Empowerment Through Self-Study
TED is my favorite online destination. It has been for years. Every now and then I stumble upon such a gem of a TED video that I have to share it. This is one of them.
Shimon Schocken is a former dean at Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzliya and has taught at NYU, Harvard and Stanford. He and Noam Nisan developed a freely available, open-source, self-paced program for learning applied computer science. This was one of the first successful open online courses and now courses based on the approach are widely offered by many educational institutions and in crowd-sourced settings.
What this project has proven to Schocken and Noam is that self-study of this kind can be the pathway towards a robust and deep education. At one point in the lecture Schocken says…
“Self-study, self-exploration, self-empowerment, these are the virtues of a great education.”
Oh so true. As a proponent of self-education of all sorts, I could not agree with him more.
Elsewhere in the presentation Schocken says…
“I’d like to say a few words about traditional college grading. I’m sick of it. We’re obsessed with grades, because we’re obsessed with data. And yet grading takes away all the fun from failing, and a huge part of education is about failing. Courage, according to Churchill, is the ability to go to from one defeat to another without losing enthusiasm, and Orwell said that mistakes are the portals of discovery. And yet we don’t tolerate mistakes and we worship grades. So we collect your B+s and A-s and we aggregate them into a number like 3.4 which is stamped on your forehead and sums up who you are. Well in my opinion we’ve gone too far with this nonsense and grading became degrading.”
Again, Schocken shows that he truly understands why we must rethink how we educate our children and ourselves if we’re to optimize education and empower individuals to live the contemporary life that requires a good education if that life is to be lived best.
Please take a few moment and watch this. I think you’ll be happy you did.