BIG IDEA: To supply India’s booming economy with millions of young workers who come from rural and disadvantaged backgrounds. Bhatia’s company, Aspire, trains high-school and college students to become English-speaking, tech-savvy, problem-solving whiz kids ready for hire. The company then connects students to jobs, often in the technology and service sectors, at major corporations such as IBM, Accenture, Wipro, and Infosys. This year, Aspire will work with roughly 33,500 students at 45 universities and institutions across 25 Indian cities. “About 600 million Indians are under the age of 25,” Bhatia says. “And there are 40 million unemployed people, with the largest share being high-school and college graduates. Clearly, the students are crying for employability.”
Scot Osterweil, research director of MIT’s Education Arcade, is one of the masterminds behind a new science game made for the Smithsonian Institution. The game is a National Science Foundation-funded experiment in “alternative science education.”
See how this grand experiment in “alternative science education” is planned to unfold over the next two months, right here.
The future approaches: Georgia state senator Tommie Williams says legislators in the Peach State are toying with the idea of introducing iPads to middle school classrooms as a substitute for textbooks. Quoth the senator and our own analysis:
Georgia State spends about $40 million a year on textbooks “and they last about seven years. We have books that don’t even mention 9/11.” Digital editions of textbooks can be quickly updated as new prints are released, which is much simpler than recalling millions of physical paper textbooks. And there’s no shipping fees associated with digital textbooks—everything can be handled over a school’s wireless Net system, securely. There’ll be fewer problems with theft or lost books, and when a student leaves the school, they’ll simply pass their iPad back to the staff and it’ll be ready for a new student, with the latest books already installed.
Great idea—that is, if the proper barriers are enacted to stop kids from wasting time in Home Ec on Facebook. That kind of learning is a little too progressive for us.
The elite has become obsessed with fixing public schools. Whether it’s Ivy League graduates flocking to Teach for America or new-money foundations such as Gates, Broad, and Walton bestowing billions on the cause, “for the under-40 set, education reform is what feeding kids in Africa was in 1980,” Newark, New Jersey, education reformer Derrell Bradford told the Associated Press last fall.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is the latest entrepreneur to join this rush. He announced in late September that he planned to donate $100 million to the city of Newark to overhaul its school system.
In our February issue, we examine 13 Radical Ideas on How To Spend 100 Million to Really Save Education.
In light of all this reform talk, we recently took to Twitter to ask: How Would YOU Spend $100 Million to Save Education? Follow the tag #fixedu to see real-time answers.
Pictured above: Heads of state in order of succession for the US and China, and their college majors. Notice anything? Full article here. Via: markcoatney & afternoonsnoozebutton
