Required reading
When I was much younger I had a girlfriend who was and still is a curator at the Louvre in Paris.
She was very much the product of a classical European education, including private school in Paris and a PhD from the Sorbonne.
I was the product of an American education.
When I met her, she had never met an American before.
Early in our relationship she rattled off a phrase in Greek.
I stared.
She looked at me.
“Don’t you speak Greek?” ske ask, a bit bewildered.
“No”, I replied.
“Then you speak Latin”.
No, I didn’t know Latin either.
She was troubled. A pause, then…
“I don’t understand. You don’t know Greek and you don’t know Latin. Didn’t you go to school?”
I did. But at Lawrence High School on Long Island I had studied film appreciation.
I appreciated spending the afternoon watching films… when I should have gotten a proper education.
But that was a long time ago.
Alas, since then, things have only gotten worse.
I taught at both Columbia University and at NYU, and I can tell you from my experience at those very prestigious universities that my students, while being very bright were also terribly under or uneducated.
It’s tragic.
Yesterday, I wrote about my nephew and niece in England, but while I am writing, I am also reading Jeff Jarvis’ excellent book, What Would Google Do?
It’s fairly straightforward to answer the question ‘what would Google do’ about running an airline or a newspaper or an online store.
I started to wonder, What Would Google Do about the appalling state of public education in America.
Jarvis makes a good run at this in his book, but even he concedes
Finally we arrive at the core, the real value of a university: teaching. Here I violate my own first law when I say that complete control of one’s education should not always belong to the student. For when we embark upon learning, we often don’t know what we don’t know. Or in Google terms, we don’t know what to search for. The teacher still has a role and a value.
I could not agree more.
And there are a limited number of great teachers in the world, and (as derived from yesterday’s blog), we should pay them a premium price.
But perhaps we can also move forward from the classroom, the chalkboard and the wooden desks by driving education through the potential that online offers.
Last year we did our yearly DNA2009 digital conference in Brussels. Jarvis was supposed to be one of the speakers, but instead of showing up in person, we skyped him in . (Let’s face it, it was cheaper). But I saw something remarkable.
There on the 40′ high screen, he dominated the room. It was better than real life. And he’s a great teacher.
With Travel Channel Academy, we have started to Skype in President and GM Pat Younge to address the classes, when he cannot make it in person. He sees them, they see him, and again, his image is on the big screen.
There is something very powerful when you combine big screen with a powerful personality. It’s what makes movie stars. 40 foot high faces. They become larger than life. If you can do the trick with empty headed actors (just look at Kevin Costner), what happens when you do it with someone who really has something to say?
It turns out, it’s a really powerful tool.
Great teachers are not just smart, they are compelling. They know how to capture and grab and hold an audience and excite a group.
Tony Robbins with content.
So now I am thinking, perhaps the future for the University (as Jarvis points out, education goes on forever now), is to marry the power of the web to the power of video.
Let’s find the very best teachers and lecturers in the country and video-ize them. Make them live and interconnected. Build a global real-time classroom with webcam and online participation
Do to schools what iTunes did to Tower Records.
