TED
Уровень B2· 744 слова
So, Reed, education, which a lot of people I don't I don't know how many know how active you are in education, education philanthropy, charter schools, et cetera. What are you doing in that space?
>> Uh I'm on the board of Khan Academy. Um and generally I've been working for last 25 years uh to try to find ways to make, in particular, US schools, but some international uh work better um and have better outcomes for kids.
And I would say after a billion dollars in 25 years, um we're down below where I started. So, uh it's a hard problem.
>> And what do you, you know, we heard about the the risks of edtech, um but you are investing in in edtech, you're giving to edtech. What are your thoughts? What What's the tradeoff there? What Why do you continue to to potentially believe there?
>> You know, in the 18th century, most factories uh were steam engine driven. So, you have a big steam engine rotating uh rods and pulleys and belts and drove the factory, very efficient. And then electricity came in and they replaced the steam engine with an electric engine um thinking that it was going to help a
lot and productivity didn't increase at all and they were puzzled. And then they realized here the limiting factor is the power distribution system, all these spinning rods and mechanical power. And they ripped that out and just put in small electric motors for each device. Then they could move things
around, fit them in better cuz it wasn't aligned to spinning. Uh they could have variable speed, turn different motors on and off, uh and then um productivity increased dramatically. So, it's a classic uh kind of economic, you know, surprise lesson.
And it's always stuck with me because I think that's what we're seeing, which is we keep doing things to improve classroom education, but the fundamental power distribution is 25 kids stuck at the same level.
And that the friction that that creates, which is, you know, roughly a third of the kids are behind, a third of the kids are bored and above, and a third you're teaching to, is the fundamental friction in our mass education system.
Uh and the theory is if each of us had an individual human tutor, um so imagine you go to school, um you have your normal social activities, but when it comes to learning, uh you get an individual who's going to sit down with you, and um and then they could do Khan Academy, or they could do Color Book, or whatever's
appropriate, uh that learning would be massively increased. Um and there was a a famous study uh 40 years ago, Bloom, uh that documented this.
Uh and now a friend of mine, uh Ben Summers, is redoing that study but at much bigger scale. And I think what we're going to see is the key to much more learning, um where uh middle school kids know all of the high school curriculum, high school knows all of the college, much better outcomes, will be individualized
