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That’s not to say, we don’t value the work and the commitment of those who have been fighting the long battle. We do, tremendously. But we also believe that sometime an “outsider’s” perspective can help us see what we don’t see. Wasn’t it Henry Miller who said something like ‘One’s destination is a new way of looking at things.’

I believe we need to reframe the problem and the conversation, from one about re-forming schooling to one about re-thinking education and re-imagining learning.

he current educational system is based on individual and teacher learning. However, this simply isn’t realistic in today’s classroom. Students are social creatures and their education should be delivered in a way that is more in line with their day-to-day interactions. The solution? Go back to the principle that worked so well in the single school house model: social learning.  Student-to-student and social learning has already proven to be effective and cost effective (it’s free).

As part of a redesign of our instructional model, students should be provided with the infrastructure to collaborate with each other live, in real-time, 24 hours a day. We should give students free, collaborative, multimedia online study rooms with access to standards-aligned content. We should do this because we have a social responsibility to do it, but it also makes good plain economic sense.

Why limit your student population to a few hundred when you can leverage the knowledge of hundreds of millions?