Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

If educational abundance is our goal, these facts leave us with serious quality and quantity concerns. For quality, what kind of learning system teaches kids to ask the right questions? That system needs to be able to teach the three R’s (because, yes, even in this digital age, these basics are still critical) and the twenty-first-century skills kids need to succeed. The quantity issue is equally important. We’re already short millions of teachers. Forget about infrastructure. Schools in America are falling apart; schools in Africa don’t even exist. So even if we do figure out what to teach our children, how to do this at scale remains equally perplexing. But overshadowing both of these is a third problem. The twenty-first century is a media-rich environment. Between the Internet, video games, and those five hundred channels of cable, the competition for our children’s attention has become ruthless. If boredom is the number one cause of truancy, then our new education system needs to be effective, scalable, and wildly entertaining. In fact, wildly entertaining might not be enough. If we really want to prepare our children for the future, then learning needs to become addictive.