.comment-link {margin-left:.6em;}

Future Imperative

What if technology were being developed that could enhance your mind or body to extraordinary or even superhuman levels -- and some of these tools were already here? Wouldn't you be curious?

Actually, some are here. But human enhancement is an incredibly broad and compartmentalized field. We’re often unaware of what’s right next door. This site reviews resources and ideas from across the field and makes it easy for readers to find exactly the information they're most interested in.

Name:

The future is coming fast, and it's no longer possible to ignore how rapidly the world is changing. As the old order changes -- or more frequently crumbles altogether -- I offer a perspective on how we can transform ourselves in turn... for the better. Nothing on this site is intended as legal, financial or medical advice. Indeed, much of what I discuss amounts to possibilities rather than certainties, in an ever-changing present and an ever-uncertain future.

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Survival of the Fittest -- In Education

*
I found this article in the Boston Globe on the tutoring of both very young kids and college-bound SAT test takers. (Note: You may have to register (for free) if you try to read this Globe article more than once.)
Hayden Delatorre sat quietly at a table before his tutor in North Andover. He carefully studied the flashcards, tried an answer, got it wrong, looked up, and tried again.

His tutor grinned broadly and nodded.

''He's doing great," gushed his mother, Kristin, watching him through the glass from an adjoining room. ''He's way ahead of where his brother was at that age."

Hayden is not falling behind his playmates. He hasn't even gotten a report card. Hayden, age 4, represents the next big wave for the $1.2 billion private tutoring business.

There's some interesting comments in this piece about the competitive nature of the tutoring market. One SAT tutor was receiving $365 an hour before he dropped out of teaching directly two years to run his company. He now has six offices and will begin franchising next year.

This demand for high-quality education focused on tests, of course, is a result of parents who want their kids to go into the best possible universities available -- educational experiences ironically known for being considerably broader based and more challenging than cramming schools for exams. But there you go.

Someone might conceivably see a market for radically advanced educational alternatives -- not ones meant merely to get your child into a school where s/he can rise to the level of 21st Century global competition, but which help that child leap beyond the first tier of their future competitors.

How? Developing the ability to master any skill with dramatic speed, discovering vast inventive gifts in terms of both technology and socio-economic innovations... even art. Dramatically enhancing their basic intelligence, and core mental abilities -- not just creativity and learning ability, mathematical facility, memory... and even the drive to learn, to master, to triumph in every aspect of their lives. In other words, by fully utilizing the accelerated learning and creativity resources we already have access to. Which are substantial.

Children given these gifts might find they've been something considerably more impressive than a Harvard education. Difficult though that may be to believe.


Future Imperative

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home