by Mike Van Schoiack
My company is doing great – the safe steering wheel is now standard equipment in all vehicles world-wide, has already saved over a million lives and the number is rising by the tens of thousands every year. And I am becoming rich beyond my wildest dreams!
And yesterday, Barb, one of my ex-teacher/principal friends and her son, Andy, who has been in the “digital technology game” business for many years approached me with an exciting idea – a learning game that , in the process of playing the game figures out the learning style of the player and “self-adapts” the game, accordingly. The object is to maximize the gamer/student’s score based on ability, time, and proficiency. He has developed a couple of prototype games, one for a second grade student to learn multiplication principles and another for an 8th grade student to learn the difference between verbs and adverbs and their usage. They ran some “alpha tests” on groups of students with amazing results. They are looking for funding to develop these teaching games for use in schools. The potential market could be huge if they work half as well as the initial testing indicates. This is the most exciting investment opportunity I’ve had since my Safe Steering Wheel concept.
Ever since Obama approved, and expanded the DC voucher program 10 years ago after first rejecting it, the program has spread to every state with dramatic results. His ability to break through the special interest grip on education and to unleash the power of the market to education – has produced wonderful results. My grandkids and their generation are learning faster, better, and more than any group in the history of mankind, thanks to all of the progress made since his fateful decision in 2010. Learning is “hip” and our grandkids are having fun and look forward to their futures.
First there was the paradigm shift of the teacher being a lecturer, using books & blackboards as the tools of her trade. This occurred when Virtual Teach, a start-up company that is now bigger than MicroSoft, developed “teaching software” that divided learning into bite-size pieces and used “talent” coupled with media to teach each principle, one at a time. A few schools started using this software. This concept was a real winner, and the company grew. New ideas were added – adding multiple approaches to teach the principle to match the various learning styles and ability of each student. Testing is now a part of each Virtual Teach module creating a “learning map” for each student – not in a “general” sense, but a very detailed, specific mapping of each student’s progress for every principle. Learning is now a much more a science, with the skills and knowledge of each student well honed and charted and it occurs quicker, and more completely than ever before.
Secondly, at the urging of the education industry, fields were added to the Dewey Decimal System in to enable classification of Virtual Teaching Modules by learning style, grade level and effectiveness based on measured results. This made it possible to find learning modules best suited for each student. As a result, ferocious competition ensued resulting in the greatest life changing technology since the advent of the internet.
The role of the teacher changed from being a lecturer to more of a facilitator and tutor. But more tutors were needed. Here Obama came through again. During his second term, he used his bully pulpit to get a couple of states to allow seniors, like myself to be paid tutors for kids with special needs or who struggled with learning for other reasons. This idea really works – it provides income to some who really need the money and/or a sense of worth and it gives a lot of troubled young people a “grandparent” figure in their lives that helps them in life as well as academics. As a result, crime rates are now at a historic low, graduation rates are now up to 98%, and the US is now the K-12 academic leader, innovator and supplier of the world. Schools are smaller, about 50% private, parent participation is higher, more than 50% of the “sports” are academic and each kid gets a “custom” education. The ideal of an “equal” education has changed to “the best possible education for each student”.
Now, being on the ground floor of what could be the next big innovation in education is beyond my wildest dreams! Is America great, or what?? What’s that noise……oh the alarm buzzer….damn, was this just a dream??????
Follow on notes to reader. Barb is a real person and friend, now retired principle and educator extraordinaire who I’ve been trying warm up to the idea of vouchers. Andy really is her son and he really is working in the gaming business. The Safe Steering Wheel is a patented concept (#8,631,893) I am working on “in my retirement”. The rest is just examples of ideas I think would quickly become reality if the grip of government control could be removed from education. Nobody can predict what would really happen because because the best solutions to improve education will only be learned by coming up with ideas and trying them, picking best solutions and constantly improving them. That will not happen until an environment that finds and picks winning ideas is adopted. This is impossible in a top down system driven by bureaucracy. And free enterprise is, by far, the best system man has devised to do this.