Perspectives: Some Perspectives on Education

The original intention of Alex Zhu

Alex Zhu, founder of musical.ly , was a futurist at SAP in 2013. Try doing some research on how the education industry is being transformed with new technology. and his co-founder came up with a "billion dollar" startup idea to transform education by combining Coursera + Twitter into a new product. Our vision is to make educational content mobile and on a small scale. This was the original intention of musical.ly , but it turned out to be a "complete failure".

He mentioned in a sharing that if you want to build a new user-generated content/social platform or social network, the content has to be very simple. Content creation and consumption need to be done in seconds, not minutes. Education is a bit against human nature. If you look at the way people use their phones, most people use them for communication and entertainment (playing games, using social media, or texting). Trying to change human nature is pretty hard for a new startup. Rather than fighting against human nature, it is better to obey human nature.

Now musical.ly has become the pinnacle of global traffic, TikTok attracting countless attention and young people, Alex Zhu's original intention of education does not know what kind of things can evolve on TikTok in the future?

Peter Thiel's view on education

We know that Workflow, Ethereum, which was acquired by Apple after the iPhone jailbreak tool made its fortune, and Figma, which is now valued at tens of billions of dollars, were all supported by the anti-Rhodes Scholarship - Thiel Scholarship at the beginning.

The Rhodes Scholarship is a prestigious 118-year-old scholarship programme that attracts young academics from across the former British Empire to study for free at Oxford University. But Peter Thiel created the Thiel Scholarship, "We're going to pay people to get out of school and do something." Twenty entrepreneurs under the age of 20 will receive $100,000 to drop out of college to pursue entrepreneurship full-time creative.

The Thiel Scholarship Board of Education is fundamentally disruptive, both rewarding would-be founders and attempting to delegitimize the contemporary American educational landscape. Peter Thiel and his colleagues agree that the American university system has become a colossal hoax, turning would-be innovators into subservient puppets.

The opportunity cost for young people is much higher. If they have a strong desire to do something right now, and they can start doing something, why wait the long, slow process of four years when you can do it right now in the dorm?

The skills and values of the university itself are the exact opposite of what the Thiel Scholarship emphasizes. When you're in college, you usually learn to think in a disciplined way. "The medium is a message," "whatever you do, if you get people to be obedient and obedient for 16+ years, then whatever you teach will produce a certain type of person."

Universities see “diversity as a value,” but in reality, he argues, they reinforce a surprisingly consistent worldview in which “all of us are somehow beyond our control” Victims of power, individual initiative is overrated, and a history full of grievances and moral outrage."

A discussion with Alan Kay, Ted Nelson and Doug Engelbart

A discussion at a symposium at MIT and Brown University in honor of Vannevar Bush last century, when Doug Engelbart was alive. On the second day of the two-day discussion, the moderator threw a question and hoped that they would give advice on how to rebuild, improve and revise the American education system.

Alan Kay: Looking back, one of the things that I think is more contradictory is that we made a big mistake at Xerox Research when we were doing interfaces, because we thought kids needed a simple interface because we would try to teach them programming and stuff like that stuff, but actually kids are the ones who are willing to put in a lot of time to become real experts — shooting basketball, learning to play baseball, learning to ride a bike, and now playing video games again. I have a 4 year old nephew who is really incredible and with the right NLS he can use it really well. So if I had that opinion, I'd design a completely different interface for kids, one that's more obvious how you can be an expert than I do. So I'm sorry for what I did.

Just like the police need criminals. This is a very complicated thing. Yesterday morning, I was in Washington discussing this with two congressional committees, and we were actually talking to those who do business. So any interest in changing things at scale is far from what they want to do. For example, the average American child spends about $6,500 a year. If you multiply that number by one classroom, you get about $185,000 to $200,000 per classroom. Those classrooms are nowhere near $185,000 a year. From half to three-quarters is absorbed by the bureaucracy, so it never falls on schools, kids, or anything else. I think this is a huge problem.

Ted Nelson: In media, as soon as you establish premises you pretty much lock in on track. Once you have a "course", the rest is the teacher. In other words, it's a system that hires teachers, so each teacher has to find an excuse for what he's been doing - then basically you have the education system as we know it now. How can I fix the education system when I hear your question? Of course I think that's a paradoxical term. The point is to get rid of what's in the way, that's the curriculum, that's what keeps teachers employed, because that's essentially what's in the way of the students. You know, education is a process that destroys you, and the last subject that is destroyed determines your career.

Doug Engelbart: I just wanted to say that all of these things have to do with how you educate kids because they can learn more and different things. But the problem is that educational institutions are unlikely to be changed by children. We can't wait 20 years for children to integrate into society before we start making changes. The technology that drives the world is changing too fast. We're just confronting the fact that we have to learn a better way for people in the organization to transform with them. That's why you need a strategy. We are all excited to think about what kind of people children can be, to thrive and so on, but I think the daunting question we really need to face is how to deal with changes in the adult world.

Source: The Brown/MIT Vannevar Bush Symposium