There’s a great This American Life where the final act is about a Brooklyn Free School, I really recommend it (http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/424/kid-politics / http://www.brooklynfreeschool.org/) – Although I think complete self learning is not feasible en mass since so many students do require guidance, I think there’s a really exciting middle-ground that could be found between a planned curriculum and a free school / ‘tailored’ education that would allow students to largely carve their own learning.

My main concern with digital tablet learning like this though would be it replacing basic pencil and paper. My partner worked in a school and already had literate 15 year olds who could type perfectly but struggled to write by hand. Scary!

Anyway, I especially agree with your final thought that a lot of why we feel such a loss is the knowledge that he had so much more to give and create. Its the feeling of lost potential, what might have been.

I am thinking that Siri, with all her current flaws, is another huge example of great thinking and vision. If Apple is able to carry Siri forward with the unrelenting focus that Steve required, Siri will be the mother of the NEXT digital revolution – voice control combined with semantic knowledge of you and your surroundings, with an AI brain and a humanistic response model. Its you, enhanced.

I really miss Steve….

As others have commented, I think there’s still a lot to be said for the social benefits of a common learning location and shared experience… Having a ‘place of learning’ to go to everyday and dealing with teachers and classmates helps you learn how to deal with people (both reasonable and unreasonable), however that’s not to say that that shared experience/location should look anything like it currently does.

- I read an article about a couple teachers at a smaller school that flipped their school days. Lectures at home, homework at school. They recorded lectures for students to watch overnight, then did the homework together in class. Students loved it, teachers and parents loved it. This is a huge duh. Offload the repetitious elements. Do it once, then copy/paste. Use human contact time for dialogue and collaboration on the work.

- I think curriculum is still important, but I agree in your statement that what we have is too rigid. We need responsive curricula rather than ones etched in stone pathways. The opportunity of building curricula digitally is that we can pool them all together to identify frequent desire paths, and then be able to fork at meaningful points to customize for the specifics of the individual. There are metaphors and tools for this already in the digital world. In other words, I think I want a GitHub for curriculum.

- As for access to people afforded by the structure of school, I think that Diana Kimball is onto something by taking the latent digital social norm and formalizing it a bit. She started an online mentoring framework for people to publicize their availability to be mentors. She created it by writing a brief and hosting it on GitHub. I think this speaks to getting one-on-one help. Hell, you could even charge for access to make it worth one’s time. And it’d be cheaper than school.

- In the light of rethinking education, how about a New Liberal Arts?

- I remember reading somewhere that the portfolio is the new resume. I think that’s awesome.

- Austin Kleon’s “you don’t have to go to college” tag is awesome, too:

- When I was in college, we had to take some science courses. They were two components: lecture and lab. The lecture was taught by the faculty member, lab by grad students. I think this is a great structure, but it’s all backwards. Lectures should be recorded and watched on the students time, and the length of the lab time should be doubled with the faculty and a lab assistant. I think this metaphor could be applied to almost anything: the thinking and the doing. The listening and the questioning. etc etc.

Would you consider coming to the next DisruptEd meetup in Silicon Valley? I helped start the movement a couple months ago and it’s blowing up. See http://disrupteducation.us and http://www.meetup.com/Disrupt-Ed/

Would be incredible to have you there!

I’ll leave it here anyway for people stumbling here who happen to understand it: http://faszinationmensch.wordpress.com/2011/06/12/warum-schuler-unsinnig-buffeln-mussen-brief-eines-vaters-an-seine-tochter-zur-erklarung/

Thank you very much for believing in a better future of education and trying to shape it!

Educational content will inevitably become more widespread and easy to access at lower costs. It’ll be interesting to see how technology helps us to learn from experience and action (not just from digesting content).

I think that’s actually one of the biggest problems with education today, too much lecturing not enough hands on experience.

Also, I agree to a point that education should be personalized – but we in order to continue to collaborate and communicate effectively we all need to operate from a common framework. Just because I don’t enjoy coding, it doesn’t mean I can ignore it when I design a website. In the same way, a writer still needs to understand the basic framework of mathematics. These are basic human competencies that we should all have – do I think it takes Kindergarten to graduation to get there? Probably not…

Also – I agree that a certain amount of infrastructure is needed still. School buildings afford students an opportunity for social interaction and development that is critical regardless of whether you want to be a painter or an engineer.

Anyways, loved the article and your thoughts, and the links you included are invaluable. Look forward to reading your thoughts on this in the future as well.

I’m very interested to see how things unfold and what changes come of it. I hope that whatever the case, it pushes education forward and is supported by technologies, peoples & incubators willing to think differently and passionately about it all.