Colleges Under Assault from the Real World

For many young people in North America, college is a place to go to party, to get away from the stresses of the real world for as long as possible, before entering the workforce.  But the outside world has a way of slipping through the bricks and mortar, bringing with it the cold winds of reality -- there may be no jobs for them when they leave partytown.

1.) Money – As the cost of colleges skyrockets, student loans and financing are becoming harder to get.

2.) Courses – Our existing semester and quarter-based college schedules are a poor match for today’s plugged-in, hyper-jacked students. Passed down from generations past, the current timetables for courses spread out over 8-12 weeks only works for an increasingly small segment of society, leaving most working adults to fend for themselves.

3.) Teachers – As new economic realities hits college campuses, their first impulse will be to cut staff. Some will attempt to limit the damage to wage freezes and curtailed hiring, but others will begin to roll out the pink slips.

4.) Classrooms – There has long been the pervasive notion that learning can only take place in a classroom. Even though schools use field trips and outdoor experiences to enhance education, the classroom remains a dominant central fixture in education today....However, classroom-centric education is not necessary for learning. Our need to physically “gather at the feet of the master” will be replaced with faster, easier systems for connecting thoughts and ideas.

5.) Credits - ...Credit-granting authority will be the most difficult area for outsiders to penetrate. But rest assured, when the economic foundation of colleges begins to feel shaky, the creative opportunists will begin to emerge.

6.) Status – Academic elites have long been drinking the Kool-Aid, espousing the gospel of superior standing in one’s community that can only be achieved through diplomas and scholarly achievement. With a record numbers of college graduates now unemployed and under-employed, the bragging rights have begun to tarnish. _ColoradoBiz_via_ImpactLab

University has been a refuge for dysfunctional adults as well. I am referring, of course to humanities and social sciences professors. As the assault on the well-entrenched redoubts of higher indoctrination proceeds, we may have the opportunity to watch many of these sinecured and self-assured brain binders turned out into the cold cruel world of real work.

Amusingly enough, it is the economic devastation driven by the political agenda of these societally superfluous profs that is squeezing college budgets and forcing many of the coming cuts in college employment. The average voter is not feeling very charitable toward tenured bureaucrats and academics with fat salaries and pensions -- particularly if he or someone he knows happens to be among the 20% or more unemployed or underemployed.

The prosperity that built the huge North American empire of education can be quickly wiped out by an Obama - Mugabe - Chavez style of bankrupting "social justice." But it is when the academics start losing their jobs as a result of their own agenda that "social justice" acquires its sweet ironic overtones.

Who Is Honest and Brave Enough to Come Clean?

The controversy over the leaked documents from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit has just begun. We are now learning that besides the incriminating emails, the liberated documents contain a great deal of commented computer code. That is where the real paydirt is likely to be found. Watch and learn.

One of the most troubling aspects of the global climate debate is the blatant dishonesty and / or cowardice of many bloggers who have committed to carbon hysteria as a way of life -- and who are now unwilling to even acknowledge the huge, obvious faultlines that are spreading across the climate science landscape.

True believers are found in every walk of life, but future-oriented bloggers are supposed to be more immune to "future shock" and "cognitive dissonance" than the mainstream of information purveyors. Sadly, that is not the case. Some of the best known and most highly regarded future-oriented bloggers are hiding from their own contradictions -- which are right in front of their noses!

Some refreshing exceptions to this troubling trend are the excellent future blogger Brian Wang, "mega-project" blogger Neil Craig, HBD blogger Half Sigma, HBD blogger Dennis Mangan, and futurist Thomas Frey. Brian Wang's and Thomas Frey's websites are very highly visited, and both Brian and Thomas have posted a lot of material favourable to the IPCC "consensus". But when recent material came to light that exposed the collusion, manipulation, and intimidation used by the foremost IPCC lead reviewers, both Brian and Thomas reported on the controversy in an open and objective manner.

It is too early to chastise the numerous well-regarded future bloggers who have chosen to keep quiet on this topic, by name. But true believers reveal themselves as often by their omissions as by their bandwagon causes. Al Fin climatologists hope that these quasi-religious believers in global warming catastrophe who happen to post on the future occasionally, will wake up and make a conscious choice to face the reality of today.

Futurism: Thomas Frey vs. The Idiocracy

Thomas Frey of the Da Vinci Institute, has inspired leaders of government and industry with his revolutionary vision of the future.

ET: What technologies do you think would be with us in the future?

Thomas: 1. Binary power is the concept where two otherwise harmless beams of energy will intersect at some point in space, creating a source of power.

To better explain binary power, think in terms of two invisible beams intersecting in a room and the point at which they intersect as a glowing point of light. Binary power will eventually replace all light bulbs. And lest you think it can only be used for intense forms of power, it will also be used to create ‘points’ of sound, eliminating the need for speakers and headphones.

2. Proof has to be demonstrated on two very fundamental levels before there is reason to think that time travel is truly possible. The first is to be able to communicate across time, and the second is to be able to view things across time. If we cannot first communicate across time, or view real life images of another time, how can we possibly imagine sending people across time?

So the ‘viewing things across time’ technology that I think most promising is – viewing the past. Think in terms of setting up sensors around a room and being able to replay images of past events, as much as 20, 50 or 100 years ago.

3. Disassembling matter. Imagine a technology capable of breaking all of the molecular bonds in any given material. As an example, place a rock on a table, focus a beam on the rock and visualise all the molecules in the rock separating and falling in a pile onto the table.

....Thomas: In the past, computer programming has been focused around architecting the flow of electrons. In the future, nanotechnology will be focused around architecting the flow of matter.

Laboratories in the future will be akin to thought factories where the outputs will be visualisations with several million permutations. Inventions will happen so quickly that few people will understand the line between what is real and what is still only imagined.

What would the PC of tomorrow be like? Will the PC even be around or is it just going to be 'ubiquitous' computing in the full sense of the word—every object being a computer, the whole environment being the user interface, etc?

Thomas: Our goal will be to make the interface between information and our brains as seamless and as invisible as possible. Presently, the PC is a rather clunky way of making that connection.

PCs will go away within the next 10 years and a variety of devices will be created to take their place. But we eventually would not want to be bothered by physical devices.

I like to think in terms of information swarms – invisible particles that hover around us, communicating with our minds whenever we desire to ‘plug in’. While much of the information swarm will communicate directly with our minds, we will also have visual interfaces that float in space in a way that is only viewable by us.


....In my mind, patents are only useful when they move the state of the art forward. Too much of what is going on today is nothing more than corporate gamesmanship.
As an example, a typical cell phone will touch on as many as 200-300 patents. If every patent required a $5 royalty, our cell phones would cost a fortune. Many of our emerging technologies will not be able to make it to market because of too many demands on the revenue streams. Once the patents expire, the products become affordable.

ET: On a lighter note, by when do we expect the DaVinci Institute to have its branch on Mars (read: migration to other planets)?

Thomas: Travelling to Mars will be measured in decades, but colonising other planets will likely begin close to a century from now. The first human colony on another planet will be called – Colony 42, because 42 is the meaning of life.

Source

Contrast Frey's visions here and at previous posts, with the mainstream idiocratic view of "futuristic scenarios:"

To be honest, we didn't find the positive scenarios to be all that interesting. So we decided to consider: what if it all went wrong - even horribly wrong?

One possible future we envisioned was "gridlock". The left-right split of today's politics gave way to a deeply divisive standoff between "naturals" and "enhanceds". Enhanceds used all the tools of science to make life better, with intelligence-enhancing drugs and genetic screening of embryos for positive or negative traits (such as a predisposition to cancer). Naturals, a novel alliance of science sceptics from the old left and religious fundamentalists from the right, rejected enhanceds' "meddling" with nature

The worst world we envisioned we called "No Glue", where the financial, political and even social bonds of society all came apart. We considered a rapid evolution of virtual worlds that completely outpaced the ability of governments and international institutions to cope. Financial markets moved quickly into these virtual worlds because they were a much more efficient way of doing business than in the past. Virtual currencies became the medium of exchange. As nations declined and virtual worlds rose, offline social bonds frayed and people lost trust in each other. War and terrorism declined but the world was plunged into constant low-level conflict.

The latter view of "the future" clearly exposes the lack of "grist" contained in the imaginations of mainstream thinkers. These products of conventional educational brain-binding could not possibly dream up a possible future, in their wildest imagination. Because, frankly, their imaginations are hardly wild at all. This is the problem with modern journalists and academics. No grist. No imagination. They are laying the perfect groundwork for the coming Idiocracy.


The fly in the ointment for the architects of the Idiocracy, is that contrary-minded thinkers have access to advanced technology of communication, computation, and correlation. With modern communication, entire new fields of study can arise and thrive overnight, just as entire new fields of commercially viable enterprise arise virtually overnight.

This is extremely bad news for those who wish to control all sources of instability in a society. Bad news for dictators, bad news for religious control freaks, bad news for ideologues and politically correct thought police.

Stay tuned to the undertow.

Da Vinci Institute: Blueprint to Supercharge Learning--No More School

Thomas Frey of the Da Vinci Institute--a futurist think tank--has presented his long-awaited report on the future of education.

...The notion that education can take place only in a classroom is similar to the notion that purchasing a product can only take place when you see it on a store shelf. Removing the classroom constraints to learning is similar to removing the shelf space constraints to the marketplace.

....While many different learning methodologies will be experimented with, one that holds considerable promise is confidence-based learning. Some experiments in this area have demonstrated a significant reduction in learning time.

....Confidence-based learning is designed to ensure that learning actually takes place and mastery of a topic is achieved. It is much more than simply delivering information to students. It ensures learning by assessing precisely what people know and what they don’t know without guesswork and doubt skewing the results. It then works to rapidly remediate a learner’s gaps in knowledge and confidence.

....We have speculated that if confidence-based learning is somehow designed into the courseware-builder that the speed of learning can be increased dramatically, by as much as 50% or more.

....Every profession, personal skill, or area of learning has logical points where experts in that field would consider the necessary learning to be sufficiently complete. But every profession or skill is different. As an example, the courses necessary to become a master cigar maker are vastly different than the courses need to become a C+ programmer or airline pilot or registered nurse. Most professions and skills will use a combination of courses completed and a certification exam to validate student proficiency.

....Before a child can tap into a system with courseware as described above, a certain number of skills must first be in place – ability to read, follow directions, and respond to questions. However, once basic motor skills have been mastered, it is conceivable that very young children can begin this type of learning with the aid of some future design of the early childhood workstation.

Since age is not a good way to determine a child’s capabilities, new systems will need to be created to assess the overall readiness of a young student to participate.


We are on the verge of radical shifts in our education systems, and not everyone will be happy to see them develop. Teacher unions and other people dependent upon the existing education system will provide much of the early resistance.

Because of the many facets of the architecture outlined above, the system will not be created all at once. It will be phased in, starting with the courseware builder and distribution system, and later followed by the official record keeping system and various groups providing inputs. Adoption will be spotty at first.

We see home schoolers and foreign students as being some of the earliest adopters, followed by private schools and charter schools, and later public schools. Initially these courses will be used to supplement traditional classroom-based courses, but will later develop into a complete learning curriculum.

....Many kinds of learning are best achieved through hands-on touch and feeling experiences. Marine biology is best learned through working with marine life in all its many forms. The best way to learn history is to travel to the battlefields, take tours of the castles, walk through the ancient ruins, dress up in the ancient clothing, and sleep overnight in a wigwam or cliff dwelling. The best way to become a plumber is to work with a skilled plumber and perform hands-on work-related tasks to fix real world plumbing problems.

....The pace of change mandates that we produce a faster, smarter, better grade of human being. Current systems are preventing that from happening. Future education systems will be unleashed with the advent of a standardized rapid courseware-builder and a single-point global distribution system.

....As a result of this shift we will begin to see dramatic changes in society. The speed of learning will increase tenfold because of a combination of the following factors:

* Confidence-based learning will significantly increase learning speed and comprehension
* Learning what we want, when we want - shifting away from a prescribed course agenda to one that is hyper-individualized, self-selected, and scheduled whenever a student wishes to take it will dramatically change levels of motivation
* Technology improvements over time will continually improve the speed and comprehension of learning

The speed of learning will increase tenfold, and it is possible that the equivalent of our current K-12 education system will be compressed into as little as one year’s worth of learning.

Read the complete report


Much of this report could have been taken from several Al Fin postings on education. There is no question of the need to transform the education machine from a corrupt and opportunistic money sink to a method of making children, youth, and adults into super-learners. The changing pace of technology and scientific development--not to mention the political and economic turmoil of today--demands a smarter student of all ages.

The End of Schools!

The futurist Da Vinci Institute has been working on a detailed report on the future of education for the past 18 months, using several thousand man hours, expert interviews, and various intensive techniques.

“We have identified 12 critical dimensions of the future learning system. However, only the first two need to be in place for the revolution to begin,” says [Thomas] Frey.

The conclusions have been expanded into a 20-page report that will be presented in detail ...[it] will explain the following:

1. * The dramatic shift will happen outside our existing education systems sometime within the next two years
2. * It will be greeted by many with open arms, welcomed by most inside our existing education system, but will eventually cause new systems to develop, and schools as we know them today will cease to exist within ten years. Their replacement will be far better
3. * This new system will be able to unlock the hidden potential within us, creating a new grade of human beings - human beings 2.0.
4. * It has the potential to increase the speed of learning ten-fold, and many will be able to complete the entire K-12 curriculum within one year.
5. * People graduating from the equivalent of high school or college in the future will be a factor of ten times smarter than graduates today

Source

Those are extremely optimistic predictions, given the dismal trends in education in the US generally. I cannot help but agree that any improvements that occur will have to come from outside the current system.

Da Vinci's Thomas Frey is generally optimistic about the future--not just the future of education. But he does not expect everything to change immediately.

Typically, Frey says, it takes time—a quarter-century or so—for new technology to take hold and be accepted. So it’s likely that the next big thing, whether in medicine, transportation or some other arena, already has been invented.

He notes patents filed with the U.S. Patent Office have reached record numbers in recent years. “Knowing that a certain percentage of those filings are cutting-edge technology, and knowing that it takes an entire generation for this to take off, we’re in for one hell of a ride,” he says.

Source

The new report on Education will be unveiled March 27th in Denver. Contact the Da Vinci Institute for information on attending.

Alternative educational curricula such as the Montessori Method or the Garcia Curriculum, focus on teaching of procedural knowledge--sometimes in preference to didactic knowledge. Such an emphasis is important in creating a sense of competence and self-efficacy in children. Only by doing that, will children build a healthy sense of self-esteem and comfidence in meeting the world on their own terms.