INSPIRED NEWS & IDEAS
Others Making the Case for WonderLab
Don’t just take our word for it. Many cutting edge thinkers and researchers are aligned with WonderLab’s vision for the future of education.
Don’t just take our word for it. Many cutting edge thinkers and researchers are aligned with WonderLab’s vision for the future of education.
“Changing Education Paradigms,” Sir Ken Robinson | RSA Animate, October 2010
The problem is that the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual culture of the enlightenment, and in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution… And this is deep in the gene pool of public education—that there are really two types of people: academic and non-academic. Smart people and non-smart people. And the consequence of that is that many brilliant people think they’re not, because they’ve been judged against this particular view of the mind. “The Global One Room School House,” John Seely Brown | Digital Media and Learning Conference, September 2012 What does it mean to become an entrepreneurial learner? This does not mean how to become an entrepreneur. This really means, how do you constantly look around you, all the time, for new ways, new resources, to learn new things. That's the sense of entrepreneur that I'm talking about, that now in the network age, almost gives us unlimited possibility. “My Education in Home Schooling,” Quinn Cummings | Wall Street Journal, July 27, 2012 “With each passing year, the division between home schooling and institutional schooling will continue to dissolve. We will go to the education, and the education will come to us. The bad news is that it doesn't work that way yet. The good news is that we get to build it.” “Build a School in the Cloud,” Sugata Mitra | TED Talk, February 2013 “If you allow the educational process to self organize, then learning emerges… It’s not about making learning happen—it’s about letting learning happen. The teacher sets the process in place, then stands back in awe as learning happens.” “Need a Job? Invent It,” Thomas Friedman | New York Times, March 30, 2013 “We teach and test things most students have no interest in and will never need, and facts that they can Google and will forget as soon as the test is over,” said Wagner. “Because of this, the longer kids are in school, the less motivated they become. Gallup’s recent survey showed student engagement going from 80 percent in fifth grade to 40 percent in high school. More than a century ago, we ‘reinvented’ the one-room schoolhouse and created factory schools for the industrial economy. Reimagining schools for the 21st-century must be our highest priority. We need to focus more on teaching the skill and will to learn and to make a difference and bring the three most powerful ingredients of intrinsic motivation into the classroom: play, passion and purpose.” “How a Radical New Teaching Method Could Unleash a Generation of Geniuses,” Joshua Davis | WIRED, October 15, 2013 “And yet the dominant model of public education is still fundamentally rooted in the industrial revolution that spawned it, when workplaces valued punctuality, regularity, attention, and silence above all else. (In 1899, William T. Harris, the US commissioner of education, celebrated the fact that US schools had developed the “appearance of a machine,” one that teaches the student “to behave in an orderly manner, to stay in his own place, and not get in the way of others.”) We don’t openly profess those values nowadays, but our educational system—which routinely tests kids on their ability to recall information and demonstrate mastery of a narrow set of skills—doubles down on the view that students are material to be processed, programmed, and quality-tested.” “How the Power of Interest Drives Learning,” Annie Murphy Paul | KQED Mind/Shift, November 4, 2013 “Parents, educators and managers can also promote the development of individuals’ interests by supporting their feelings of competence and self-efficacy, helping them to sustain their attention and motivation when they encounter challenging or confusing material. Weaker learners may need more of this assistance to find and maintain their interests, while stronger learners can be pushed in the direction of increasing autonomy and self-direction. The goal in each case is to cultivate interests that provide us with lasting intellectual stimulation and fulfillment, interests that we pursue over a lifetime with vigor and zest.” "Chasing Beautiful Questions," Warren Berger | Spirit Magazine, April, 2014 "[His] story...changed the way I think about questions. I've learned they can do more than make a conversation interesting: Questions can transform the world as we know it -- if they're the kinds of ambitious and "beautiful" questions Phillips asked." "It Takes a Mentor," Thomas L. Friedman | New York Times, September 9, 2014 "Graduates who told Gallup that they had a professor or professors “who cared about them as a person — or had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams and/or had an internship where they applied what they were learning — were twice as likely to be engaged with their work and thriving in their overall well-being,” Busteed said." |