All of modern schooling optimizes convergent thinking: finding THE right answer, the one from the answer key, the one from the teacher. That was perfect for manufacturing office workers in 1950. It’s exactly what machines now do better than we do. What remains for humans is the other half: divergent thinking. Asking the question no one else asks, connecting two fields that have nothing to connect them, enduring being right alone for ten years. The school of the future doesn’t grade the conformity of the answer. It grades the fertility of the question.
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Nobody wants to do the exercise seriously. Everyone comments on the fall of the old world, nobody describes the next one. So let’s do it. Here’s what the future of humanity looks like, and why it’s already under construction.
First the principles, because everything flows from them. A civilization is software before it’s buildings. Ours just crashed. Here are the six lines of code for the next one.
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Years ago, I served on several taxpayer funded Madison School District volunteer committees. My observation, then, was that half the teachers I met worked hard to improve the achievements and drive of their students, while the other half simply wanted to hold hands from k-12 and give them a piece of paper at the end.