Modern Day Education: Learning in the Information Age

Fellow Interintellects Katrina Dela Cruz and Mind Apivessa continue their exploration into the history, present, and future of education.
Our past salons on education have shown us that while our values on education may differ, our experiences of “the educational system” are quite similar. Parents praising straight A’s. Peers aspiring for Ivy League degrees. Information to memorize for the sole purpose of high-stakes testing, with little opportunity for application.

It’s resoundingly clear that the “one size fits all” system is outdated and leaves students ill-prepared for challenges in the information age which call for a greater agency, creativity, and critical thinking in navigating a more globally connected world. This becomes more obvious as information becomes one Google search away. From Josh Richard joining Remus Capital at the age of 18 to May Kanokwaranawan taking her dessert company to IPO as a self-taught pastry chef, we see self-taught experts everywhere around us. With the expansion of options in how we learn and what we learn, many start to raise questions around the return on investments in traditional education, hence why we see “X is disrupting education” headlines and tweet threads every other day.

As new solutions and options continue to form in response, it’s important to equip ourselves with an understanding of what we expect from our educational systems so that we can make informed choices. In this salon, together we’ll ask the questions:

• How has the internet changed how students learn in K-12 and higher ed classrooms?
• What options for learning do we now have available to us as students? as parents? as life-long learners?
• How has the internet changed the expectations of our educational institutions?
• What are the latest terms describing approaches to education and what do they mean (e.g. student-centric, personalized learning, peer-to-peer, cohort-based, passion-based, etc.)?
• Are there themes in the history of education that continue to repeat themselves today?

Join us in understanding the state of education, and exploring ways in which our decisions impact it today.

which our decisions impact it today.

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Reading List:

• HundrED 2020 Yearbook https://cdn.hundred.org/uploads/report/file/10/hundred_yearbook_2020_digital.pdf
• The Atlantic – American’s Not-So-Broken Education System https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2016/06/everything-in-american-education-is-broken/488189/
• Seth Godin – Stop Stealing Dream https://sethgodinwrites.medium.com/stop-stealing-dreams
• Crisis on Campus by Mark Taylor https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/8459423-crisis-on-campus