The Future of Education is Aristotle for Everyone

The future of education is this. Digital Aristotle for everyone. A computer programme that teaches students individually by pulling from a library of videos from crowd sourced video platform, a programme that tests students on what they know and more importantly adapts to the way they learn overtime by comparing the effectiveness of different videos and tests to discover the effectiveness of learning.  

Digital Aristotle of everyone is not a fantasy there are a number of people building this now even though digital Aristotle is not there explicit goal. One of these places is the Khan Academy. It is more than a man one the computer. Behind the website is incredibly complicated software testing everything about student learning. The effectiveness of different videos, different tests and different ways of asking questions. Whilst it may seem primitive now technology only gets better faster.  

When digital Aristotle arrives it will be cheaper, less labor intensive and better than human teachers ever could be. It shall be the case that teachers time is freed up allowing kids to focus on interesting projects in class allowing students to be more engaged. Whilst that might happen in the near term it may not be the long term reality. What happens when digital Aristotle knows more about the student than the teacher. When for every topic of human endeavor it is able to take the best and brightest kids further down the path of knowledge than there teachers ever could. 

It is not likely that schools will go away after all they are not just about learning but also freeing parents to work in the economy whilst their children are turned into civilised adults. Schools will be radically different, there will be far fewer teachers working in them doing far less. Whilst that is not great news for teachers it is excellent news for students and society.  Lets take for example a current typical scenario that can happen in a school; a student does poorly school moves too fast and if they are doing well school moves too slow.  

In the future every student will use digital Aristotle for there whole life. Tutor personalised for them teaching them exacatly what they need to learn when they are best ready for it. When that comes we will have a better educational system and a better society.  

The internet is different behind the scene something different is happening this hints that the shape is to come. In a perfect school each student would have a personal tutor like Aristotle to Alexander the great. If your education policy is Aristotle for everyone then there are three main problems with this. Firstly, there are not enough people on earth to teach every child. Secondly, if there were even enough teachers to do so it would be horrifically expensive. Thirdly, even if human capital and financial capital was not a problem there would not be enough good teachers like Aristotle. 

Technology is solving this problems. "There are not enough people on earth to teach every child." Who needs teachers when the internet can teach you all the things. Lets say you want to learn mathematics just use Khan Academy or want to learn Science just use Crash Course YouTube channel go watch then with hundreds of thousands of students. The internet massively multiples the number of teachers solving the man power problem.  

With the internet the cost of accessing education is dramatically going down as is the cost of making stuff for the internet. That is why a guy with a camera can make videos and pull in millions of views at essentially zero cost. The internet solves problems one and two but educational videos still aren't personalised for everyone. This leaves YouTube as a library of videos and not a tutor like Aristotle. However, you can build on top of YouTube.