[ Documents / Educational System / Work ]
After an Identity is assigned to you, without your knowledge.
you will be sent to an organization called:
An Educational System
It differs a little, from country to country
considering the culture, but more than that, a country's budget.
So i will refer to the educational system from the country where I was born.
The differences are, almost, less important, considering the similarities.
Kinder-garden lasts about 3 or 4 years, but can vary.
In kinder-garden I learnt many stories, tales, things related to imagination.
Why? I don’t know, nobody told me. I still have no idea why.
Well, You must understand that today, we expose children, to artificial values
first: boo boo said the cow, baba said the sheep.
When you bring up children with that kind of garbage,
they can learn Geology, children can learn Engineering, Mathematics.
Children are capable to learn the same thing adults are.
It takes just as much garbage, that you fill the kids head with.
and you keep pumping information into their heads, that is unreal.
and then you expect them to be able to think later on
Children can learn and read at very early age, they can understand complex things.
Like continental drift, they can understand volcanos, nature.
they can understand the symbiotic process.
but you have things like Mickie Mouse club. Imagine that
Imagine all the ridiculous things that children are exposed to.
So, here we damage them right away,
because they think, so i guess that's the way children are.
No They Are Not.
I would like to say this about my own little boy:
when he was about 4 years old, he said:
Daddy the wheel came off my toy car, would you fix it?
So i said: so it did, i'll get your baby toys where the wheels don't come off,
and I threw the car on the garbage.
oh, I watched him, and I noticed that lower lip come out.
He said: you throwing it away.
I told him: Yes I did!
So, he: Well, maybe i can fix it. then I took it out and I gave it to him.
and he tried to put it together, and he did put it together within few minutes.
Then i picked him up and said "That's Wonderful" how did you do that?
he said: I'm not THAT little.
In other words if you give kids responsibility,
instead let daddy solve this, let daddy do that for you, let mommy fix that.
you produce a blob that doesn't think.
School
I was often forced to wear the same outfit as others,
an outfit imposed by the educational system.
Without an explanation.
The School program is fixed.
So, you are bound to respect it, otherwise, it is likely to expel you,
resulting in a potential lack of job,
leading you to starvation, being unable to take possession of money.
Speaking of program, school started early in the morning,
because of this i was forced to wake up around 7 AM.
This meant that bedtime was not dictated by the biological system,
but, by the educational system,
leading to constant brain, and other organs, fatigue.
I often came to school very sleepy,
and the school wants to be an institution in which you must retain information.
Classes were fixed, so were the breaks.
The program was about 6 - 7 hours a day, five days a week.
The educational program lasted about 12 years,
and the break was about 2 - 3 months every year.
The educational system has created the first scale of values,
and labeled people as being stupid, or smart,
because of some unknown rules, creating envy.
if you are born with a better brain than him,
say the tissues is better quality, the neurons processes are better built,
if you live in nazi germany, you become a nazi faster.
even if the brain is better,
the brain has no mechanism for knowing that which is relevant or less relevant.
That goes for intelligence.
I don't know if i've talked to you about,
an electrical engineer 75 years ago, an intelligent one
couldn't get a job today
so when you talk of intelligence, what are you talking about?
it's an ongoing process, there is no such a thing as an intelligent person,
there are people that are fairly well informed in area A&B, not informed in area C
Also, schools promoted competition, that leads instinctively to dispute.
And, do not forget that competition may have winners and losers.
Mostly, the school in which I, along with millions of other children,
have taken part, created a false scale of values and promoted competition.
Also, schools destroyed something very important: Curiosity,
since nobody gave you an explanation for the way you are forced to behave,
just telling you to do things without asking.
You said you are worried about kids,
I'm not worried about kids, I'm worried about grown ups, ok?
These are the ones who vote.
These are the ones who tell you 'the world is coming to an end in 2012,'
kids don't say that, grown ups do.
I'm worried about grown ups who say:
"read my horoscope, tell me whether I'll find money tomorrow".
Grown ups say this, not children, ok?
Children do not read horoscopes, ok?
Childrens are perfectly happy counting through the number thirteen.
Children are not afraid to walk under ladders,
they see a black cat cross their path they say "oh kitty kitty", they want to pet it,
not run in the other direction, children are not the problem here.
Get me started...
Because kids are born curious.
They're always exploring.
We spend the first year of their lives teaching them how to walk and talk.
And the rest of their life, telling them to shut up and sit down.
To see what it is all about, and to summarize what I have learnt in school, let's recap:
I remember that I learnt a language. This language that you are hearing right now.
Let's focus a little bit on that.
don't know if you understand me,
we don't know, lot of people think somebody invented language.
and they say to read and to write is to communicate, that's not true,
what happened, a guy banged his elbow, said "aam",
then banged his knee said "uuh", then he eats something said "oo"
language is an extrapolation of all those sounds over many years,
nobody ever sat down and invented language.
The Language in this form is centuries old,
and although it represented the point of support
in the development of mankind, it is now outdated.
Often slow, sometimes too long for the sent message,
but more importantly it’s interpretable, which makes it useless.
We know that mathematics, chemistry and physics are not subject to interpretation.
They are fixed languages.
Well... the language that you are hearing right now, is interpretable.
I can tell you now, that you and your boss are the same.
But... what did I actually mean?
You are the same, but how? You look the same, behave similarly, or what?
Depends on what you understand, because this is interpretable.
But, if I scientifically prove to you that both of you are composed of the same chemical elements,
then no one would have any doubt about what my message means.
Consider now the people who build all kinds of buildings.
They are constructing using all those fixed languages, so that everyone understands,
and the building could fit in the environment. No opinion here.
So in those 12, or for me 15 years, of school,
I learnt an exceeded language, that adds to the confusion of the current world.
Moreover, I learnt one language out of hundreds, which does not help me when I leave the country.
I learnt an Interpretable language,
that helps me communicate with a few tens of millions of people on the planet, out of 7 billion.
That, in an era of the Internet, a place without fictitious boundaries.
Why haven't I learnt a universal language?
One more compact and less interpretable.
Or why didn't I learn the other fixed languages, better than this interpretable one?
I have possible theories, but they don't matter, all that matters is that you ask yourself.
Besides this language, I learnt mathematics,
and even after I finished school,
I thought that mathematics is a bunch of letters and numbers, with certain rules,
and that everything is a game for brain development.
My colleagues thought the same thing, perhaps some of them didn’t even ask.
I created this theory because nobody, ever, could give me a more detailed explanation,
other than: you need to know how to calculate.
Calculate Money? Or what?
I wonder if my old colleagues even know what mathematics really means.
The same happened with physics and chemistry.
Blackboard, white chalk, and a professor with a fixed character,
together with fixed and obligatory school schedule,
pushed me away from reality,
and all those fixed languages have become nonsense bonds.
That's why many students hate such classes, their value is never explained.
Remember that no such fixed language could help me in daily life of the monetary system,
because the basic language used here is the one that you are witnessing right now,
a language old and subject to interpretation.
I also learnt geography and history.
History never interested me because I did not know if indeed such things happened,
they were just writing for me, and the present is much more important anyway.
Besides, I didn't agree with stories where armed criminals were seen as leading heroes.
Geography taught me names, that it said, were countries.
That means... some portions of planet Earth, were 'conquered' by people,
just as monkeys do, and named.
This is the concept of countries, and that is how countries evolved.
Even today, boundaries separate areas,
and are dividing the human species, leading to racism
and instinctively slowing progression, due to separation.
Countries and cities have no importance,
because the Earth itself is the common heritage of all humans.
You can define a piece of Earth, name it, and say it is yours only by imagination;
it will be recognized by others, in its value, only if others accept that as being true...
also through imagination.
That's what i retain from geography, names and imaginary demarcations.
I learnt about God, and religion,
a theory that says the world was created by a divine creature, within 7 days.
Basically, the theory was promoted and accepted by all,
especially as it was taught in school as being true.
It is in contradiction with other subjects in school,
such as physics, chemistry or biology,
even with reason, and for me, it just created confusion.
My school didn’t focus on sport, music or drawing,
so I can not remember anything from these areas.
The closer I got to the end of these 12 years,
the less rationality I found in what i learnt.
What we learn in school does not have any tangent with reality,
only with further education through college.
In the monetary system, college is the final step, of this human education,
and college will prepare you for a job.
That makes the educational system, a system of training workers.
12 years, in which I learnt a language that confused me,
more than it helped me.
12 years, in which I was confused by this different theories of my existence.
12 years, in which I have been obligated to present myself at fixed hours,
to an institution, and to have a certain uniform.
12 years, in an organization, that, pushed me away from mathematics,
physics, biology or chemistry.
12 years, in which, I did not receive any explanation for what I learnt,
or why I learnt it, or why I should respect the educational system’s rules.
12 years that I personally consider being lost, and immoral.
12 years, in which I could learn so much.
Then, another three years of college, which only prepared me for a job.
So, where is the education?
Maybe, the country where I was born, was to blame.
But then, you can think of the years you’ve spent at school,
and the information learnt,
then correlate that with reality and draw your own conclusions.
After you draw your conclusions,
think about whether you accept taking part in such a program,
for 12 to 15 years, only to learn;
without receiving any degree or any gratitude at the end.
I haven't heard school teachers say:
"Let us make education relevant to the needs of people"
I've never heard descriptive system from Universities
or any elaborate organization.
The democratic concept for example,
where everybody participates and contributes,
I believe they can only contribute
to that which they've learned from the culture.
And they can't be that different and be a member of a standard organization.
Even though the universities today, have the most sophisticated equipment,
In the science labs, the architectural labs, all the labs
the wars are getting worse.
The explosives are getting worse.
[ Alternative Solutions ]
Now, let's look at how children learn,
and how schools might look in a system focused on progress
and freedom of human beings.
The children enthusiastically got up to me, and said:
"Now what do you want us to do?"
I gave them 6 GCSE questions.
The first group, the best one, solved everything in 20 min.
The worst, in 45.
They used everything that they knew:
News groups, Google, Wikipedia, Ask Jeeves, etc...
But teachers said: "Is this deep learning?"
I said: "well, let's try it!"
I come back after 2 months,
will give them a paper test, no computers, no talking to each other etc..
The average score when I done it with the computer and the groups was 76%
When I did the experiment, when I did the test after 2 months, the score was...
76%
There was photographic recall.
I mean, if there is stuff on Google,
why would you need to stuff it into your head?
I basically embedded a computer
into a wall of a slum in New Delhi.
The children barely went to school.
They didn't know any English. They've never seen a computer before.
And they didn't know what the Internet was.
I repeated this all over India
and then through a large part of the world.
I noticed that children will learn to do
what they want to learn to do.
So at the end of it, we concluded
that groups of children
can learn to use computers and the internet on their own,
irrespective of who or where they were.
I got an interesting phone call once from Colombo,
from the late Arthur C. Clarke,
who said "I want to see what's going on".
And he couldn't travel so I went over there.
He said two interesting things.
"A teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be".
The second thing that he said was that,
"if children have interest then education happens."
And I was doing that in the field, so everyday I would watch it, and think of him.
It is possible and they can definitively help people.
Because children very quickly learn to navigate the web and find things which interest them.
And when you got interest then you have education.
I think we've just stumbled across as self-organizing system.
A self-organizing system is one where a structure appears
without explicit intervention from the outside.
Self organizing systems also always show emergence,
which is that system starts to do things, which it was never designed for.
Which is why you react the way you do. Because it looks impossible.
I think I can make a guess now:
Education is a self-organizing system
where learning is an emergent phenomenon.
Now that we know that children learn,
and organize themselves better through curiosity,
you should only provide information and access to them.
It's simple.
Hi! My name is Sal Khan, the founder and faculty of the Khan Academy and
we are trying to educate the world.
Welcome to the presentation on "basic addition":
In august of 1789 they've already done their version of the Declaration of Independence...
And the process is called photosynthesis...
I was tutoring my cousins, literally, and I had kind of figure out a way to scale myself up,
so I started recording youtube videos and I started making little software modules for them.
But I made them so anyone can use them and started to get a lot of attraction.
What Sal Khan has done is amazing,
He's taken all this material and broken them down into little 12 min lectures.
I used it myself to remind myself of things, I've children who like it,
so I was super happy, he came up and we got to talk about, "where does he go now ?"
"how can my foundation help him pursue this dream"
"and connect it up with the other great things going on on the internet."
I want it to be a stand alone virtual school
where anyone in the world, who wants to learn anything,
can go there, start from the basics, progress as far as he needs to go,
get feedback, get assessment, get practice.
And eventually I want it to actually become the operating system
for what goes on in the classroom
where every student is allowed to work at their own pace,
and the teacher actually becomes more of a mentor or
of a coach.
So I see Sal Khan as a pioneer, in an overall movement
to use technology to let more and more people learn things,
know where they stand
it's the start of a revolution.
A system like that will create curious, intelligent and inventive individuals.
Something different from a worker.
Such a system couldn't help you in the monetary system.
Then you have to ask yourself "Why is that?"
I didn't want to teach my kid how to read
so I used to read to him at night
and close the book at the most interesting part
and he said "what happened then daddy?"
And so I said "Why don't you read? I'm too tired, I'll read it to you tomorrow".
He had to need to want to learn to read.
Don't teach children how to read, don't teach them mathematics.
Give them a reason to want it!
Does everybody know what that means?
In school they're working it backwards.
[Alternative solutions] 1) Provide information and access
An individual of the human species,
the dominant intelligent species on planet Earth,
should learn how he and the environment works,
to try to understand what is happening around him
through the best and demonstrable information possible.
It is a mockery to use 12, 15, or even more years of a human being's life,
that is around 70 to 80 years, to prepare him to be a worker,
or to learn a language limited by your culture.
Such an educational system is against evolution,
it makes the human species go forward... not in a straight line, but in ellipses.