I was listening to the Freakonomics podcast today and they talked about a pilot program in New York called school of one. The genesis of this program was that in objective measures the school system was doing so poorly it needed to be changed.
According to Arthur Levine
This concept uses the same concept that Pandora uses for music. Find the best modality that kids learn a concept. Pretty amazing idea which makes me wonder how that could be applied to other things (specifically in my industry healthcare).
Tim Westergreen Pandora's Founder
According to Arthur Levine
Today's schools are an anachronism. They resemble the assembly lines of the industrial era, when they were conceived. Groups of 25 to 30 children, beginning at age five, are moved through 13 years of schooling, attending 180 days each year, and taking five major subjects daily for lengths of time specified by the Carnegie Foundation in 1910. These schools are time-based -- all children are expected to master the same studies at the same rate over the same period of time. They focus on teaching -- how long students are exposed to instruction, not how much they have learned. They are rooted in the belief that one size fits all -- all students can benefit equally from the same curriculum and methods of instruction.
Tim Westergreen Pandora's Founder
The first wave of the internet made everythign available. The second wave will make everything customizable.