The amazing people at opencolleges.edu.au recently released this awesome infographic about education in Australia and the correlation between the income gap and achievement gap. Hopefully companies like Khan Academy, Teach with Reach and others can help reduce the correlation, allowing anyone with Internet access the ability to learn.

The Achievement Gap

To bring the matter down to earth, a system of education that prepares people for “careers” rather than for life in all its dimensions, especially its tragic dimension, will readily lead its graduates into Thoreau’s trap of “improved means to an unimproved end”. We will unthinkingly build bigger and supposedly better mousetraps that do little or nothing to improve the quality of our lives or that even make them worse.

Without judgement – the ability to assess the nature of the reality that confronts us, to conceive the likely consequences of alternative courses of action, and then to weight the delicate balance between ends and means – we are little more than skilled barbarians whose short sighted and imprudent decisions will terminate in ruin.

– William Ophuls in Plato’s Revenge, p107.

#chatwithstudents “Schools shouldn’t test for knowledge; they should evaluate our ability to apply it in meaningful ways.”

#chatwithstudents “Sometimes we don’t need to go to class to learn, especially if we’re learning trivial knowledge.”

#chatwithstudents “ideal school day would start with a meet w/ peers & experts in a café”

#chatwithstudents “Let’s build 2 kinds of schools: 1 for those who are early birds; 1 for night owls.”

The quotes come from Brad Ovenell-Carter and the blog post was pointed out to me on the forum of the Designing a New Learning Environment course from Stanford University.