm used to and we definitely come from a Western ideology and a Western educational background besides this is supposed to be about the future of Education I just wanted to kind of like preface it with a little bit of the background in the history of it it's already gonna gone on a little bit too long if you wanted to hear a comparison of different types of educational systems around the world that might could be a video but for now please just excuse my eurozone on that note bouncing over to the United States we did have some publicly funded schools going all the way back to 1639 in New England but the agrarian south still kind of tutored people mostly until around the 1800s but it was the 1800s and we all kind of coalesced around the idea of tax funded public education for everybody kind of like what we have today but with one major difference it stopped at eighth grade now there were secondary schools which kind of provided a path to university and a lot of those were publicly funded in urban areas but if you were in the rural areas if you are the more agrarian areas yeah you were kind of needed to work on the farm and if you were gonna go off to college and do that kind of thing if you're wealthy enough you could go to a boarding school but for the most part you went to school till eighth grade around the age of fourteen and get back on the farm toward the end of the 1800s as the Industrial Revolution started to take hold secondary schools took on more importance and more prominence because employers needed students to come out of school with a bit more technical expertise to be able to handle the more technical jobs that were out there and by the early 20th century the high school movement is it came to be known was in full swing and it was hotly debated with a lot of people saying that going to high school should be a choice and it shouldn't be tax funded and paid for by taxpayers whereas other people were saying no we need more highly skilled people and the school system that was set up at the time was set up for a world that didn't really exist anymore you know the percentage of agrarian households was shrinking jobs were becoming a lot more technical and complex in the education system needed to change with it so that we could have a more qualified workforce over time eventually the high school movement went out and basically got us to where we are today so just to reiterate mandatory and publicly funded K through 12 education is literally less than a hundred years old some states didn't get on board with it until after World War two today the biggest debates around education center around college tuition cost which has more than doubled since their late 1980s and we as students when they graduate with a lifetime of debt which is a horrible way to get started in the real world plus there's this extra squeeze because people are living longer they're not retiring until much later which leaves a lot fewer job options out there so you're paying a lot more money for a lot less opportunity so now we're seeing a movement to expand public funding to cover college tuition as well this is almost exactly like the high school movement all over again with a lot of the same arguments being given and actually looking back it's really interesting to see how technology has expanded education which then led to innovations in technology which led to an expansion of education and on and on and technology has been expanding into the classrooms as well changing the way we teach what we teach according to MIT US schools spend 13 billion dollars annually on education technology everything from smart boards and classrooms to iPads and tablets for students to do their homework on two remote-controlled robots for sick kids to attend classes from home and as some of my younger viewers that may all sound really duh and basic to you but I haven't been in a classroom in a really long time and even when I was I was in this very underfunded small town school that was kind of behind all the other schools anyway and so yeah my wife's a teacher she's always coming home talking about the technology and the in the cool classes that they offer now and I'm just yeah so jealous so yeah I mean cool tech and all but has it been effective I mean that's what matters right the results have been a mixed bag you know kids with more access to computers definitely know how to use computers better it doesn't necessarily mean the grades are going up but then there's online courses those are kind of the big thing these days but some studies have shown that people who do only online courses especially high school students don't necessarily perform as well as in class students do but a mix of online and in-class teaching seems to be producing a better result online classes for adults tend it has some advantages to them motivated learners can go about 50 percent faster than everybody else adults tend to have different motivations for learning and you tend to take things a bit more seriously when you're paying for it Plus adult education often has to do with gaining or keeping a job that'll light a fire under your ass kids generally don't have that fire there at school because they have to be it has to be applied to them from somebody else teachers can do it parents can do it social pressure can do it some people just work better in groups unfortunately for those people co vid 19 hit this year and moved all learning online schools have adjusted and evolved to handle the situation which is temporary hopefully but this hyper reliance on technology is bound to have some permanent effects what exactly is that gonna look like maybe a better question is some of this stuff have happened a long time ago if the rise of ADHD in the 21st century taught us anything it's that kids have different learning needs as I said a second ago some kids thrive in a social environment some kids don't for some kids this new zoom based approach has been a godsend and this has been actually pretty good for some teachers as well according to an article in education next Annabelle Morgan says that differentiation and individualization of instruction can be easier to manage remotely and some teachers have found that their ADHD kids have been able to focus more easily because there's not other kids around to distract them now another advantage for a lot of kids out there that are learning remotely is is they're getting to start their days a little bit later instead of the ridiculously early hours that schools have been gravitating toward against the advice of every expert in the world teenagers are growing they're developing they need more sleep than the rest of us and their circadian rhythms are gonna be a little bit different than everybody else's and studies have shown that earlier start times lead to lower grades worse health decisions poor decision-making I mean it's just it's just bad so more sleep and fewer distractions that's a couple of pluses of course this might not be a dream scenario for parents who now have to make sure that their kids are doing their homework but still beyond high school though online college classes have been growing in popularity lately mostly due to the ridiculously high you know college tuition lately but unfortunately they don't really command the same respect as a traditional degree does I mean if you want to go to Harvard for your masters you're not gonna be able to get in if you have a bachelor's from Grand Canyon University and then there's a sort of supplemental education resources online like some of the people that sponsor this channel like Skillshare and brilliant you know you might not be able to get a degree from there but if you're studying a specific topic you might get some deeper complex understanding of the subject the education space online is vast I mean it's it's kind of what I'm doing here so yeah in the near future education might be really more of a mix of traditional brick-and-mortar schools online accredited universities and then supplemental education we're starting to see a lot more of that right now now another movement that's changing education is the maker movement you know people actually making and creating things with their hands some of these are exploring traditional craftsmanship methods others are on the cutting edge of 3d prototyping and manufacturing and then others get in more computer programming and robotics while traditional schools are definitely embracing maker courses almost like shop classes in the past the real correlation here is with trade and tech schools these are schools where students forego the traditional you know foreign language classes and calculus classes and focus on a specific skill set and these have been criminally undervalued for way too long they're cheaper there they're more focused and unlike the college education I was sold they could actually lead to a job but what's cool is today we're seeing those schools kind of merging with the entrepreneurial bent of the maker movement I mentioned earlier the squeeze that Millennials and Gen Z is running into as older generations are retiring you know older and older well a lot of them are finding more opportunity in entrepreneurial efforts and you know building things of their own you know one good example is a school called the make school in San Francisco which is not only a place to learn it also serves as a bit of an incubator for innovative ideas now programs like this are super cool but they also require a completely different approach to education one where failure is a good thing makers embrace failure fail fast fail often reiterate learn and eventually reach your goal in traditional schools failure is the last thing that you want is the thing you're trying not to do with every single paper and every single test and every report card but that's a mo mattock of the changing times you know in the past the education system was created to to create workers that would be able to follow directions and be good in the workforce and today because technology is changing so fast it's really more of an innovation mindset that people are looking for you know lifelong learners people who are gonna be quick to embrace new technologies and want to evolve the processes of the company these are the things that employers are looking for and the education system is gonna have to reflect that here's another reason why schools might embrace more of an innovation mindset as opposed to just learning general knowledge in the future these things I mean is it just redundant to spend 12 years learning general facts and knowledge and figures when we have a portal to all the human information that has ever existed in your back pocket you know in the future it might not be so much about the the facts that you can retain as much as about you know critical thinking and how you can apply those facts to what you're doing and this could be a good thing or a bad thing to be honest because I think a lot of the best innovations come when different ideas sort of cross pollinate with each other and the best way to make that happen is to have a whole of ideas in your head employers today are looking for what they call it t-shaped employees somebody that has a lot of depth in one specific skill set but then a broad knowledge base up top so it kind of you know kind of looks like a tea being somebody who's covered about a million subjects at a very shallow level I would be more of like an M - just a - but perhaps no technology can make a bigger difference to our intelligence than artificial intelligence AI developers are looking at ways to personalize curricula to people's different learning styles essentially hacking the brain you know think about the AI algorithms that you see on Spotify or Amazon that sort of monitor are the things that you click on and give you stuff appropriately that they think that you might be interested in you know an AI teaching algorithm could do the same thing it could ascertain the right teaching style for a student and then adjust the curriculum accordingly you know effectively we might see education turning back to the tutoring days except instead of a teacher doing the tutoring it's a it's a computer tutor it's just fun to say computer tutor and this is already in the works at MIT they actually did an experiment recently where they had a robot teach kids how to solve puzzles and they actually tested out a couple of different styles of teaching they did one that has sort of a growth mindset approach which kind of mimics the way the way makers think and the other one is more of a neutral approach the makerbot one now because I know a lot of you were gonna be asking about this in the comments if I don't say something about it I did take a look at Elon Musk's at Astra school that he's set up to try to figure out you know what that's all about yeah the details of it are still scarce but it's set up at the SpaceX campus by Elon and it's run by a teacher named Joshua dawn who was formerly a teacher at the mermen school for highly gifted children in Los Angeles but apparently the goal of the school is to prepare kids for the world that they're going to be living in as adults you know twenty thirty years down the line focuses a lot less on language courses and a lot less on STEM subjects surprisingly instead of focuses on things like creative problem-solving abstract reasoning ethics and decision-making there are no grades and by that I mean there are no grade levels like first second third grade and there are no class grades like the A's B's and the C's and their admission process is interesting applications involve a student endeavor statement where they talk about what they're passionate about what they're interested in a parent statement where the parents describe what they're looking for in the school and then there's a synthesis response here the students can choose one of five projects and give their best answer when involves creating an art installation by choosing from a supplied gallery of images one asks you to imagine going to Mars and gives a list of crew members with cryptic clues to their personalities and asks you to pick a leader clearly they're just looking for out-of-the-box thinkers here right now there's only 31 kids at the school half of them are kids from SpaceX employees but if you would like to kind of start something of your own with this they have a program called Astra Nova so that you could set up like a pilot program where you live but here's a question could it be possible and in the far future maybe the middle future even education becomes completely irrelevant you know I talked earlier about how we all have a portal to all the human information in our pockets well what happens when you don't even have to whip this out to find out something you can just kind of like download it into your brain what happens when we merge with this would math in school even be a thing you're wired into a supercomputer you can do advanced calculus in your head lawyers would have immediate access to all the facts in a case and all the precedent in all of legal history when your car breaks down you wouldn't have to take it into a mechanic you could just download how to fix it into your own head and maybe I don't know maybe a remote mechanic could just take control of your arms and do it through you that that might be too much or is it the point is if we merge with computers everything about education would change it wouldn't be about knowledge at all it would be all about creative and critical thinking or maybe we'll have traditional schooling up to a certain age at which point kids can you know get connected and after that it's all about like learning emotional intelligence and life skills maybe there'll be special connection ceremonies when kids turn 13 or 14 it'll be like a like a digital Bar Mitzvah now obviously neuro-link comes to mind when we talk about you know human brain interfaces and we haven't really heard much from them since last year when they did their big presentation they did have one scheduled for this summer but we don't know if that's gonna happen now but yeah I apparently they plan to show how they got a monkey to control the computer with its brain nothing could go wrong there you know they said they want to implant one of their chips into a human's time this year but they call that an aspirational goal I think we all know what that means of course it'll be a really long time before that technology merges us with one of these it's mostly in the beginning going to be about giving functionality back to disabled people but even if we do merge with computers even if we merge with super intelligence that's that's not gonna change who we are fundamentally you know we're more than just a collection of memories and facts we're shaped by world view and perspective and experience all of which are things that need to be kind of taught to us by people who have more of it than we do teachers will never fully go away and that's a good thing because they're the best of us they work way too hard put up with way too much bolt for way too a little money and for the teachers out there that are watching this I know you've had a really rough year too and you have had to perform absolute miracles to overcome it everybody at some point in their lives has been shaped in one way or another by a teacher who cared and they deserve better maybe if we want to create a better education system for the future that's a good place to start and if you agree that future education is going to focus more on logic and creative and critical thinking skills may be a good place for you to get started on that is the logic course on brilliant brilliant logic course will challenge you with 37 interactive quizzes where you solve problems that will push your critical thinking skills and set the foundation for mathematical reasoning become an expert on logical fallacies game theory and machine logic as well as logic gates combinatorial game algorithms and de Morgan's laws but you don't know what de Morgan's laws are what have you been living under it yeah I don't I don't know they are in there this is of course there's one of dozens of classes on brilliant where you can learn everything from quantum mechanics to computational biology or just bone up on algebra and general scientific fundamentals you can go as basic or advanced as you want you can do it through solving problems which trains your brain to think like a scientist and gives you problem-solving skills that you can apply to everything in your life plus there are daily challenges little problems that flex your brain every day to keep those brain muscles strong they can be downloaded on your phone you can take it with you on the go or just do it right from your browser is this whole log down situation drags on I know a lot of us are going a little bit stir-crazy and you're looking for things to keep yourself saying I can't recommend brilliant enough for that and if you won the first 200 people that go to brilliant dork slash answers with Joe and sign up for the Premium Subscription that gives you access to all their courses you can get 20% off your subscription for life they do have free weekly quizzes and problems and stuff that you can go check out and just see if it's right for you but either way go check it out brilliant org slice answers with Joe link is down below big thanks to brilliant for supporting this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that are helping me grow a team forming an awesome community and just being overall awesome people we got some new people that have joined let me murder the names real quick we got mark Lewis Rodger Dobbin Troy cabinet cat of a Mike Ramsay Roland Bobek Joseph B Stokes Josh Adrian Matt D Zack Dylan JL Joyce a aka juice Jonathan HB Karen Elizabeth Smith Jeff Mayer Holtz Nathaniel Langston Toni 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Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 366,862

Rating: 4.9187374 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott, education, artificial intelligence, maker movement, high school movement, martin luther, history of education, future of education, teachers, neuralink, ad astra school, brain machine interface

Id: VSiQCL3oBj8

Length: 23min 48sec (1428 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/CivilServantBot]

Welcome to /r/Futurology! To maintain a healthy, vibrant community, comments will be removed if they are disrespectful, off-topic, or spread misinformation (rules). While thousands of people comment daily and follow the rules, mods do remove a few hundred comments per day. Replies to this announcement are auto-removed.

[u/Leandroth]

He talks about Neuralink but we are going to need to wait a long time for it to become accessible to everyone.

Something that could provide a similar functionality to Neuralink but could be available a lot sooner: a combination of Smart Glasses + AlterEgo from MIT + Ctrl-Labs.

[u/Ichirosato]

Education as we know it would still be around, people would go to workshops or even university as a hobby just for the sake of know more in a particular interest they have.