Hmm, my background. Well, I spent 25 years from K-Ph.D. in the system myself. I was a tenure track Professor of Computer Science, granted only for one semester (til some VC money convinced me to leave it which was the best thing I ever did). My wife spent 27 years from K-to-M.D. She’s a Professor of Pediatric Orthopaedic surgery that actually prescribed Ritalin to a lot of kids out of Johns Hopkins (the center of the “epidemic” on the evil East Coast) for about 12 years. I’ve got three kids in primary, middle, and high school right now. Two in Catholic schools and one in the public system. But, I’m not a Professor of Education pandering to the Dept. of Education for grant money, so you can discount my opinion and the rest of this post.

What I hear in this video is a bunch of anecdotal examples strung together to reach an at best specious conclusion. Let’s go through it item by item shall we? I’ll paraphrase what I think are the important points in this presentation.

1) How do we educate our children for the new economy when we can’t anticipate what that economy will look like?

The implication here is that there’s actually something wrong with our system. My impression is that we have the most creative entrepreneurial economy in the world. Certainly the creativity and entrepreneurial nature of our economy should be well suited to adapting to changes better than one that is less so. Whatever we are doing in our educational system as part of a person’s overall development seems to have gotten us to a pretty good place?

2) How do we incorporate cultural identity into education in the face of globalization.

While its certainly the case we don’t want to strip people of their cultural identity, I don’t see the distinction here. Education is (or should be) about infusing mainly factually oriented knowledge into a persons brain. I don’t know that cultural identity, other than perhaps making people aware of different cultures, is really relevant.

3) He then asserts that whats been done in the past is bad because its “alienating” kids.

I was a major nerd and very alienated in high school. I’m not sure I know anyone, including the quarterback of the football team that didn’t feel alienated at some level. However, now that I’m an adult, I understand that that alienation had very little to do with the educational system and more to do with just growing up and dealing with puberty and socialization, etc.

4) College doesn’t guarantee a job anymore

Um, when was there a guarantee of anything in life?

5) The educational system was designed in a “different age”

Its bad cuz its not new I suppose.

6) The inherent division of people by academic “smartness” is builtin to the system and is bad because in automatically disenfranchises those that are not “smart”

Oh my God. Now we can’t discriminate people based on whether their smart or not?

7) This inherent segregation has resulted in an “epidemic” of Ritalin prescriptions

How do you make this assertion? How can you correlate the prescription of Ritalin to the fact that some people may have more academic aptitute than others?

He claims that information overstimulation is also causal, however, this is simplistic at best. He then makes this incredible leap where he “observes” some correlation between ADHD diagnoses and the use of standardized testing! Nothing to back this up, just his “observation.”

Since he gets to make all kinds of anecdotal observations, I’ll add mine here, or more specifically, my wife’s. Ritalin is a babysitter. Its more correlated to broken homes and poverty and large class sizes than anything else. If we get to make wild assertions, mine will be that its parents not spending enough time with their kids for whatever reason thats more to blame.

8) He then goes onto claim that the “arts” are the primary victim of this Ritilan explosion.

He defines “aesthetic experience” as something that makes you “fully alive,” whatever that means. I felt pretty alive when I figured out differential equations and got my computer programs running but those aren’t considered the “arts.”

9) He asserts that Ritilan is an “anesthetic experience” which is antithetical to his hand waving assertion about the arts being victimized.

This is just putting words together for effect from what I can tell. It doesn’t mean what he is asserting it means.

10) Education is organized like factories

He asks why we put kids through school based on age. Well, duh, cuz their brains develop as they get older? Like many of these kinds of talks, they boil down to the assembly line nature of the system. However, I didn’t hear a single proposed concrete solution in this talk that would be an alternative. How do we change a system that is educating 10s of millions at the same time? Seems like no matter what you do, you’re going to have to have some sort of assembly line characteristics aren’t you?

11) Standardization, with standardized testing as the example, is bad.

See my comment on discrimination based on smarts. Come on people, we’re not all the same. We have to figure out who can do what somehow. Sure the people that aren’t “smart” are going to be “marginalized,” but what do we do instead? Should we let people who can’t add be engineers? Should we allow people who can’t play to be musicians?

12) Divergent thinking is necessary (but not sufficient) for creative thinking

He goes on this wild train of thought about how 6-year olds are genius because their brains come up with wild incoherent connections between thing and that that goes away as we get older. Well, the next time a toddler tells me I can fly or that the rock in the driveway can power a city, I guess I had better listen more closely eh?

I mean this is as close as he comes to actually proposing a solution, that we should organize our system around “divergent thinking.” But he himself states that its not sufficient to support creativity so is a bit of a leap to restructure the entire system around that don’t you think?

13) Once he starts to generalize that academic distinctions are bad, he asserts that most great learning happens in groups.

As I stated, learning is about infusing knowledge into and individual’s brain. That means that ultimately the individual must do the learning. Some people learn better in groups I suppose, but thats hardly universal. I, for example, did almost none of my learning in a group setting.

I’ll conclude with what I said first. IMHO, this presentation is very weak. It seems to me to be overly critical with little basic logic to back it up. I would require assertions that our entire educational system needs to be reformed to be presented with a much more coherent, well supported argument than I see here. But hey, he did have some fancy animations to go with it!