do that. again, it has been a problem for us aid for sometime. the alan speak about growth story, and whether or restrictions efforts are constant. have been quite by the inted administration. >> i think it is tied up in cuban politics. to get him out but there is no beyond the diplomatic channels. that amily has frustration what is being old done. phone question, we had some but what the administration talked about, in the re been a turn or are they concerned still an uncontained situation? has been a there is slowing. the word contain might be a premature. there has been small outbreaks in other not even that we have read about, that is a sign of how effective the response has been. >> as you mentioned before, it is putting a strain on the agency because they're having to pull people and resources from other places to deal with that. it is impacting their work in syria and es like south sudan. sustainability is the question. it is not how the necessary funding to carry on with this mission to build to eradicate this outbreak. >> it is an issue that has affected other crisis. is going to impact the to ntries and they are going become greater challenges. >> happy thanksgiving. >> happy thanksgiving. how the us government waste is millions of dollars on the war on terror. to try to investigate to what happened with all the money that the out-of-state sent to iraq. around $20 llion, or billion that the us sent to iraq and was unaccounted for. that stigators found millions was stolen after went apparently by powerful iraqi. it was hidden in a bunker in rural lebanon. >> tonight, on c-span. we have an inside and the presidents from gerald ford to barack obama. >> a group of education innovators from around the country recently spoke at chicago adie is weak but the future of education. they discussed other alternatives to traditional teaching. this is just under an hour and a half. >> what a pleasure to be here the end a great topic, of school. i am and every surrey psychologist and what that interested at i am in human nature. in the nature of human children. here to idea that i am this, children biologically designed to educate themselves. they do it through play, we do not need to educate children. always to do is to provide the conditions that would allow them to educate themselves. the basic instincts of childhood, their playfulness, decision ability pushed by natural selection. we take those abilities away put them in schools. if we provide the condition need to educate themselves, we really can do away with schools as we know them. plus -- [applause] some of you might think i am think some of you might i'm an idealist. i can assure d u i am neither, i am a har realist. the idea i am talking about today is supported by a great deal of empirical observation research which has elaborated on my book, but here they have a few minutes to try to convince you. the first way i want to think idea is by looking at other cultures. were all hunter gathered. some people around the world have survived like that for years. if you'd years ago we conducted a survey of 10 different anthropologist which had different hunter gathered cultures. we asked questions about how children became educated on that culture, one of the much time do how children have the play and explore on their own? was all the time. even the teenagers are free to play, explore and to engage away from adult all they want, everyday. other question we asked was, what other forms of their play? one thing we found was that they play at the very activities that are hardest to learn and most important to success in their culture. they play hunting, and gathering and finding routes. the dugout canoes, bows and musical instruments. they play at those things that they have to learn to become educated. anthropologist also told us have never seen writer, happier more resilient and more self reliant children than the hunter gatherer children. could this work in our culture? at first you would think, of course it can't. there are things that we have like ed that they do not, reading and arithmetic. moreover, it is not so easy for our children to be exposed to all the scales that is important to the culture. was founded in 1968 so it now has been in existence for have a century. it has students, aaged four on until about 18. around eight staff members, it operates on a that is around half of the other schools. all students that apply. eliteeducation, this is affordable. the unique things about this weight that is administrative and the philosophy of the school. a e school operates as participatory democracy, all school rules are being by students and teachers which have one vote. they have a committee which is jury led after the systemof our culture. one y given time there is a couple of teenagersand the judicial committee, weather is a staff they r or a student when come upon rule they the jury. school the way the operates. in terms of educational is essentially the same like the hunter gathered. no test, curriculum, no grades, no substitute for grades. it expects children to decide themselves what they want to learn and how they want to learn it. were to go through the school at any time of the day u might see scenes like this slides. will see kids making various art project or somebody cooking in the kitchen, in the computer lab on the photo lab. children building playing cks, children music kids drawing in a blackboard. game people playing a such as cheques. you might find people fishing in the pond, then again on the athletic field. you might find people building a snowman or d. ting on the pon playing t also see them much traditional playgrounds ways. the key to learning at this school is engagement. the children and not segregated by age, the older kids are ittle kids. l they want to be able to read you visit all the once read, they want to climb trees in they see the older ones. they are bringing them up to higher performances. many children in school land to read because they play games which involve reading with kids that know how to. teach them to read because they almost need to do so to play the game. back, i should say the advantage of age mixing also goes the other way. they older children learn how to care and to nurse. they are also being continuously inspired by the creativity of the younger ones. the age mixing is as valuable for the older kids as it is for the younger ones. the work comes from follow-up studies of the graduates. i along with a colleague, conducted one such study. the people at all of who graduated, they were doing there in the world. o problems in higher to go that s chose way. there working out wide roti of careers. they were all very satisfied with their lives. many of them were pursuing careers which were direct had nsion of passions they veloped in childhood play. one of them was a machinist inventor. another one loved boats and he is now a captain of the cruise ship. was fascinated by computers, he developed his own software company. another loved to make doll clothes and now she is a the high aker in fashion industry. is people who have time to like to ursue what they play at, and find a way of making a living offered. they were doing what they were really interested in doing. since the time of my study a couple of other studies at the school have been conducted by staff members. they have been published as books and they came to the same conclusion as we did. the model is replicable, three dozen schools copied it, mostly in this country some in others. to her is closest the tollcross sudbury. this success does not seem to depend on socio economic e particulars th of students personalities. here i want to describe the conditions that i think are gathered the hunter and the schools. and there really are the conditions that optimise children's possibilities to educate themselves. the first is a clear understanding that education is a child's responsibility. when children know that they are responsible for their they take that education. when they are led to believe that somebody else is responsible for their education what hey have to do is do they are told, then they do not take responsibility for their education. limited ondition, and pursue to play your interest. unlimited time. it takes timeto try out time rent things, it takes to get bored. overcome boredom, to find your passion. it takes a limited amount of time to find your passion, you ith ot interrupt that w bells and telling people consulate what to do and expect them to develop a passion. three, opportunity to play with the tools of the culture. gathered that would be bolder narrows and digging sticks. in our society the major tool would be a computer. they know that this is a tool of the culture and they need to spend a lot of time with it. it becomes an extension of their own body. access to a variety of caring adults who are helpers not dges. important that last practice, helpers, not judges. want to go rson you to the learner is somebody who is evaluating you. the presently go to more as a frame of mind to try how much you th know, not to say read don't i need some help. by not judging the children, staff members are much able on be helpers then teachers a typical school. free age mixing between children and adolescentsis absolutely key to the school. it will not work if your children all the same age, because children do not have much to learn from kids the same age. they learn from kids who are older or younger. emerging on a stable and more democratic community. in the hunter gatheredband their own different ways, they are democratic communities. there are communities where every child knows that their ideas and actions influence the others involved in the community. are in a setting where just feel responsible not for themselves, but for the community where they are developing. there is an extraordinarily aspect for the education and one which is completely ignored in our regular schools. i want you to notice that none of these conditions exist in our current schools. if we deliberately take away from children everything that need to educate themselves put them in schools and then we try very inefficiently and very ineffectively to educate them. to conclude this way, i am absolutely sure someday people are going to back at us now and they're were those y, what people thinking? did they ever -- ieve that koresh and coercion is essential for education? believe that standardisation, that all children should learn the same things and be tested by the same test? what kind of crazy idea is that? i am sure won't we will reach a day when people will look back and say that. i hope we reached that day sooner than later. that some of you, all of you i hope, will play a role in bringing that time about before it is too late. with that i thank you for your time and attention. i thank you for being here. [applause] and bless you all. of let's have another round applause for peter. [applause] our next speaker has taken his turn tedious -- the ideas of peter into action. he has tried to teach kids some pretty powerful stuff. here's a do it yourself neuroscientist. an organisation which develops kids to discover new science and how the brain works. subjects of these just put it less this way, cockroaches will be used in the next demonstration. the end of school! let's welcome greg gage. [applause] >> hello chicago. i am actually from michigan. you guys are good people so i am excited about this. am a neuroscientist. have a make-up to build n allowing us low-cost tools. learn about to changes that there are that have happened and making something that we called citizen science. i am in neuroscientist, in order to study the brain and have to go to graduate school. trying to spend six years on a access to the tools to understand how the brain works. little bit silly because one out of five oz is going to have in neurological disorder. i had to understand how the brain works. if you wanted to learn astronomy, you do not have to a ph.d. in astrophysics. you can buy a telescope and set it up on your backyard. you will become interested, you in becoming erested an astronomy. as an amateur level it should access the same tools. mates d work with my lab in graduate school, we would go outside to try to change that. would have papier-mâché frankenstein, trying to put ice cream on his head. visual take out the cortex right here, the student would have blinders on. another student will take the motor cortex and we put his arms down so he could not move. those trying to explain different part of the brain but it was very different of what we're doing and the lab. this stuff in the lab was cool but it was so abstract. the time we decided, with an idea and would published an o. tract here in chicag were called at the hundred dollar spike. want to take the lab equipment cost around $40,000 and make it affordable enough to even high school teachers could use it. in da will record the same a simple way. it et up and we presented at the conference. there is me on the left, and tim on the right. did not involve work, but much interest from scientist when we showed what we try to do that we kept getting emails. was a good aybe this idea so we did just that, we started with our prototype, we on it until finally we ually version that act works. is the spyker box. we are not going to use a high-tech computer but students record the able to neuro activity. before i go into the experiment less to a brief and what the brain is and what neurons are. not many people, this is interesting. 20% of the world, nobody really knows what the basic cell in the brain is. information gets passed from part of the other, the information comes in the form of electricity, ilchester goes from one cell to the other. irritated enough time that is to see, think, move. this is all done through ty. trici this comes in small packets. it allows your brain to function. let's see some demos. to use my going brain, i'm not going to bring someone appear to drill. i am actually going touse the -- pull out these cockroaches. well, disaster. [laughter] you got this? is a south american cockroach. first i am going to anesthetize him in ice water. you see him moving around? no tricks, these guys are alive. i am going to put him and icewater for a few moments. anyone know why we are doing this? these guys or what? warmed up -- warm-blooded? cold-blooded, right, meaning that even after a few seconds they become instantly the same as the icewater. why do they stop moving us and as they are cold? it means they stop moving because they slow down. he stops moving and stops feeling pain as well. i am going to remove one of his legs. we are going to record the neurons inside legs. i am going to cut off of the legs right there. let me go back to the slides really quickly. let's talk briefly about what we are doing here. all of these beautiful hairs are going down the leg. do somethingm to interesting, detect the world around him. inside each hair is in your on that sends electrical messages to the brain. even though i coughed the leg, the brain does not know that, it keeps sending messages back and forth and it will try to get information to the brain even though the brain is not there. we should be able to listen into how the brain actually functions. going to put a couple of pins on the leg. these are positive and negative pins. you need to points for electricity. don't think that there are neurons in the back. i am going to put one of them into the femur, where i do think that there are neurons. can you guys see that so far? just a cockroach leg. now i am going to turn on the speaker and we are going to listen to what the brain sounds like. can everyone hear that? what does this sound like to most people? raindrops, frying bacon? , if i wired into your brain, you hear the same sound. the neutrons inside of your brain are similar to these. isn't that bizarre? the beauty of nature, things are conserved. i will turn on this ipad here that i've plugged in. we will hopefully see that as well. now what we are looking at here, you can see those spikes that are going 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 down, we can make kids 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. very similar to an experiment 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. this 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. i am looking down on it and 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. so let's go to the next thing. i want to record the neurons 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 activity and amplify it and stick it into someone else's arm. we are going to record your 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. this is saltwater which is on a 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. i want you to squeeze up like you are revving a motorcycle. now what we have here is we have 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? i've got you hooked in and we 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. i will turn it up a little bit. 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? it has to be your brain sending 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 why is that? it has to be your brain sending 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 community for the better? this 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 was seven years old, i was 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. in middle 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? which is a a la point. i found myself helping build a 40,000 space called the hub. i got to do some of that work. i fell in love 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. i started down that track. the more i looked at the style of learning, i did not know if it hit me. i didn't 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. i found myself in a digital agency. i ended up serving thanksgiving dinner learning with -- it put me in a position where i was slightly alone. designing your own education, you are a little bit of a vagabond and a little bit of a vigilante. i would talk to these companies 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. it was finding these people that were thinking about could i adapt and start a business this year? and so those people started sending me their stories. at the end of the year, -- 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. we designed a book of stories that were learning the risk. it became the theme of the leap year project. and finally i had to figure out how to design my on graduation. i had a community now, a dissertation. i 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. in a lot of 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. we 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. and the idea of 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. just 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. that is my class, myself, and if 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. i know that they are 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. i was able to design experiences 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. i say, don't study it. 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. the real world portfolio. not seeing what they are able to do with it. but what they are able to do with higher education. they continue 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. they were 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. and the next 12 students have 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 businesses to consult and foster 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 where she is able to learn and do so in a way that is building her body of work and serving an actual common need. and to take a risk and find 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. this will push me out of my 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 thinking 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 i am thinking 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. a way to do that, there are countless ways each day to take chances to look back. april used 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 studying how i make my city more alive. they do a traveling tour of cold-weather cities. i think he is there right now. a study about what is making copenhagen come alive. this process 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. i think as i look at what scale looks like, those that design their education will be the ones that design their future. think about it in the context of 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. and they can do so without the 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. and on a personal level, the 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. watch how it inspires others. thanks. >> fantastic. if you had one wish, what to wish for? i heard that. founder speaker is the of wishbone. a nonprofit organization that is helping to make extracurricular low incomeality for students. making it possible to dream a reality. a former teacher for america and education ventures fellow, an entrepreneur and she has been recognized twice on the forbes 30 under 30 for her work in education. she is joining us today as a recipient of the blue health and social innovation fellowship. philanthropist and entrepreneur's lesley blume and david huffman created this as a way to motivate socially conscious individuals to encourage them to continue their efforts. please join me in welcoming pets schmidt. [applause] >> conventionally we think of opportunity like this. 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. instead what created a culture of achievement in me was not academics at all. it was figure skating. growing up i was a competitive 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. notable what funny a true 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. after that the opportunity was obvious. let's 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, purpose and 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 year i had a research paper, out of 160 students less than 10% turned this paper in. so i took a step back and 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 passion -- 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 papers and students wanted to 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. with that $12,000 i sent seven students on the programs they had written about and what is interesting is when the students came back they were way more confident 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. pose a luis -- jose luis has 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. so while this 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, just awesome. i feel that confidence and it is such a simple concept of pursuing passion that changes our lives. thank you for changing so many lives. imagine a situation in which the circumstances were so extreme that you had to relearn much of what we typically take for granted. like walking, talking, eating, writing, everything. our next speaker is here to tell you, based on her experience she founded the clara and 2013, they cannot go to -- a technology 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. so, great to have you here in the roots of your company are in 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 not for somebody, a passerby who opened up my airway, i would not be here today. so declara 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 because a lot of people who 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 -- invented -- 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. -- i am getting a titanium jaw bone next week. every time something falls off someone has something for me. [laughter] it 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 there about 68 pounds bald and did not have a lot of my face by then that i had 100 grandparents who all came around and read top me everything -- re-taught me 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 your learning, not just once on the stage or a teacher but that acknowledges and what we do is we replicate a lot of the hierarchical processes of the brave, so when you think about it -- of the brain, soanya think 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. i believe we are all lifelong 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 the holes in the curriculum and 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 their current economy is collapsing, so most of the countries that have come to us have said how do we transform our workforce at scale immediately, 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. coming this 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? >> since 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 to try things and risk-taking so the reason why all my companies have been wrapped around learning is i started out helping students learn and now i've been focused on adult learners because all of us have to be continuous learners because the world is changing so fast. to be able to have 2 billion out 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. >> you are so right, it is not even the answers we are looking for it is about having the right questions. >> you read my mind because one of the pieces of my product will be of about curated questions. one of the learnings i had from that was from a project called fold it. but uw 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 and tech -- genentec will be 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 be 50 years in the making it's 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. everybody in this room and when 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 continue to undo yourself so 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 learning pathway with her at their mind and the only way to free 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! i want to give it up for all the 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 going, 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 texting "talk" to 37479. thanks again, have a great evening and don't stop learning! [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2014] >> the president of the university of virginia will be at the national press club tomorrow to discuss the trends in higher education. remarks come after the aiversity develop zero-tolerance policy and campus assaults after a rolling stone article revealed an alleged gang rape at the university house in 2012. >> monday night, on "the communicators, -- "the communicators," the cofounder of paypal. >> i would say that the single overarching theme of my class and books is that people should rethink competition. in this is this books tell you how to compete more effectively. others say -- mine tells you that perhaps you should not compete at all and should always aim for something like a monopoly that is such a noakthrough that you have competition at all. >> monday night, 9 p.m. eastern on "the committee getters. later, democratic senator carl levin of michigan. after 18 years in the house of representatives, new york congresswoman carolyn mccarthy is requiring -- retiring. to talked about what led her run for office, her legislative competence, and what she had planned after leaving congress. >> you are about to become former or ex representative mccarthy. how are you processing all that? >> i am very lucky. i made up my mind last january. in my mind, i am already there. i am looking forward to retiring. i love my job. as you know, i had cancer last year. i am doing well. it is a terrible thing to say. as a nurse, we have weird senses of humor. if the cancer hadn't gotten me, my family would've killed me. i had no choice. i had to retire. >> they want you back home? >> they want me back home. people don't understand that you get on a plane from here and you had home and you get off the plane and you are doing district work. you still don't have that time to really spend time with your family. >> what would you miss the most about this place? >> my friends on both sides of the aisle. i know people say we are so dysfunctional here. many of us get along really well. when i was -- when democrats were in charge and i was a chairwoman of the education committee, i worked with my republican colleagues to get bills done. when the republicans took over, they would come to me to sponsor bills on the democratic side. many of us do work together. i know we call that the old days. there are many members here that work together still. the big things are the ones that make the news. we still are making the government work. >> what impressions might the public have about congress that are misperceptions? >> i think it's damaging for all of us when a member crosses the line and does something wrong. people think that we are all corrupt. i would say 99.9% of the members are good people. yes there is going to be someone that puts a bad name on us. i think that is really a shame. we pass all these laws where now, i have money in stocks. every month we have to put in what we've sold. i don't pay attention to that. that's why i have a broker. to have them think it we have inside information, i said to my staff, has anybody ever mention something that we might have inside information on a stock coming up? at a remember anybody ever approaching me about that. i'm sure that's the majority. the laws that we have before all this scandal, if you did something wrong, you go to court. when you get caught, you got punished. you had to leave congress or you were prosecutors did went to jail. >> the you think the ethics process has enough teeth to encourage good behavior? >> i do. i think they do a very good job. you will always have a member that thinks they can get away with something. why they think that, i always have a dinner with republican and democrat women every six weeks or so. there was a time when three or four scandals were going on at the same time. we would all say, why did they think they would get away with it? thank god, no woman has ever been brought up on charges.

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