Tour of various native american tribes at 10 00 a. M. Eastern following washington journal. 1 30, attend a Ground Breaking ceremony of the new Diplomacy Center in washington with former secretaries of state. Justicesme court alitoce thomas, samuel and sotomayor. Go tor complete schedule, cspan. Org. Ideast, from chicago week, a group of education researchers from around the ofntry discuss the future education and alternatives to traditional teaching. Minutes. 0 thank you. The end of school thats so cool to say. Thatt you guys to have experience, too. So ill say it and you say it back to me. Hows this. The end of school think about all the songs school. By the end of aptly named the end of school because when i think about school, i think containsuilding that all of the information, all of the knowledge and you go there, you get what you need, and then you leave. Whereas education really means to lead an individual out. School where you have to go and get all the somewhere elsego andhe idea of education leading yourself, and oneself out. There was a gentleman here this our who is featured in future Global Leaders summit yesterday, and his name is emerson sparks. And whats interesting, maybe even phenomenal, about emerson, path to education. You see, he was only 12 years he convinced his parents that he should be school. To drop out of the end of school could say it. You but he wasnt asking his parents emtion. His education. He simply felt he could what hecate better than was getting in traditional school. Now, his parents agreed and began his journey down the path of education outside of the classroom. He read lots of books, studied what made people and with them so and utilized a wealth of online resources. Only 12 years of age, he mogulnet. Com. Right, harry potter fans out there . Mugglenet was a harry that gained 50 million paid views every month and caught the eye of the author, j. K. Rawlings. Today at the age of 27, emerson and c. E. O. Of sparks media where hes created predictive science to forecast virollity of websites with a large success rate. Pubertyschool before isnt exactly what this talk is about but what emersons story only is the potential not for learning, but extremely learning beyond the walls of a classroom. So weve all heard of or maybe even experienced online courses like those offered, and maybe onlineceived an certificate or degree. Now, however, parents and toldren have resources complete grades k through 12 self guidedne curriculum. What . It the end of school . Maybe it is. It. E as we know its definitely going through a transformation and thats what to explore today, transformation. To rethink path traditional education started in the classroom and so i take you to my High School Chemistry class. Class, i pulled on the periodic table and had all pick an element. Thats where that he had they be for the whole semester. Youou were iron, id call effy. Say, hey,e gold, id you and then i asked my students to pick whether they wanted to be a solid, liquid or gas so the cool like, solids and some of the girls would be like, liquid. Geeks who are thinking where is she going with this would say gas. Youre 17 years old, you declare to your colleagues you want to be a gas. Somee going to hear sounds. So immediately id separate the class, solids, you sit in the front row. Your molecules are packed title will not move. U sometimes i would talk to them as smart asere not everybody else because they were solds. Rolled back a section of the classroom and said your molecules are a little you willad out but always take the shape of your container. The gases, of course, their molecules were all spread out in they had all the freedom the world. What does every 17yearold want more than anything . Freedom. The end of school right, gases,l youre free to move about. If i left the door open, they leave. They had everything. Well, immediately, the solids fair be like, that is not and id say then youve got to matter, or state of class mobility, we have to begin to change our state of mind. And our journey together will be to get the freedoms that we want. My kids did great. Of fun together. They scored very well on their tests. Student ofay another mine would come back and take me out to lunch. Lunch law. Ree and so the question was, what are you doing with your science . Is your truth, right . Science is the study of truth. The brighteste of kids i worked with came to see said what are i you doing with your science . He said im working with chemicals. Excited, are you smashing atoms . No im working in cleaning services at one of the Hotels Downtown and youd be surprised about what people dont know about the basic properties of ammonia. My heart breaks. This kid was brilliant, probably smartest student i had every worked with. He could have figured out cold was basically telling me he was cleaning toilets. Then i knew something had to change. I wear my heart on my sleeve, he could see i was upset and he said, sandy, i dont think youre listening to me. Youve always taught us that leadership is making others. Ities for and it doesnt matter whether lecture lab coat or hall, im teaching, and thats what you told us to do. So on the way back it my office, i knew this was a defining moment in my life. My best friend and i worked at gotsame organization and we our Heads Together and we said we have to change this. Now we Love Technology because creative, it doesnt matter what you look like, its a teachingcy and by programming we could write the rules. It was also 1998. There were dotcoms popping up everywhere. There was a tremendous here. Unity but the really cool thing was that theres a core set of that sit between technology and leadership that so that folks could not only get great jobs in could apply those skills to the communities we we could be change agents in our businesses, Building Systems that would change the nature of business, but we could also be agents of change in our communities. By using empathy and reciprocity all of thency and things inner city kids are building and with developing in their life by overcoming adversity. So that was it. That was the moment. Now its 15 that was the moment. It is now 15 years later and we have a 90 basement rate for graduate and the average earning increase is over 300 . 27 of our alums are homeowners. Thank you. Just a little piece about the power of education. About a lead change. I want to introduce our next speaker. What did education look like when there were no classrooms . No core curriculum or textbooks. Is it is a believe that we will teach ourselves what we need to survive and thrive. It teaches evolutionary and developmental educational psychology. Please welcome me in joining dr. Peter gray. Welcomingjoin me in dr. Peter gray. Thank you and what a pleasure to be here. What a great topic. What it means is i am interested in human nature. I am interested in how that came about. And most particularly, in that asked fact, childrens nature that lead them to become educated. The idea i am here to talk about is this. That children are biologically designed to educate themselves. They do it joyfully through play, questioning. We dont need to educate children. All we need to do is provide the for their playfulness and curiosity. Naturale been honed by selection to serve a function of education. That we take those abilities away when we put them in school and prevent them from educating themselves. My argument is if we provide the conditions the children need to educate themselves, we really can do away with schools as we know them. Thinkingou might be that i am crazy. More kindly might be thinking that i am a hopeless idealist. I am hardheaded realist. The idea that im talking about today is supported by a great deal of empirical observation and research which is elaborated but here i have a few minutes to try to convince you it is worth thinking about. By looking at hunter gatherer cultures. Some people have survived the hunter gatherers into modern times. A graduate student of mine and i conducted a survey about 10 different anthropologists that studied seven different hunter gatherer cultures among them on three different continents. Them questions about how children became educated in that culture. How much timeas do children, in the culture you observe, have to play and explore on their own. Got all the time was that the children and the teenagers are free to play and explore away from adults all day and in theday process, they become educated. How do they play . What forms do they play . Play at thet they very activities that are hardest to learn and are most important to learn for success in their culture. Hunting and gathering and finding roots and digging them up. They play at building things like Musical Instruments and. Hey play with music and dance the other thing is that they have never seen writer, happier, more resilient and selfreliant children. The question is, could this work in our culture . Think of glance you course it cant. There are things that they dont learn like reading, writing, and arithmetic. It is not easy for children in our culture to be exposed to all the skills and knowledge thats important to the culture. I might think it wouldnt work except for the fact that for many years, i have been an observer and researcher at the Valley School in massachusetts. This school was founded in 1968. It has about 150 students at any given time. It has about eight Staff Members elite education, it is eminently affordable. The other things about the school is the way it is administered and the educational philosophy of the school. The school operates as a participatory democracy. All the rules are made by a School Meeting in which each student and each staff member has one vote and the rules are enforced by a Judicial Committee which is modeled after the jury system of our larger culture. A couple of teenagers in one staff member. Whether it is a staff member or student, if they violate the rules, they are brought up before the Judicial Committee. That is the way to school operates. The school offers no curriculum, no tasks, no grades, no substitutes for grades. It expects children to decide themselves what they want to learn, how they want to learn, what they want to do. If you were to go through the school at any given time of day, you might see scenes like on this slide. You would see children in the art room making various kinds of art projects. You might find somebody cooking in the kitchen. You might find somebody in the photo lab. Playing in one of the music practice rooms. Young people may be playing games such as chess. Outdoors, you might find people playing down by the brook or fishing in the pond or playing a game on the f x field or strumming a guitar and talking and singing. You might find people building a. Nowman or skating on that pond you might see them playing in more traditional playground ways. The key to learning at this school is age mixing. The children are not segregated by age. The older children are naturally kids andthe younger the little kids are drawn to the big kids. The young ones want to be able to read if they see older ones reading. They want to be able to climb trees. They also learn by interacting with the older ones. In age mixed games, the children are scaffolding the behavior of the younger ones, bringing them up to higher levels of performance. Children at the school learn to read because they play games that involve reading with kids that know how to read. The kids more or less teach them to read not because they are butng to teach them to read b because they need to do so to play the game. Say that the advantage of age mixing also goes the other way. The older children are learning to care and be nurturing and be leaders by helping the younger ones in this. They are also being continuously inspired by the creativity and the energy of the younger ones. It is as valuable for the younger kids as the older ones. The best evidence that this works comes from followup studies to the graduates. Quite a number of years ago, i along with a colleague conducted one such study. Of thed essentially all people that graduated from that school, almost all of them agreed to be in the study and we found that they were doing very well out there in the world. They had no problems in Higher Education if they chose to go that way and they were in a wide variety of careers. They were very satisfied with their lives. Many of them were pursuing careers that were direct of childhood play. For example, one of the graduates was a machinist and an inventor. There was another that loved both who was now captain of the cruise ship. There was another who was fascinated by computers who developed his own software company. There was another who loved making golf clubs who is now a pattern maker in the high fashion industry. People who have time to really pursue what they like to play could find ways of making a living at that. They are doing what they are interested in doing. Studious other studies have been published as books. They came to essentially the same conclusion as we did. Is replicable. Mostly in this country, some in other countries. Hear ishe closest to school. Grass sudbury seem to depend on socioeconomic class. It doesnt seem to depend on the particulars of the students personality. Now here i want to describe the conditions that i think are common to the hunter gatherer optimizing childrens abilities to educate themselves. The first condition is a clear understanding that education is the childs responsibility. That they areknow responsible for their education, they take that responsibility. Believe thatto somebody elses responsible for their education and all they have to do is do what they are told. They tend to do that in a minimal way and dont take responsibility for their education. Unlimited opportunity to play, explore, and pursue their own interest. Unlimited time. It takes time to try out different things. It takes time to get bored and overcome boredom and find your passion. It takes unlimited amount of time. Opportunity to play with the tools of the culture an. Those would be bows and arrows and knives and fire and digging sticks. They love to play with computers. They know this is the tool of the culture and they need to spend a lot of time with it so it becomes an extension of their own body. Access to a variety of caring adults that are helpers. How important that last part is. The last person you want to go to to help you learn something is somebody who is evaluating you. You are nervous about that person. You go with more of a frame of mind of trying to impress that person with how much you know and not to say that i dont know this and i like some help. Children, the the Staff Members are much more able to be helpers to the children than teachers in a Typical School could be. Free age mixing. That is absolutely key to the school. The school would not work if it were children all the same age because children dont have much to learn from others who are the same age. They learn from children who are older and children that are younger than themselves. Immersion in a stable, moral, democratic community. The hunter gatherer band are in their own different ways, democratic communities. They are communities in which every child knows that their ideas and their actions influence the others involved in the community. So they are growing up in a setting where they feel responsible not just for themselves but for the Community Within which they are developing. And that is an extraordinarily important aspect of education and one which is almost completely ignored in our regular schools. What i want you to notice is that none of these conditions exist in standard schools. Its as if we deliberately take away from children everything that they need to educate himself when we put them in school and we tried very inefficiently and very and effectively to educate them. So im going to conclude this way. I am absolutely sure that some day, people are going to look back at us now and they are going to say, what were those people thinking . Why on earth did they ever believe that coercion is essential for education . Believing that you have to force people to eat or force people to breathe. Think earth did they ever that standardization such that people regardless of their interests or predilections should all learn the same thing in the same way . Be tested by the same test . What kind of crazy idea is that. I am sure we will reach the day where people will look back and say that. I hope we reach that day sooner rather than later. I would like to see it come in my lifetime. I hope that some of you or maybe all of you will play a role in bringing that about before too long. And with that, i thank you for your kind attention. I thank you for being here. [applause] and bless you all. Lets have another round of applause. Wasnt that so cool . All right, our next speaker has dedicated his career into taking the ideas we just heard about into action. Outlandish for his and on spiraling educational tactics that utilize what is right in our own backyards to teach kids some pretty high powerful stuff. He is a doityourself neuroscientist and the founder of backyard brains, an toanization that develops help kids discover neuroscience and how the brain works. The subjects of these experiments . Lets just put it this way. Warning, live cockroaches will be used in the following demonstration. Lets bring him out. [applause] hello, chicago. Its good to be here. Im from michigan so i always love giving talks. It you guys are good people so im excited about this. Am a neuroscientist it this talk will be about and are a science and exciting changes happening in the education system. The democratization of science. Aty now allow us to build low cost, tools that used to only be done in a lab. What we are going to learn about today is that this change is happening and we are seeing it happen making citizen scientists out of us. The history of what it used to be to be a neuroscientist. This is a brain that i studied and i had to go to a graduate school, spending six years in a research lab getting a phd just to get access to the tools to understand how the brain works. That seems a bit silly. Is goingf five of us to have a neurological disorder. We have no cures for these diseases yet. I dedicate my life to study the brain just to be able to understand how the brain works. Example, if you want to learn astronomy, you dont have. O go to your phd it you can buy a cheap telescope and understand a bit how the planets move. Can sit thereyou and maybe you become interested. But with biological sciences, there is nothing like that. Theres no cheap telescope for the brain to be able to allow to get access to the same tools the professionals do. W