Why Germany Is So Much Better at Training Its Workers

Excerpt from The Atlantic — October 2014 The U.S. has its own tradition of apprenticeship going back many years. But like most kinds of vocational education, it fell out of fashion in recent decades—a victim of our obsession with college and concern to avoid anything that resembles tracking. Today in America, fewer than 5 percent…

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Video: Sparks – How Youth Thrive – Peter Benson

No one has ever said, oh this child of mine, my fondest wish is they will ace statewide benchmark math and science tests when they’re 16… When you actually listen to people’s statements about their dreams for our kids, you hear a very different language. Kids who experience joy. Kids who are connected and engaged.…

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On Connectivist Learning

At its heart, connectivism is the thesis that knowledge is distributed across a network of connections, and therefore that learning consists of the ability to construct and traverse those networks. … I once played a chess player who (surprisingly to me) turned out to be far my superior (it was a long time ago). I…

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Long Now Foundation

Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. … Some sort of balancing corrective [is needed] which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility—where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries. The Long Now The Long Now Foundation, established in 1996, is an American non-profit organization based in San Francisco that seeks to start and…

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