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If you think the fallout in the newspaper business was dramatic, wait until you see what happens to education.

Should this be about school or about learning?

School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists.

For a while, smart people thought that school was organized to encourage learning. For a long time, though, people in the know have realized that they are fundamentally different activities.

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/08/education-at-the-crossroads.html

Update: Force For the Future has changed directions since taking part in Palomar5 in fall 2010. We still think we can affect education, but we believe we can make a bigger impact their, over the long term by focusing on entrepreneurship first.

We believe the larger long term direction we’re heading towards is becoming the liaison for “Real World University”, the best learning environment of all, where passion, learning and work are all fluid and intimately related. Making an impact and creating value in the workplace is increasingly dependent on leadership, initiative, and working effectively with small teams of innovative people tackling big goals. Corporate America is not doing a good job of allowing creativity and innovation to flourish in the workplace and by and large the university system is doing no better, squandering the potential, ambition and talent of many motivated young people that the world desperately needs to make it through this pivotal period in our history. The pace of change continues to increase and now we finally have the power to create the world of equal opportunity, abundant wealth, endless creativity and boundless possibility that humanity has always desired, but we also face bigger existential threats than ever before, which are also accelerating exponentially.

We need more people working on the big problems of our day instead of opting for dispassionate pay-the-bills work or the allure of fast money from financial optimization. Our school system churns out highly dependent, disengaged citizens, in search of a paycheck instead of a purpose. Failing to realize that the only form of sustainable wealth creation is when your passion becomes your work.

There are simply not enough people working on the big problems of our era and our survival depends on unleashing the talent of the next generation of young leaders.

Force For the Future aims to create the learning institution of the 21^st century. We won’t just tell people that they have to find their passion we will show them how. We will connect them with all the resources and people they need to go from a mindless sleepwalk through life to a passionate undertaking of the issues they care about and everything in between. We will assess exactly where a person is on the motivational scale and provide them with the resources to just take the next step. We believe the best way to have happier more fulfilled people who impact others on a large scale is to allow them to take ideas for a better world, refine them, prototype them and scale them. Investment in startup companies represent .02% of our GDP yet they represent 17.8% of our output, and yet over 75% do not succeed. That is a major force for good in the world.

We think too many people overestimate what they need to get started. They don’t three degrees and a lengthy resume before they can began working on realizing their visions for improving the world around them; they just need initiative, a little help and a little luck.

Our model basically boils down to really well connected unschooling with abundant resources. It’s based on the idea that you will contribute the most by putting your time and energy into the things you are really passionate about. And it aims to strike the optimal balance between being completely off on your own, where it’s easy to get lost and being part of a large system where you’re always told what to do.

The path Force For the Future is advocating isn’t anything new, in fact it is a well trodden road by most of the world’s successful people. The rules of success aren’t that hard, and there’s no need to reinvent them. We don’t need new rules we just need more people to use them to create their own success stories. Impact begins with a burning desire to accomplish something, followed by 100% faith that you will achieve it no matter what, leading to definite plans of actions about how to achieve it, and continued persistence through failed plans which give you the feedback to make a better plan until you find one that works. By pursuing this process you naturally gather other necessary ingredients along the way like co-founders, mentors, and funding.

Why do only a select few discover and utilize the basic rules of achievement while it is a fruitless struggle for others?

It’s a mix of personality type, hospitable formative environments, and seizing lucky opportunities when they present themselves.

But we want to open this incredibly fulfilling path to more people and show that a career driven by passion and impact is very possible. We believe that the role of the learning institutions in the 21^st century is to enable everyone to invest a majority of their energy in their passions and improve the lives of other in the process.

To create this environment Force For the Future hardly needs to build anything new. We are just going to assemble all the information, resources, and opportunities already out there and make it easier for you to navigate the ecosystem like many successful people have done before.

And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn’t matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
http://www.miltonglaser.com/pages/milton/essays/es3.html (via heyitsnoah) (via superamit) (via kareem)

Desmond Tutu: If a young man says to you, sir Richard, if I want to be successful what must I do?

Branson: You must realize that money is not the definition of success, you want to get involved with whatever interests you in life and try to do it the best you can, it may be that money will be a byproduct of that and you’ll be able to put that money to good use. Achieving things you can be proud of and making a real difference.

DT: You’ve been very successful, what would have happen had you not succeeded.

Branson: Honestly, as long as I tried hard to succeed…I’m not the sort of person who feared failure.

There’s a thin diving line between success and failure. And I feel fear like anybody else. I’ve been picked out of the sea 6 times by helicopters. And on the laws of average I shouldn’t be alive today.

I think there’s not much a difference between an adventurer and an entrepreneur. You’re trying to achieve things that have never been achieved before, you’re trying to do it better than it’s ever been done before and you’re trying to protect against the downside. And the downside for an adventurer is obviously your life.

One could easily psychoanalyze me and say this is incredibly stupid and this incredibly irresponsible, and of course it is. But equally, if you stand back in life, you think would I rather be doing things or sitting in front of a television watching other people do things…

Excerpts from great article entitled “Let’s Abolish High School”

Restrictions on work by young people also took hold very gradually. In fact, the earliest “child labor” laws in the United States actually required young people to work. It wasn’t until the late 1800s that laws restricting the work opportunities of young people began to take hold. Those laws, too, were fiercely opposed, and in fact the first federal laws restricting youth labor—enacted in 1916, 1918, and 1933—were all swiftly struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court. After all, young people had worked side by side with adults throughout history, and they still helped support their families and their communities in countries around the world; the idea that there should be limits on youth labor, or that young people shouldn’t be allowed to do any work, seemed outrageous to many people.

Unfortunately, the dramatic changes set in motion by the turmoil of America’s industrial revolution also obliterated from modern consciousness the true abilities of young people, leaving adults with the faulty belief that teenagers were inherently irresponsible and incompetent. What’s more, the rate at which restrictions were placed on young people began to accelerate after the 1930s, and increased dramatically after the social turmoil of the 1960s. Surveys I’ve conducted suggest that teenagers today are subject to 10 times as many restrictions as are mainstream adults, to twice as many restrictions as are active-duty U.S. Marines, and even to twice as many restrictions as are incarcerated felons.

Our educational institutions today are cursed by at least four fatal legacies of the Industrial Revolution—ideas that may have been helpful a century ago but have no place in today’s world. In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning. First, although cars can be assembled on demand, it’s absurd to teach people when they’re not ready to learn.

As the brilliant German educator Kurt Hahn (the founder of Outward Bound) said, teaching people who are aren’t ready is like “pouring and pouring into a jug and never looking to see whether the lid is off.”

Second, although mass education was exciting in the era that invented mass production, it does a great disservice to the vast majority of students. People have radically different learning styles and abilities, and effective learning—learning that benefits all students—is necessarily individualized and self-paced. This is the elephant in the classroom from which no teacher can hide.

Third, although it’s efficient to cram all apparently essential knowledge into the first two decades of life, the main thing we teach most students with this approach is to hate school. In today’s fast-paced world, education needs to be spread out over a lifetime, and the main thing we need to teach our young people is to love the process of learning.

Finally, whereas that first compulsory-education law in Massachusetts was competency-based, the system that grew in its wake requires all young people to attend school, no matter what they know. Even worse, the system provides no incentives for students to master material quickly, and few or no meaningful options for young people who do leave school.

A century ago, there was no way to address these concerns, but, thanks to computers and the Internet, we now have rapidly improving tools that will soon allow virtually all young people to master essential material at their own pace, and to do so at any point in their lives.

There will probably always be a place for the classroom, but it will be a place where intense and intimate learning takes place with highly willing students, not a step on an assembly line. A careful look at these issues yields startling conclusions: The social-emotional turmoil experienced by many young people in the United States is entirely a creation of modern culture. We produce such turmoil by infantilizing our young and isolating them from adults. Modern schooling and restrictions on youth labor are remnants of the Industrial Revolution that are no longer appropriate for today’s world; the exploitative factories are long gone, and we have the ability now to provide mass education on an individual basis.

Teenagers are inherently highly capable young adults; to undo the damage we have done, we need to establish competency-based systems that give these young people opportunities and incentives to join the adult world as rapidly as possible.