I've decided to bootstrap the launch of the greatest school in human history by simply doing what I can right now for a group of people who decidedly merit a helping hand: those who have been injured in the service of our nation.
I want to help them get all the assistance they want in building a great future. I plan to approach university presidents asking for scholarship help. I am already collecting contact information for wounded warriors. I've spent several hours studying the Walter Reed Medical Center website, trying to get some understanding of what they are doing to help wounded veterans transition to civilization life. As soon as I am a bit better oriented, I'll contact the chaplain's office and see about working through them.
About half of the injured sent to Walter Reed are too badly hurt to return to military service. This means many thousands of young men and a few hundred young women who could use a hand in not so much adjusting to civilian life as learning how to create the future they want.
What particularly interests me is in helping those who want to become entrepreneurs. They seem to me to represent a pool of talent who can benefit from the sort of practical instruction I envision a state of the art Third Millennium school offering.
A hallmark of such instruction will be total personalization. On enrollment, the school's knowledge management system will begin to collect and analyze all digital information the student is willing to provide. This will form the basis of comprehensive evaluation and assessment that will shape the individualized curriculum for each student.
No two people know exactly the same things. Each student has a unique knowledge profile and individual interests, attitudes, skills, talents, goals and motivation to reach them. Ultimately, our new school will -- almost entirely automatically -- create a unique individual course of instruction for each learner. For example, the system will have a perfect picture -- derived from the student's email and other writing -- of the student's working vocabulary. We will know what the student knows -- and does not know.
Until we have this knowledge management system in place, we will simply try to strike step with each new learner and empathically try to discover all we can about them: what they like and don't like, what interests them, what their goals and beliefs are, what their attitude towards life is. I see little place for the factory model of education in the school we are building.
Until we can
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