RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms

I have a question for HN. At what point do you become responsible for your own education? Before, you may have not had a public library near you. Nowadays, there is too much information. Curation? Multiple MOOC's have taken the problem and squashed it. Internet Access? I'm not sure, but I remember reading that Comcast gives subsidized rates in poor income areas. Computers / Notebooks? This I'm not sure about at all. What access do people have? Assuming people have access to education, at what point are "educators" defunct? I feel as though I would not have gone to high school had these MOOC's been available. However, I did have enough personal curiosity to pursue these things. In college now, I'm not "spoon fed" anymore, it is my responsibility to do well, and seek out help if I am struggling. I am just curious where people think that line is drawn, and if it's different for everyone or not. I am for the Bar exam - for goodness's sake, we still have teachers trying to teach Creationism! One of my favorite videos on reforming education, from a very logical perspective from Sir Ken Robinson. Bonus: it's pictorially animated! [VIDEO]

Some of these talks (not just TED) are incredibly inspiring. I particularly love the ones that were turned into RSA Animate. [VIDEO] [LINK]

While I do think that ADHD is a real condition, I don't think that the solution is to medicate children with a very serious life changing drug that alters the core aspects of a child's personality and behavior. The true solution is to revamp our country's education system and provide a framework that can accommodate the wide variety of personalities that come into the classroom. Instead of forcing children to think one way, we should let them think the way they NATURALLY think, and flourish with their native mindset. I strongly recommend this eye-opening video for those of you who haven't already seen it: [VIDEO]

This RSA video shows some reasons why the current education systems (not only US') has the problems it has: [VIDEO]

If anyone is actually surprised by the administrations intelligence - I should remind you of 3 events: - A teacher confiscates Linux CDs claiming that the student was essentially distributing illegal copyrighted software - because no software is free [1] - A system administrator was fired for installing/running seti@home on school computers. There is a lot of controversy about this case - but I read one news article (that I can't find right now) where the administration said they would have been ok with cancer research folding@home rather than searching for aliens with seti@home. This combined with the backpedaling of "oh actually he was a bad employee, stole things, and cost the school millions in extra in electricity costs!" makes me believe that they just wanted to use it as an excuse to fire him and make the position open for a friend/relative. [2]. - Or an honor roll student suspended for buying candy from another student [3]. His statuses were only restored after it caught media attention. I would go into my rant about the education system but you should just watch this video [4] [1] [LINK] [2] [LINK] [3] [LINK] [4] [VIDEO]

Most education research is about how to evaluate TEACHERS not children. If you want to help children then you're better off starting here: [VIDEO]

An indirect response: Try this for another explanation/point of view (it's kept short and to the point): [VIDEO] (About the speaker: [LINK]

Isn't cheating a symptom of the failure in how the education system works? This^ very interesting video of Ken Robinson produced by RSA was recently posted by someone on this forum. It diagnose this problem very well. Trying to put kids in a system that is boxed due to constraints of age, time, subjects and grades is very harmful for the real development of individual kids. Kids understand this and get disengaged from the system but still have to force themselves to follow along because they are not provided with an alternative. ^ [VIDEO]