Quitting college at 18 to move to Silicon Valley and pursue your startup is the stuff of Hollywood dreams. Now add a billionaire benefactor--PayPal founder and Facebook investor Peter Thiel--bankrolling you and under pressure to prove that entrepreneurship can rival Harvard as a path to success. The inaugural class of Thiel Fellows is blogging about their experiences for Fast Company. Dale Stephens wants to shake up education, one page at a time.
We live in a world where technology dominates the future, but I fundamentally believe education is a human problem. I wish curing our educational ills were as simple as making videos of lectures, or buying iPads for every student. The fact that education is more complicated than that is part of the reason I'm writing a book. Yes, one of those oldfangled paper contraptions.
When I am asked what I do, and I respond that I'm writing a book, I'm often scoffed at. In San Francisco the assumption is that if you don't have your own startup merging Airbnb, Pandora, and Dropbox, your life is a waste.
Changing education isn't quite as simple as starting a company, because we already hold beliefs about education. Before Airbnb, did you know that you needed to rent out your spare bedroom? Before Pandora did you know that you needed to stream personalized radio? Before Dropbox did you know that you needed to sync your files? The answer, in all cases, is no. However, if I asked you, "Did you know you need to get an education?" you'd be insulted. You'd also have very clear ideas about how to get an education.
Those preexisting ideas mean that changing education required more than building a technology company--it requires shifting our paradigm. I'm writing a book as the first step in shifting that paradigm and changing education. Surely technology will build solutions that help solve our educational problems, but efforts will be fruitless until we stop worshipping the SAT.
Another reason I'm writing a book is to take the time to pu...
[Source: Fast Company]
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