An Education Bubble?

An Education Bubble?: I watched this debate the other day between entrepreneur Peter Thiel and Google CEO Eric Schmidt. It was moderately interesting, but the part that got me thinking was in the last few minutes (about the 33 minute mark) when they briefly touched on education. Peter Thiel suggested that, at least at the university level, we are in an education bubble. Eric Schmidt responded that while there may be issues, he thinks education is the answer.

Dinner and Debate with Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel from Fortune Conferences and Fortune Conferences on FORA.tv

And that got me thinking. More and more I'm wondering if Education - with a capital 'E' - is not the answer. Perhaps we are seeing a bubble in education, not just at the university level, but in K-12 as well. Perhaps we'll look back at the last half of the twentieth century and this first decade or two of the twenty-first and view it as the industrial-education complex (with apologies to Eisenhower) era of education.

More and more I'm wondering if there's any possible way to take a system of Education and make it work the way I think it needs to; to truly meet the needs of our children. I'm really beginning to doubt there is.

So if Education (capital 'E") is not the answer, what is? Perhaps it's learning.

Now, to be fair, I have no idea how to "scale" such an idea, and specifically no idea how to make sure the least advantaged among us can take advantage of the learning landscape we currently are presented with (that's one thing a system - despite all its flaws - currently does better). But just as in other bubbles, where in the midst of the hype very few folks were aware they were in a bubble, perhaps the way forward to make our children's learning the focus will emerge from the rubble.

Perhaps.