Bill Gates On Educating the World

theodp writes During February, Bill Gates is playing Perry White at The Verge, expounding on the big bets the Gates Foundation is making to improve the world over the next 15 years. One of those bets is that online classrooms can help the world catch up. Gates' vision of universal online education extends to those who struggle with basic literacy and currently lack online access, far beyond the reach of MOOCs like Coursera, EdX, and Udacity, which have enjoyed their greatest success with higher-level courses aimed at the middle class. "Gates' vision — a wave of smartphones that can act as ubiquitous, cheap computers — is central to solving this problem," explains The Verge's Adi Robertson. "And unfortunately, we're not there yet." But eventually, Gates is betting that a world-class education will only be a few taps away for anyone in the world. And that's when things get really interesting. "Before a child even starts primary school," Bill and Melinda Gates wrote in their Foundation's 2015 letter, "she will be able to use her mom's smartphone to learn her numbers and letters, giving her a big head start. Software will be able to see when she's having trouble with the material and adjust for her pace. She will collaborate with teachers and other students in a much richer way. If she is learning a language, she'll be able to speak out loud and the software will give her feedback on her pronunciation."

Comments

What's the evidence this will work?

[nbauman]

I don't think the people who come up with these schemes have ever sat a child in front of a computer, and watched while they tried to learn something from it.

The kind of information children can get that way is not much different than what you can get from reading a book. (Yes, I know the computer has sound and animation.) And for younger children, it's less than they can get by reading a book with their parents.

I would like to see published controlled studies that demonstrate that online classrooms can do as well as classrooms with a teacher.

Or that classrooms with a teacher plus Internet connections are better than classrooms with a teacher alone.

And they should be judged by the standard skills that good teachers are teaching students, not by their skills at answering computerized multiple-choice questions.

One good skill is learning how to tell whether a new innovation will work.

Re:What's the evidence this will work?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

It's particularly 'optimistic' given that we already have a fair amount of experience with what does (and doesn't) happen to children with access to books. With comparatively rare exceptions, mostly in slightly older children, not all that much.

It's pretty obvious that networked computers are, sooner or later, going to beat out printed textbooks(if only because it's getting cheaper to transmit a few megabytes to the ass end of nowhere than it is to ship tens of kilograms there, not necessarily because they are better, especially with the hardware in the cheap seats).

It is radically less obvious that our tiny monkey-spawn, with their few-hundred-million-years of experience in absorbing knowledge into their sponge-like brains by demanding interaction with nearby group members, are on the cusp of successfully being tutored by expert systems with some animated cartoon characters tossed on top.

If the trouble with teaching were a matter of text scarcity, Gutenberg would have mostly kicked its ass. That's not exactly what happened.

Re:What's the evidence this will work?

[blue trane]

Oh, right, children are owned, so you get to force them to do what you want.

But why not guide them to guide themselves. Let each kid learn in his idiosyncratic way, with a wide variety of tools to choose from?

Banana Republics

[Anonymous Coward]

Somewhere around 20,000 children die every day from poverty. That's a 9/11 (3,000) every few hours and a holocaust (6 million) every year.

But poverty isn't an impossible problem. Some countries have very little poverty: in such countries it's relatively easy to find a decent job that pays enough to live simply but comfortably. But then other countries have most of their population trapped in desperate poverty. In such countries, there's typically a a relatively small group of (extremely rich) people lording it over everyone else as a (mostly hereditary) dictatorship that is focused on government policies that keep itself in power and exploit everyone else.

So what does this have to do with the USA? Well, these dictatorships that are exploiting their own people often have close ties to certain rich and influential families in the USA. And these families use their influence on the US government to have the US government support the dictatorships. Sometimes the support is fairly limited - allowing the dictatorship to purchase military equipment to oppress their population and stay in power. Other times the US government provides more direct financial and military assistance to keep the dictatorship in power. The general term for such situations in banana republics.

In the USA, it is often said that freedom and democracy are fundamental human rights. And rights are supposed to be universal and irrevocable - not just for Americans. When Lincoln, in his Gettysburg Address, talked about the USA being founded on the principle of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, he meant ordinary people - not members of a small hereditary ruling class. Often you hear American politicians talk about promoting American interests in other countries when what they really mean is promoting the interests of a small number of rich and powerful Americans at the expense of ordinary people in other countries. This is a betrayal of one of the most fundamental American values: democracy.

So, getting back on topic, yes, education is important and, yes, online education has tremendous potential. But what's also needed is for countries like the USA to stop doing the banana republic thing - stop helping hereditary dictatorships keep their populations trapped in desperate poverty.

Seriously

[fred911]

We all have fun poking at Mr. Gates, warranted or not. And, we can all believe that the 31.6 billion dollars his foundation has GRANTED since inception internationally is not much of a personal sacrifice in relative terms. But a least he's taking a shot. Surely, figuring out how to grant money effectively is more than a full time job. Regardless of one's opinion of the effectiveness of his benevolent ventures, there's more than just a financial commitment here.

  I find it honourable and surely it has majorly affected recipients in a positive manner. Undoubtedly, he has made life changing or saving differences in this world. If you had the ability to do anything, anywhere, anytime, had the ability to make multiple errors, sans ANY change (personal, financial, etc), how long would it be before you would just disappear from any public exposure?

  If you plant seeds in every place in the world, some of them will produce fruit and some will fail. I see the motivation as benevolent and don't believe condemnation here is deserved or warranted.