Thought Leaders Blog

In the United States there are, in round numbers,  5 million students at each grade level.  Today, only 2 million of our 5 million 18 year-olds will graduate from college.

Less than half of the 55 million students currently enrolled in K-12 are projected to achieve the standard of living they grew up having.    Our 8th graders know this reality.  Without a college degree they will earn less than their parents.  That’s why 88% of them told the Stanford Bridge Project researchers that they aspired to a college education.  With the year-to-year increase in college graduation rates projected to continue to decline to 1% or less, most of our children and indeed our nation will not live the American dream. 

The great question of our age is therefore whether we can, in a very short time, increase our college graduation rates from 40 to 88% and truly enable every child to achieve the education they dream of.

Textbooks enabled high school graduation rates to explode in the 20th century

Toward the end of the 19th century, a revolutionary technology swept into our schools.  Readily available paper and fast printing presses made textbooks cheap enough for every student to have their own for each subject. These textbooks, often written by great experts in a discipline, provided standardized, high quality curriculum that classroom teachers could build on. They provided basic information and practice exercises that students could do after class and turn in to be graded.

This text-book technology defined the teacher-centered classroom and rigid school structures that we know so well today.  It was extraordinarily successful catapulting high school graduation rates from 3% in 1897 to nearly 80% today.   It worked well in a much less demanding time when there was much less to teach and real success was demanded for only those students in the “college track.”  Its limitations in our much more demanding time are all too apparent and impossible to circumvent.

Can a new technology of learning have a similar impact on education and take college graduation rates to 88%? Can it build high levels of fluency in core subjects and produce flexible thinkers?

Can an internet computer make practice much more efficient and build fluency?

Practice is the key to learning most things.  We can’t learn to hit a golf ball without practice and we can’t learn to do math problems without practice.  To make practice productive for every student it has to:

• Provide immediate feedback on every problem

• Give assignments in which each problem is adapted to an individual’s learning progress

• Take them to interactive and dynamic examples when needed

• Ensure that mastery is reached on each assignment to build fluency

Technology that makes practice a productive experience exists today!

Can an internet computer help a student think flexibly?

For the past 100 years education has been a battleground between content and concept. Should we teach our kids to do or should we teach them to understand? Should we teach facts or ideas, basics or new math, phonics or whole language, procedures or critical thinking, workforce skills or 21st century skills20? Do we want our children to have fluency and good command of the facts and processes of a discipline? Or do we want them to think flexibility, think critically, solve authentic problems, work creatively, and know the principles of a discipline. An efficient technology of learning will enable students to become fluent thinkers much more quickly, providing time to build flexible thinkers as well.  By providing an interactive visual learning medium, we will gain the capability for all students to deeply understand the broad range of visual concepts in many of the disciplines and truly build flexible minds.

This new technology of learning can enable every child who dreams of a college education to get one.  It will also enable our students who today achieve success in school, to have the time and the tools to “Put the wonder back in learning.”