Education is a topic I did not expect Garry Kasparov to discuss in Deep Thinking. However, I thought he made a couple of interesting comments about the matter in the context of how our ongoing shift toward machine intelligence will challenge education to make adjustments and I want to highlight those challenges today.
One observation I agreed with was that kids tend to learn much faster than allowed by traditional education methods. The ongoing process of information becoming increasingly available through new devices is an opportunity for educators to change their teaching methods and take advantage of this observation. If teachers can teach kids how to learn, it gives every student the freedom to learn at his or her own pace using the bounty of new tools and technologies at their fingertips.
The other thought I liked was how the next major innovation in education is likely to come from developing countries. This tends to be true for innovation in general – it comes from places that have no need to maintain a status quo (1). As education systems worldwide consider the ramifications of students having immediate access to all the answers, look for the best new questions to come from the countries that have no commitment to the questions they are asking of their students today.
Footnotes / money, money, money…
1. M-Pesa basically means texting money
This reminded me in a way of how M-Pesa is a popular way of transferring money in many countries yet it seems like Venmo is the closest equivalent we’ll ever have in the USA. The difference as it applies to the thought above is that Venmo does a better job of maintaining the status quo in the USA than M-Pesa because it leverages Paypal (an existing method of money transfer) rather than text messaging (which would be a new concept in the USA).
