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Third, vocational and academic high schools were required to design and provide instruction that enabled students more flexibility and choice.

One scenario is that schools will race after technology and align core instructional operations to rely on digital and other technological solutions.

A second scenario views schools merely as places for facilitation of study and checking of achievement.

A third scenario would be to elevate schools as places for social learning and developmental skills. Cooperative learning, problem solving and cultivating the habits of mind would be at the heart of school life.

First, I am not saying that Finland has the best education system in the world and that others should imitate what we have done.

Second, I make it very clear that the Finnish school system cannot be transferred anywhere else in the world.

There are some concrete lessons that American educators and policymakers could learn from Finland.

First, a universal standard for financing schools, so that resources are channeled to schools according to real needs

Second, a universal standard for time allocation in schools, allowing pupils to have a proper recess between classes and a balanced curriculum among academic learning, the arts and physical education.

Third, a universal standard for teacher preparation that follows standards in other top professions.

“Writing exams isn’t a measure of intelligence or knowledge, it’s about getting inside your prof’s head to figure out what’ll be on the exam.”

Information is propelled into students without teaching them how to practically utilize it. This is senseless. Regurgitating facts, memorizing figures and formulas, compressing course material in our short-term memory for the sake of doing well on an exam; they are all detrimental to the learning experience. But students still do it because they don’t want to fail. Instead, we should be fostering a culture where, to paraphrase Arianna Huffington, “Failure isn’t considered the opposite of success, but an integral part of it.”

We can’t allow learning to become passive. We need to teach students to learn how to learn – to become independent, innovative thinkers capable of changing the world.

We need to tear apart the school day, the high school timetable, the school year, the four-year diploma. We need to rethink credit- and diploma-awarding authority, which need not be the sole purview of the high school. For instance, why can't we give this authority to nongovernment organizations and corporations willing to step up and offer academic credits in their workplaces relevant to the work of their institution?

not just for university-bound scholarship students

New technologies will profoundly alter the way knowledge is conveyed.

As articulated by the Nobel Prize-winner Daniel Kahneman in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” we understand the processes of human thought much better than we once did.

And yet in the face of all evidence, we rely almost entirely on passive learning.

This makes it essential that the educational experience breed cosmopolitanism — that students have international experiences, and classes in the social sciences draw on examples from around the world.

Courses of study will place much more emphasis on the analysis of data

A good rule of thumb for many things in life holds that things take longer to happen than you think they will, and then happen faster than you thought they could.

Here is a bet and a hope that the next quarter century will see more change in higher education than the last three combined.

But the legality of library.nu is also not the issue: trading in scanned, leaked or even properly purchased versions of digital books is thoroughly illegal. This is so much the case that it can't be long before reading a book - making an unauthorised copy in your brain - is also made illegal. 

not stealing

The winter of 2012 has seen a series of assaults on file-sharing sites in the wake of the failed SOPA and PIPA legislation. Mega-upload.com (the brainchild of eccentric master pirate Kim Dotcom - he legally changed his name in 2005) was seized by the US Department of Justice; torrent site btjunkie.com voluntarily closed down for fear of litigation.