- Socrates was worried that a few scrolls
would make people stupid.
Well what would he think about Wikipedia?
(electronic music)
Let's imagine that you are an ancient Greek,
and you've come up with an amazing fact.
You've discovered that the best cure for a fever is leeches.
Or let's say that you've found that the cure
for an upset stomach is also leeches.
If you're illiterate,
you have to keep that fact spinning around
in accessible memory up here in your head
for as long as you need it.
But, if you can read and write,
you just scribble it down on a scroll.
And then, you have no incentive
to remember that information.
Thus say the doomsdayers, writing weakens the mind.
They said the same thing about the printing press.
They said the same thing about the Internet.
Back in 1814, when British soldiers were setting fire
to the Library of Congress,
the Central Collection had about 3000 books in it.
Today, that's more like 35,000,000 books,
and that's just the tip of the iceberg.
Google has indexed gigabytes of information,
from particle physics to post-colonial literature,
to pro wrestling, to the history of Pokemon.
I mean, the Game of Thrones Wikis alone
have got to be staggering.
Winter is coming.
It's easier now than ever to access information,
but the gold standard remains a formal education.
And around the world,
people are pursuing degrees in record numbers.
So the future of education has got to be more
than just information right?
Some advances will come
in what is known as personalized learning.
That's where adaptive tutor software
follows a student and fixes misunderstandings in real time.
Not just from test to test, but from step to step.
And neuroscience is gonna play a big role too.
Not just in helping us learn more
about how the brain learns,
but in developing new tools to learn as well.
Imagine a future where we download information
directly to our brains, matrix-style,
through procedures like decoded neurofeedback.
I mean, why would you sit all day
in a big dusty library,
when you can just zap your brain
and get the knowledge that way?
But isn't the real secret of education
learning how to learn not just what bits of data
are up in your head.
I think it's really important that we teach students
how to navigate all the information
they're going to encounter,
whether it's on the Internet, or somewhere else.
In informal education
I see specialization being a big deal.
It already is, I mean in areas like health,
you have to specialize.
Maybe a couple hundred years ago
you could know everything there is to know about medicine,
but today, you have to focus on something very specific
like a body part or a disease
to truly be an expert in your field.
And also the future of education will be how we learn.
What class do you put after lunch?
What size room should you use?
What color scheme is important for learning?
No matter how easy it is for us to get information,
I think the craving for education's never going to leave us.
Because education is more than information,
it's about becoming an intellectual member of society.
It's about learning not just what other people
have discovered, but how to discover things yourself.
That's something technology is never going to replace.
Technology might be able to put answers into our hands,
but it's coming up with the questions
that generates actual wisdom.