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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.

Force For the Future will be connecting accomplished professionals to ambitious young people with the primary purpose of advancing entrepreneurial projects and we hope as a result more holistic mentoring relationships will evolve around life’s many challenges.

Another thought on mentorship:

Wanting a mentor can be like wanting to sit down and have long meetings. People who are successful have a lot of meetings and have great mentors, but simply having mentors and having meetings doesn’t make you successful. Great mentoring relationships and productive meetings only come to the person with strong independent work ethic and self reliance. They have to be icing on the cake of internal drive to innovate on your own. Too many people think a mentor will solve all their problems and do a lot of work for them.

Founder, Max Marmer’s Speech at the World Future Society on Making Education More Entrepreneurial

Everyone of you could get into medical school, but that would be a bad decision because you’re signing up to be a cog in a broken system. We’re not going to run out of doctors. Let someone else be a doctor. Your job is to figure out how to lead. How to connect people. How to break rules that won’t get you into too much trouble. Don’t expect that on the 2nd day the president of the University is going to call and say how I can help, I heard what you’re doing, it’s wonderful, would you like to use our auditoruim. Instead what you’re going to do is fail over and over and over again. Because if it was easy everyone would have done it already. It’s not easy, that’s why you’re here. But everyone of the cycles of failues is going to teach you something. You’re here because you’re going to do something that we don’t have the formula for and then everyone is going to copy you. But you’re going to have to decide first and I hope you do.
Seth Godin

F3 Member: A pressing question for me is: Exactly which, if any, organizations would hire young, ambitious, multi-disciplinary, big picture people? This applies to people like me who want to be paid for their talents and don’t see themselves in traditional organizations, but also don’t want to create their own new organizations from scratch. The underlying question is: are doing Good and getting paid mutually exclusive? Young people typically get slotted into jobs doing mundane tasks with limited responsibility and latitude. How can we leapfrog that career stage and get right to the big picture and responsibility for things that matter?

I agree with you this is a very important issue. Doing good and getting paid certainly shouldn’t be exclusive, but it is true right now they often are at odds.To me that means the system has bad incentives and needs to be realigned.

This is a key problem I think Force For the Future can solve. A key point is that we need to have system that allows young people to take bigger swings if they want to. I think taking big swings at the core of economic and societal advancement.

Most startups fail yet their payoff as an industry is enormous. Juan Enriquez said, “The only part of the economy that generates new output are start-up companies. The fortune 500 have generated net negative jobs over the last 30 years. It’s startup companies that are .2 percent of GDP that have generated 17.8 percent of economic output. That’s where we’ve got to be investing.”

Yet as you said most students aren’t encouraged to take big swings, they get stuck in mundane jobs with little responsibility and I think as a result the size of their thinking long term decreases and complacency ensues.

So what are some solutions?

It needs to be easier for young people to jump into projects with laudable goals and small dynamic teams.

What are the barriers that I think Force For the Future can reduce?

Money, Good People, Support/Advising to stay on track, a wide range of ideas for projects that people can undertake

Money – Get VC’s, Angels, and Foundations to invest a small amount of money in these types of projects – they should be doing this as early as high school. 21st century learning has project based learning at its core and these ambitious projects are the epitome. The benefit of these projects are two pronged: societal/economic benefit if successful, and educational in the event of success or failure.

Good People – Create a network of like-minded peers. Host events, meet regularly to throw around ideas and build friendships. Form more intimate forum/mastermind groups etc.

Support Network – Many prominent professionals are interested in mentoring the next generation, especially if you’ve got young people thinking big and making progress on a daily basis. Get them to consult, promote, advise, run skills workshops. Ideas for

Projects – This should be easy. Good ideas are a dime a dozen. I propose building a platform where peers can pool ideas and experts can be polled about the best way to attack specific problems.

Both starting new organizations from scratch and joining existing initiatives would be equally supported.

To summarize I think the answer is merging the disparate fields of Education, Entrepreneurship (startup culture) and Life Long Learning (learning just in time basis, mentoring, etc)