Request for Startups: News, Jobs, and Democracy

I think you're exactly right in that the "world APIs" for education are the limiting factor. The major issue is that the assessment process is directly tied to the learning process within a single institution, leading to both being done incredibly inoptimally. It leads to the necessity of standardized tests and exams, and accredited institutions, which limits the potential learning opportunities available to the very few that are recognized on national or global scale.

If a "global assessment API" was decoupled from learning institutions it could capture educational experience as generated by any environment, from standard public schools to non-traditional schools, and we'd see a much more diverse set of educational experiences arise and be able to coexist fairly, meaning that individuals could better shape their individual academic paths without compromise and still be able to operate in the greater academic network.

A universal assessment system can exist in a very scalable way if its built upon social consensus. It would be absolutely impossible given our current models of assessment, especially the ones used on a national or international level. They are just simply far too expensive to begin to capture the breadth or depth of potential experience in academics in a meaningful way.

Today though we have the technology (i.e Ethereum and other decentralized technologies) to (relatively) easily design and deploy incentivized _secure_ systems for social consensus. It would enable systems like the one you're talking about to actually enable not just the teaching of the most obscure subject, but the _recognition_ of them too.

This is something I have been working on building for a while now. I truly believe its the answer to the flaws in our (global, not just American) education system and will be necessary for a truly effective, and universal, one.

As others said, education was already on an earlier RFS. But it's still important, maybe more than ever.

As you stated, I also believe that education it's the root of most problems. Today, almost everyone learns the same way as they did 100 years ago: A teacher going through a non-customized textbook that was written by a small number people. It's a linear learning path and highly ineffective. It's also inefficient, as teacher to student ratios are mostly around 1-to-20 (I am talking about K-12, not college or MOOCs).

I believe that we can overcome a lot of problems of education by applying technology. More concretely, we should be able to provide more customized, higher quality content for people at young and old age. This, while creating more genuine excitement for science and scientific thinking. This means, we have to rethink the current teacher/student paradigm. And I don't mean by merely providing tools to teachers or copy/pasting textbooks to online videos.

I mean by curating content that excites, using some ML to create an optimal and dynamic learning path per student and making it fit to the busy daily lives of people who don't have time to watch 1 hour lectures every week when they get home from work. This might seem like advertising, by I am working on exactly such a project and thought it would be ok to mention it here, because it is relevant for the discussion and other startups were mentioned in the comments, too. It's called Humbot (humbot.io) and I am happy to hear your comments and start a discussion on what the radical improvements in education must be over the next decade.

Education and News are two sides of the same coin. At some point the majority of the adult population makes the decision to learn about the world from entertainment companies. We should reanalyze what news and continuing education mean, relative to each other.

https://theconversation.com/ and http://www.worldcrunch.com/ make good starts, as do aggregators like http://www.aldaily.com/ and https://redef.com/

As far as pure education companies, we need more software platforms for building curriculums collaboratively, some combination of wikia, github, wirecutter, and khanacademy.org. You may be thrown by my inclusion of wirecutter, but concensus based consumer reports type information, leading to populations making better decisions, helps cut through the paradox of choice. It also teaches people HOW to make decisions, and how to evaluate choices. It should be easy for anyone to fork, remix, contribute, or request corrections. Even collaborative documentary editing software, or the ability to sift through ALL the worlds lectures on a topic, and assessable the best bits. As long as teams of strangers can collaborate and fork, the world will have more shoulder standing giants, and less reinventing of the wheel.

We just need 2 things to make it happen. The replicator (far closer than most people think) and a way to deal with the people who will inevitably decide that replicators can only be used with their permission (so, so far away).

People usually believe what their friends believe - information is used to make social objects and ways of doing social signalling, not to get at hard facts.

A lot of bullshit starts to fly around when you have two or more stable "positions" around a subject in a society. People divide into sides and keep using information only to signal to which side they belong.

This leads me to (maybe a pretty dumb) idea: what if we found a way to destroy such stable positions? Destabilize them, so that people couldn't stubbornly signal their support for a single side? Of course all sides would end up using such a tool to destroy their "opponents"; I feel like this could lead to two outcomes: a) (bad) there aren't any stable positions anymore, and b) (good) the positions keep getting disrupted until they rearrange into one that is actually aligned with the facts.