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, c-span.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! that's so cool to say. thatt you guys to have experience, too. so i'll say it and you say it back to me. how's 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 what's 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 wasn't 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 he's created predictive science to forecast virollity of websites with a large success rate. pubertyschool before isn't exactly what this talk is about but what emerson's story only is the potential not for learning, but extremely learning beyond the walls of a classroom. so we've 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 it's definitely going through a transformation and that's 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. that's where that he had -- they be for the whole semester. youou were iron, i'd call effy. say, hey,e gold, i'd 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. you're 17 years old, you declare to your colleagues you want to be a gas. somee going to hear sounds. so immediately i'd 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 17-year-old want more than anything? freedom. the end of school! right, gases,l you're 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 i'd say then you've 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 i'm working with chemicals. excited, are you smashing atoms? no i'm working in cleaning services at one of the hotels downtown and you'd be surprised about what people don't 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 don't think you're listening to me. you've always taught us that leadership is making others.ities for and it doesn't matter whether lecture lab coat or hall, i'm teaching, and that's 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 doesn't matter what you look like, it's a teachingcy and by programming we could write the rules. it was also 1998. there were dot-coms popping up everywhere. there was a tremendous here.unity but the really cool thing was that there's 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 it's 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, children's 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 don't 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 i'm 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 self-reliant children. the question is, could this work in our culture? think of glance you course it can't. there are things that they don't learn like reading, writing, and arithmetic. it is not easy for children in our culture to be exposed to all the skills and knowledge that's important to the culture. i might think it wouldn't 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 follow-up 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 doesn't 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 children's abilities to educate themselves. the first condition is a clear understanding that education is the child's responsibility. that they areknow responsible for their education, they take that responsibility. believe thatto somebody else's 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 don't 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 don't 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 don't 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. it's 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 i'm 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. >> let's have another round of applause. wasn't 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 do-it-yourself 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? let's just put it this way. warning, live cockroaches will be used in the following demonstration. let's bring him out. [applause] >> hello, chicago. it's good to be here. i'm from michigan so i always love giving talks. it you guys are good people so i'm 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 don't 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. there's no cheap telescope for the brain to be able to allow to get access to the same tools the professionals do. with my lab mates and we would try to change that and come up with kits to work with kids. a papier-mache frankenstein and put ice cream in his brain. we would transfer that to another student and the student would take out the visual cortex back here and the student what all of a sudden have blinders on and could not see for the last -- rest of the class. we would pinch his arms down. different.ly so it was so abstract. one of our lab mates decided to come up with an idea. abstract and we called it be hundred dollars bike. we wanted to take the lab equipment and make it affordable and easy enough. we would be able to record the same ron's in a very simple way. this is really kind of a shoddy stage. it didn't even work but there was so much interest from scientists. we kept getting e-mails about this thing, when can we buy one? our prototypeh and we kept working on it until finally we have a version that actually works. the spyker boxx allows it to record living brain cells. wewill do that today and will use not a high-tech computer but students phones to be able to record been earl activity and analyze that as well. i go into the experiment, let's do a brief recall on what neuroscience is and what the brain is and what neurons are. not many people. we need to do neuroscience earlier. no one even really knows what the basic cells are. long axonneuron and a that reaches out. this is where information gets passed from one to the other. the information comes in the form of electricity and it comes from one cell to the other cell and you do this enough times and that's how we are able to see and we are able to think. comes in small upkets and they are opening really quickly and allows your brain to function. are you guys ready? let's hear you. thank you. we said earlier, we are not going to use my brain and i'm not going to invite some appear to drill into your head. i'm going to use the brains of south american cockroaches which oops. us -- what the first thing i'm going to do is pull out these cockroaches. oh, disaster. you've got this? what i'm going to do first is i'm going to anesthetize him. there are no tricks here. this guy is alive. does anyone know why we are doing this? are they warm-blooded? cold-blooded. the sames they become temperature of ice water. those potassium channels stop moving. he stops feeling pain as well. i am knocking him out because we are going to do a surgery right now and i will remove one of his legs so that we can record the neurons inside the legs. to take this guy out and i'm going to cut one of his legs off right there. gross. let me go back to the slides really quick. this is the leg of the cockroach. , they allowl hairs him to do something interesting. the neuron will send electrical messages up to the brain. the brain doesn't know that. it will try to get information to the brain. those neurons will start firing again and we should be able to listen to how the brain actually functions. i am going to take the leg and put a couple of pins on the leg. positive and negative. you need to points for electricity. we don't think there are neurons. put one into the femur where i do think there are neurons. can you see that so far? i will turn on the speaker and we will listen to what the brain sounds like. [static sounds] peopleryone here that? say it either sounds like raindrops or frying bacon. that is how your brain sounds. if i put a wire to your brain, you would hear the same sounds. the beauty of nature, these are concerns. i will turn on this ipad here that i've plugged in. we will hopefully see that as well. here,at we are looking at you can see those spikes that are gog by. those are the messages being sent from the leg to the brain. so what would happen if i were to touch that leg? maybe it sends a message. i will go ahead and touch the leg. you see that? what you're looking at is information. it's being encoded and being sent to the brain. this would be the same if i wanted to touch the shoulder. he feels that because there is in or on there. this is how everything works from the sensory input into the brain. let's go back to slides really quick. we'll come back and do more experiments. when people first see the spikes for the first time, these are not doctored photos. this is a wonderful thing. it is portable so we can get citizens involved. we can show spikes on a plane and as you get people to sit kids we can make understand it and give them the schematics. and not only that, what each of the knobs do. they develop their own experiments and we developed some online. i just want to do one more quick experiment. the brain not only takes an information but it sends it back out to the muscles. instead of my brain, i'm going to send information coming out rum my cell phone and i'm going to play some hip-hop music which has electricity similar to the electricity in the brain into this leg and we see what happens when we send a little jolt of electricity inside this cockroach leg. experimentr to an galvani did many years ago. can you zoom in on that? let me turn it this way. what you are seeing is the cockroach leg, when the base frequency is playing, you will see a little twitching of the leg. i just want to jump to one more video. what we are going to do now is i will show you what happens if you do this within -- this is the galvani experiment. is a squid that you can catch off the shores of maine, of boston. i've done the same experiment here but inside the brain of a squid. it sends information down to the skin to change the colors. we will listen what happens when you play hip-hop music into a squid. it andoking down on hopefully have some audio here. so what this is, these are the cells inside the squid that open and close like tiny muscles. the cephalopods change their color on demand. we have put a little bit of electricity there. you can actually do this pretty well. thing.s go to the next neuronso record the from people through these muscular activities. can i get one volunteer from the audience? yes, what your name? perfect. all right. the first thing i want to do is hook you up and get one more volunteer. what we're going to do is i'm going to record the electrical and amplify it and stick it into someone else's arm. record your to brain, amplify it, and control another brain. do we have a volunteer that would be willing to give it up? come on down. let's hook you up really quick. are you ready for this? i will put a couple of pads on you. i'm going to put an electrode. on ais saltwater which is lot of the sodium and potassium that connect to the metal. and in what i'm going to do is i'm going to hook you up to hear and put this one here. >> do you know each other? >> no. >> we are going to have you do something. i want you to squeeze your hand. up likeou to squeeze you are revving a motorcycle. is we have have here amplified your electricity and we're going to turn on the led. when the red led comes on, we have amplified the electricity enough that we can make your our move. nish, let's do your left hand as well. you have a nerve that runs down here, the funnybone. i'm going to try to hit this so that when she moves her arm -- what you're hearing is her motor cortex. we will stick it into your arm and make a brain computer interface to a brain brain interface house that? in and weou hooked are almost done here. you're going to feel a little bit of pinching. an electrical charge will hit that nerve and you should be able to feel these things. you have completely lost your free will of that left arm and you are now completely in control of his left arm. let's try it. bit.l turn it up a little when you move, go ahead. that we will do a really quick experiment. you look the other way. if i were to move your arm -- why is that? sendingo be your brain it down to match your muscles. that is the last experiment right now. you can have a seat. will we are trying to do is make them available. including antarctica. we are going to be on the eighth continent. we have an agreement with nasa to send ourselves into space. i want to thank you all for your time. thank you. >> that is so cool. you had me at narrow. the cockroach is still in there. in keeping with the theme of education outside of school walls, it is my honor to introduce you to the next speaker. what risk would you take to change your life? change your world or your thisnity for the better? is the question the next speaker challenged himself to answer. instead of attending a traditional grad school for an mba. this transforms the way you think. >> i have been given 12 minutes so we will dive right in. a blank page and a problem. for most of my life even though , i waseven years old supposed to become and engineer. it has limitations meeting you have to go through a lot of schooling and that means you have to be incredibly smart. if she saw that, she would have elbowed me the whole time. school, i came across some incredible mentors and teachers and friends. these guys became my heroes. ok, sorry. i told them i wasn't be going -- going to become a doctor or engineer. they said, why can't you do both? la point. a i found myself helping build a 40,000 space called the hub. do some of that work. with this idea of the social enterprise. building businesses and organizations that were for-profit or for purpose. the common answer is i will get an nba. there were several great schools here, two of the top five or 10 schools in the country. track.ed down that the more i looked at the style of learning, i did not know if it hit me. want to get into so much debt that i couldn't navigate what i did afterwards. i thought if i could start from scratch, how could i design my education. i started a blog and a newsletter. i know what you're thinking, you got people to give you money? i convinced them that i would pull off 12 projects. it was from design, business, and social change. and i would also make collections along the way. it happened to be a leap year and i designed my own masters. it led me across the world. but by rocket scientists. myself in a digital agency. i ended up serving thanksgiving -- it putrning with me in a position where i was slightly alone. education,our own you are a little bit of a vagabond and a little bit of a vigilante. companieslk to these and i would say, can you give me a month? if you days to solve a problem? i would scope a project and find something that i could solve and at the end of that month, share that with that company. over and over, that's what happened. interview, pitch them on an idea. it was scoping this thing. it was finding people wanting to create risk to make change. thats finding these people were thinking about could i adapt and start a business this year? and so those people started sending me their stories. year, -- the the beginning of the year, if you guys share your stories, i will compile it to an end of the year project that would be my version of dissertation. storiesned a book of that were learning the risk. it became the theme of the leap year project. to figure outhad how to design my on graduation. i had a community now, a dissertation. put a cap and gown on and on this very stage. it was 18 months ago. my parents sat right there. my dad was elated. he introduced himself to everyone as the father of the leap year guy. awesome. the question came, how might we establish experience as a credible form of education. cases, i would not be compensated for some of my work. i learned a great amount of practical tools. students, instead of doing 12 experiences in 12 months which is kind of the everest of the program. we would do three experiences with 10 to 12 weeks and we would have classes peppered him throughout. would find a small group of students. self-awareness, community building, human centered design and human centered design and community building. how do we redesign all aspects of higher education? we did not have a massive campus. the first thing you see is all these images of beautiful campuses. what does that look like? for campuses, we thought about countless office spaces with extra space. they be we could meet with them. companies started giving us space. instructors, we ask them to give us two days of their time to teach us one of those five core competencies. we teamed up with a hostile here in chicago. it was kind of turning into a mix of harvard meets the amazing race. stanford was in the middle of doing a project where they were dissecting for cart -- for parts of higher education. library, accreditation, and experiential learning. it we asked to be one of the partners. last may, the final presentation called stanford 2025 where we were able to share some of the findings after a year of studies with them. myself, and ifs, you haven't gotten to check that out, a super awesome project. and of course there was the actual experience. this is the quick telling of what she did. >> when i started my year of experiences, i knew i wanted to become a better designer. areow that they communicated. i want to get better. i began working as a project manager for dojo. for the first time, i communicated with them throughout the entire design process. i felt confident to take on my next team in seattle. i was in studio seven with the architecture firm. experienceso design for civic and corporate projects. for my last term, i was in the department of design for arts education campaign. together, we worked on all aspects of the project for designing the physical form. my undergraduate degree is an architecture and music. when considering careers, i thought it would have to limit myself to one or the other. i got to work on projects that let me exercise everything. it will help me design in every medium. rather, i can show how those skills make me a better designer for teammates. >> and giving me creative confidence going ahead. it.y, don't study experience it. [applause] >> right? may have been things like creative confidence, creative agency. navigating things that are seemingly gray or white. they don't have a framework yet. portfolio.rld not seeing what they are able to do with it. but what they are able to do with higher education. sharing this idea of designing education through experience. at the very end of last year which was just last month, they designed their own graduation with a shared for discoveries and they were able to tell their stories. also expected to welcome the next class of students. and they were able to hand them their diplomas on the first day. a piece of wood with the logo cut out. after each experience they are given a token that fills in the diploma. students have2 begun. they are starting off in their fall experience. obviously, starting with schools at a city or a museum, where do you start? it has been this combination of learning funding models and are we in movement? we have been able to work with and fosterto consult this community of curiosity. and we have 1000 people or 2000 people that design education through experience. what has been interesting is to think about having that many people come through here, and how do we create this process. this discovery of helping people start with intention, don't declare a mission -- i'm sorry, don't declare a major but start by declaring a mission. debbie patterson is interested in health care. they are opening the challenge and administering the challenge for the ebola virus and finding ways to create solutions for that. for her to be in a position ande she is able to learn do so in a way that is building her body of work and serving an actual common need. and findke a risk things that push you out of a comfort zone. not that classes are bad but thinking about what i actually need to do that i don't know yet. mys will push me out of comfort zone. johnson was in a spot where he had an invitation from an ad agency. i am really interested in either -- eastern orthodoxy and i would like to do a writing project on a monastery. i am the leap year guy, this is -- i don't know if it's the right thing to do and he sends the new york times writer to mentor them. he lives in a monastery and rights a paper on this wall project. and not have this amazing piece that he's able to share. experience needs is valuation. it you can just move through things at 100 miles a minute. it will define your future if you take those moments to look back. that, there are countless ways each day to take chances to look back. instagram, each place she did, showing how seat -- how she processes cities. how do we make learning a habit? it was one of our younger students, 20 years old in a position where they wondered how teams worked. the idea of iteration is now launched him into a year of i make my city more alive. they do a traveling tour of cold-weather cities. i think he is there right now. making about what is copenhagen come alive. of intention, action, iteration. it is a framework and is becoming something that anyone anywhere can begin to execute on and think about and their own context. at what scaleook looks like, those that design their education will be the ones that design their future. context of it in the design in general. the computer opened up an entire new type of design where people can design everything from websites to systems, to print design. and now there are countless ways to create things without much cost and you can easily excel at them and learn how to do so. same thing with businesses. it felt like you needed some sort of great credential to design a business. but now, anyone can launch a billion-dollar business and do it from their garage. i think this is going to happen with education. i will end with this. there is a new breed of learner that realizes they don't need a costly degree to achieve the tools and networks to make a valuable contribution to society. but thoughtfully leaning into the countless resources around them. individuals can design their education. it will take extra attention to detail and an emphasis on telling their stories but those are increasingly necessary skills. those who venture to take such a leap will set a lifelong pattern of being inventive, helpful, adaptable, and curious. without the do so crippling debt that comes with higher education. it will be seen as an incredible option for someone of any age. from the corners of the inner-city, two workshops and any industry. on a systemic level, i propose you find every way to cultivate curiosity and leave a seat at the table for those curious and impassioned by what you are doing. level, thersonal tassel may have been turned and the final school bell may have wrong, but what does it mean for you to intentionally learn now? as the pace of change quickens, all of us find ourselves with feelings and at crossroads. if it is time to learn, i am inviting you to the same call i have shared on the stage 18 months ago to be a student again. find ways to solve problems. people that are striving for change. >> fantastic. reading, writing and reality. wish, what would you wish for? i heard that. next speaker is the founder of wishbone, a nonprofit organization helping make extracurricular dreams a reality for low income students, making the impossible dream a reality. educationoffman labs venture fellow, and a newer and she has been recognized twice on the forbes 30 under 30 for her work in education. she's joining us today for her social intervention fellowship. and onto wasts leslie bloom and david half one created this award is a way to recognize young socially conscious individuals and encourage them to continue their efforts. join me in welcoming beth schmidt. this is where i went to high school and it is known for its academic rigor, structure and obvious opportunity but what was really interesting about my experience is that it wasn't really the same when i got my 16-year-old self out of bed, it was not the thing that got me excited or passionate and in fact i did not relate to the opportunity offered here at all. what created a culture of achievement in me was not academics at all. it was figure skating. competitive was a figure skating and that was the thing that taught me dedication, passion, purpose and confidence. that was the thing that got me out of bed in the morning, nothing to do with academics. truele what funny a passion felt like but a self driven sense of motivation to achieve and this translated not only into everything else i did but also to school. no one had to convince me that effort and really hard work was required to achieve figure skating. opportunity was obvious. fast-forward to two dozen seven and i found myself teaching at locke high school in south-central los angeles. i was a teacher for 160 10th grade students and most of them were at a fifth grade reading level and a quarter of them had one child and some had two or three it a lot came from single-family households. many suffered from domestic violence and other forms of abuse and in fact my first year of teaching, a right it is 600 broke out on campus and the lapd had to break it up with gas masks. naturally the opportunity of school was not on my student's mines. -- minds. i realize some the more interesting than these statistics, despite all the darkness there was something more interesting. they were still motivated by the same thing that motivated me, they wanted to fill confidence, dedication so despite the obvious lack of traditional resources what i would argue they were most starved for was the opportunity to pursue passion. when i was teaching in my first paper, outa research of 160 students less than 10% turned this paper in. back and a step thought about the relevance of this paper and i think it was on migrant farmworkers. i changed the topic entirely and said forget about farmworkers just tell me what passion you have, the most relevant thing i could possibly think of. the research component was atomic how you would pursue this -- was tell me how you would pursue this passion and 80% of them turned it in and on time which never happens. what was more interesting was that 20 of the papers started with something like this sentence, no one has ever asked me what my passion is. so i stopped myself in my tracks and i started to read these wanted to students pursue stem cell science, and wanted to study art, they wanted to learn film production they had all these passions they were hoping to pursue so wanting to capitalize on this momentum i ran a marathon to raise $12,000. sent seven12,000 i students on the programs they had written about and what is interesting is when the students came back they were way more and their attendance rate went up and they started showing up at school more. in their gpa's went up as a result of showing up. i thought it was an interesting coincidence. this became my most important time in l.a. and as a result i realize that running a marathon was not a sustainable form a fun rising -- fundraising so i started a proper organization called wishbone or we have said 250 students to afterschool and summer programs to pursue their passion. luis hasis -- jose studied architecture, kayla has studied fashion design and watley has learned how to code. we are just beginning. we are on track to be the leading provider for out of school access to the nation's poor. [applause] >> thank you. like so many of those first students from locke, the first seven kobo we are smeared all of his students graduate high school and they are attending college and they come back and say this experience made the realize what could be possible. impact seems so large it started so small. it started with just recognizing what passion feels like myself and then it continued by putting passion at the forefront of the schooldays of my students and that it continued also understanding that when students are curious they will learn and when they learn they will succeed. thank you. [applause] awesome.e, just confidence and it is such a simple concept of pursuing passion that changes our lives. thank you for changing so many lives. situation in which the circumstances were so extreme that you had to relearn much of what we typically take for granted. talking, eating, writing, everything. our next speaker is here to tell experience sheer founded the clara and 2013, they technologyo -- a platform that uses algorithms for learning. she has at careers in both neuropsychology and software development. please welcome miss ramona pearson. [applause] ramona and i will just sit down and talk. here int to have you are ints of your company your remarkable aspiring recovery from an accident you recovered, tell us about that and how does that inform what you do. >> when i was 22 years old i was in the marine corps and i was running and i used to run marathons and i would grab my dog and started out to run and at the same time i was leaving i left a bar and we hit an intersection at the same time and he read -- ran a red light and my left foot got caught in the will well and the car spun my leg around in the bumper sliced my throat and i suffered blunt chest trauma and if it was passerby whoody, a opened up my airway, i would not be here today. came out of the understanding of innovation and radical corroboration because the innovation of being able to keep me alive and everything that was invented along the way inspired me to be an innovator myself. >> what do you mean by radical collaboration? >> a few things happened so when you look around this room and i think about curiosity and the end of school, i get excited whouse a lot of people invented some of the body parts i am wearing today inside of my skin were people who dropped out of college and school and drop both by feet are titanium, my knees are titanium and i've different pieces in my heart, my nose is plastic, my cheekbones titanium and i getting a titanium job of next week. jaw am getting a titanium bone next week. every time something falls off someone has something for me. [laughter] was this radical collaboration the hospital had given up and the medical professionals never thought i would speak again and it took me four years to learn to speak again and it was when they dumped me in a nursing home and i look like et had just landed bald andut 68 pounds did not have a lot of my face by grandparentsad 100 who all came around and read top meeverything -- re-taught everything i know, how to speak and walk and how to function as a blind person or in is completely blind for 10 years until some dropout figured out how to invent robotic surgery so i could have brain surgery to get vision in one of my eyes back. >> wow. [applause] you are the definition of extraordinary, extraordinary, that is amazing. we see terms like machine learning and semantic search techniques and descriptions of the platform, can you say a little bit more about what the clara does? >> one of the things i learned when i was in the senior home is that a lot of people can come together and help accelerate once onrning, not just the stage or a teacher but that acknowledges and what we do is we replicate a lot of the hierarchical processes of the , so when you think about soanya thinkbrain, about your cell phone is a simple tool i can access a library that is the sum of all human knowledge. it is fascinating that we have that much content in the world that jesse's be indexed, classified and sorted and then provided in an easy to use way for learners. all lifelongare learners and we are driving our learning through curiosity and every day i work by studying and learning and driving my work through what i learn. so we use the machine learning to understand and process content and be able to deliver that content to people based on their intent for learning. sometimes we just automatically provide that to them. >> brilliant, really. i have this image of you in the nursing home with all these ladies standing around you -- teaching you -- right? it's beautiful. who is it available to? >> we have been working with the nation of australia so what is fascinating is australia said we're rolling out new curriculum to our teachers so instead of taking a hammer and beating teachers over the head saying you have to learn this curriculum they decided let's use the clara and we will roll this out and we will on board educators to the new curriculum so what they did is the educators started leveraging our platform to be able to identify andholes in the curriculum to create the support around each other and the invention of new content so that they could support the role. we are in mexico right now and doing the same thing, i am bringing on educators to a new curriculum so what we started doing was understanding the skill and labor mismatch and seeing how countries who have to transform their entire workforce because of their trying to onboard into the information society or their finding that isir current economy collapsing, so most of the countries that have come to us have said how do we transform our workforce at scale so those are the kinds of clients we started out with and now we are working with genentech to help researchers solve clinical trials for cancer much quicker and faster. spring were going to have consumer products so that anybody can use our products for free. >> that was want be my next question -- did you hear that? awesome. this is your third startup, what other companies do you envision starting? i am a lifelong learner i am always playing around with studying things so nanotechnology is something that i am fascinated with. mainly because i will probably have to fix myself. i got into neurosciences because i thought i will have to figure out how to see again and fortunately someone figure that out for me but i started really focusing all of my companies around learning, mainly because it was such a difficult thing as an adult to come back and learn. mainly because my ego kept getting in the way, hout -- needing to relearn how to speak i had to learn how to move my tongue and move my lips again and when you're a kid you learn things so naturally because nobody is telling you that it is strange for you not to know these things and when you are an adult your ego starts to inhibit your ability and your curiosity and risk-taking so the reason why all my companies have been wrapped around learning is i started out and nowstudents learn i've been focused on adult because all of us have to be continuous learners because the world is changing so fast. billion outo have 2 in the world to be your teachers through mobile devices, there are 2 billion people connected today and 5 billion in the next five years, we might as well create a platform that would allow all of us to connect all the time and to learn from each other. right, it is not even the answers we are looking for it is about having the right questions. because onemy mind of the pieces of my product will curated questions. one of the learnings i had from that was from a project called fold it. had an experiment about taking novice learners and teaching them cellular biology so they created a simple school that game a five learning and they had a rocket ship and it started out with 40 people old ladies who were knitting and high school students but pretty soon that 40 became 700 and 40000 and 70,000 and these people now by crowdsourcing solutions are able to be double doctorates in predicting how proteins are going to fold so imagine that that kind of power can help us invent new drugs and and issues and diseases faster than probably companies like gin ntec will begene able to do. that is about learning to curate questions so you learn from the question. it is the essence of education and i think everyone of our speakers talked about this that there is something very powerful about the act of giving in that we receive so much more when we are able to just open up our hearts and give and what you're doing and solutions are coming that would it's years in the making amazing because when we start thinking about how we can open up learning and provide democratization of content and resources and when i think about the greatest resources that are out there those are us. and when in this room i think about the senior citizens who helped me come back, i imagine the power of people who are not being used and they have all the skills and talent of everybody in this room but they just need access. >> and that is what helped you see it? >> exactly right. >> beautiful. we've a few seconds left and i will be rapid fire. the first is what advice do you have for all the entrepreneurs in the house starting their own company? and the second is, why do you think such smart people dropout? >> good question. the first question take risks and be willing to undo everything you have done, right now what we have been doing is inventing new tools that we are going to provide in our consumer product that will actually probably undo the tools we have invested in already and that is because you have to take the risk to invent and reinvent and sotinue to undo yourself with education and learning a believe you have to unlearn everything so that you can actually relearn and teach so why do people care about some of the smartest people dropout because we are not challenging them and we are restricting them on the pathway that isn't right for them so when we define a learning pathway for people or a curriculum for people and do not allow them to develop an curate their own curriculum and their with her athway their mind and the only way to .ree themselves is to escape >> here here, give it up! [applause] >> right from the beginning to the end, there it is president john f. kennedy once said that the goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth if we look at education in this matter it can be surmised that is not a method time or place that really matters it is the outcome thanks again for joining us today and participating in our community of curiosity. the end of school! up for all theit amazing speakers that we heard today in the beautiful art that we came back to about curating our own learning. if you love what you heard and what to keep the conversation , head to the back door right now because i am done talking to continue the conversation with other attendees. on your way out check out our info table where we will be selling the 2015 memberships at a 20% discount this week only. then you will also want to stop by the general store we can pick up great gear and get your book signed by peter gray. definitely do that. then finally don't forget to share your feedback for the chance to win great prizes by 37479.g "talk" to thanks again, have a great evening and don't stop learning! >>

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