The School of Everything.
An online place where you can learn any subject that takes your fancy, and teach it if you have the expertise. You can link up with teachers and learners in your area, get a sense of a teacher’s style from looking at their scrapbook, which might include videos of tutorial sessions or workshops. Teachers register online and create a personal page giving information on their lessons, the qualifications offered and the format in which they teach - for example workshops or one-to-one sessions. Potential pupils find a tutor who’s right for them simply searching by subject, learning category and location. They can then send them a message, arrange to meet and begin learning their new subject. Essentially an online open marketplace, the School of Everything encourages real life learning! I can’t wait for the virtual learning tools to also join the platform. I’d then be able to learn Balinese drummer from a drummer in Bali! I recently took a MOOC (Massively Open Online Course), and aside from the time difference, enjoyed webinars (seminars cast over the web into which online learners listen in or Skype in) and telecasts (big telephone conference calls) with world leading teachers and other learners from across the globe.
Anyway - this is the best idea for education for a long time, emerging from the social enterprise ethos, and no doubt informed by the ideas expressed by Ken Robinson in All Our Futures: Creativity, Culture and Education (The Robinson Report) back in 1999; re-iterated in his book Out of Minds, and his TED talk Do Schools kill Creativity? and re-affirmed in his new book The Element
(watch the RSA video of Ken talking through the ideas in the book):
that people have infinite capacity for learning, but only want to learn what they’re passionate about and have aptitude for; and
often they know better what that is than school systems do!
Wake up UK government please.
This is a great opportunity for the cultural sector too: artists can offer masterclasses through the School for Everything, arts organisations can offer their learning programmes more widely. Teachers can choose to charge for lessons if they want to. Read more about the ethos here.
