Flipping the script -

Couple of good links ...

Teachers as Mentors, Working For Students: Salman Khan “calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script — give students video lectures to watch at home, and do “homework” in the classroom with the teacher available to help”. 

US Undergrad Education Hits Rock Bottom: The NYT explains why undergraduate teaching in the US is now essentially worthless — it has become an expensive day-care program for unemployable youths.

And a quote- 

It Takes That Long to Break a Child’s Will: From Derrick Jensen “Even when I was young it seemed to me that most classroom material could be presented and assimilated in four, maybe five, years… I’ve since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years.  It takes that long to sufficiently break a child’s will.  It is not easy to disconnect children’s wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure.  Less time wouldn’t do it, and in fact, those who are especially slow go to college.  For the exceedingly obstinate child there is graduate school.”

All from Dave Pollard @ How to Save the World - I would also recommend Dave's book below -

Creative organizations

Good piece from Sir Ken Robinson in Fast Company magazine -
The Principles of Creative Leadership

This is one of those areas where if you read what the CEO's say they need and compare it to how most of them run their enterprises and compare it with the structure and emphasis of the education and training institutions in theory preparing students to fill those needs... you see massive gaps.

How well do grades on standardized test prepare students to answer the challenge from these 3,000 CEO's?
"There was a report published in the fall by IBM called Capitalizing on Complexity. It was based on a survey of 3,000 CEOs of for-profit companies, non-profits, social entrepreneurship and public sectors from around the world asking what's on their minds. What was interesting about it was that this year the CEOs said they had three overall priorities. The first priority was running organizations that can respond to complexity because the world is getting more complex every day. Second was how to run organizations that are adaptable and resilient to these changes. But the top priority was how to promote creativity in organizations."

Creating Jobs

Really good piece by Ed Morrison on creating jobs - I didn't take offense at the NPR piece he chastises in this, but I could see how one could, it is cynical and perhaps we do have enough cynicism around -

"What do we know about "how to create a job?" - Ed Morrison