A delicious, brief quote of the day — that's the foundation of a lot of what our new kind of school is trying to do:
I don't know how the human brain works but it's almost magical: when you read enough or talk to enough experts, when you have enough inputs, new ideas start appearing.
The quotee? Andrew Ng — the genius AI pioneer/entrepreneur profiled in Inside The Mind That Built Google Brain: On Life, Creativity, And Failure, from the Huffington Post.
Ng understands innovation — and that makes him go against conventional thinking about creativity.
Our society is obsessed with creativity. (Or, at least the society I spend my time in! Your mileage may differ.)
And, to nurture creativity, we constantly hear cries about how schooling should lay off information — "kids can Google that!" "They already have knowledge at their fingertips!"
But fingertips aren't brains.
Information that you can Google isn't knowledge that you can use, now.
To innovate — to spin out new ideas — you need to have ideas inside you. And not just a few ideas: a thick, dense ecosystem of ideas. A Great Barrier Reef full of ideas!
We're creating schools of perpetual innovation — where kids are asked to do more original thinking than perhaps any school asks of kids now.
And we're going to do that through immersing kids in ideas, in stories, in theories and songs and artworks and films and ecosystems.
Our plan: to have a richer curriculum than any school has had before — and to leverage that into the world's most creativity-focused curriculum.
Onward!