If you haven’t showed the Epic 2020 video to your class yet, you must. It’s such a brilliant, yet controversial study regarding the direction of education over the next eight years. It carefully lays out the achievements in recent years in education (Sal Khan, MOOCs Udacity, badges, etc) and talks about 2012 as the threshold year for moving education to the web for all, for FREE. This democratizing of education is worth considering especially given two things: the declining test scores of US students, and the outrageous costs of colleges which are making schools harder and harder to afford, while they are becoming more and more selective. Epic 2020 offers an innovative solution to both of these problems. To open up the discussion, I began my class with this document about the absurdities in the current system of higher education. I had previously shown this video of Will Mcavoy from HBO’s The Newsroom which addressed the US’s problems in student test scores (a fact we revisited). Then, after watching Epic 2020 I opened up the room to discussion…
It was amazing to watch my students, whom we often call digital natives, struggle to consider the feasibility of an alternate online educational option. Some nodded their heads in agreement while my seniors immediately felt depressed. The college process had recently left a bitter taste in their mouths, and I was forcing them to consider the value of that diploma AND the price at which it comes.
My US History class happened to be studying the Gilded Age and the following day, we had an open discussion about wealth during the Gilded Age with a focus on Andrew Carnegie’s Gospel of Wealth and Horatio Alger’s rags to riches narratives. I used this graphic regarding wealth in Congress, this graphic about inequality in the United States, and these graphics about corporate profits and tax rates, to prove that we are truly living in a second Gilded Age. When one student astutely connected this lesson to the EPIC video, he concluded that we wouldn’t be moving toward the vision laid out in the video because the elite will invest their time and money into ensuring that the existing structure, which benefits them, will be there for their kids and grand kids. You can imagine the reaction of the other students. Minds were blown.
