“A Teacher that Can Be Replaced By a Machine, Should Be.”

Thanks to an email from Robb Allen, I got to watch a fascinating TED talk that bolsters my position that the best way to fix our “education” system is to take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.

Please pay close attention to Dr. Sugata Mitra (who blogs here) and his experiments in education around the world.  As he says in this post:

My work with self organised learning by children shows that groups of children can learn to use computers and the Internet to answer almost any question. This happens everywhere and is independent of what language they speak, where they live and how rich or poor they are. All they need is free access and the liberty to work in unsupervised groups.

And here he shows that work:

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf
As long as we don’t pull the whole thing down around our ears in the next decade or so, there may be some small hope of making it to the Singularity.

Ennui

–noun
a feeling of utter weariness and discontent resulting from satiety or lack of interest; boredom: The endless lecture produced an unbearable ennui.

I haz it.