More on need for change in education from Will Richardson

"If you want school to be test prep that's fine, but please realize you don't need schools any longer for test prep...(online) kids will get personalized self paced curriculum where they can pretty much get prepared for the test...I understand why we go for better...most of us are products of the system and we can relate to what better means...we have taken the same tests that our kids have taken and forgotten the same answers that our kids are going to forget as they go through school..We know the system...the system worked pretty well for a few decades...but right now this system is KILLING our kids. It is taking all the imagination, all the creativity, all the initiative, all the engagement right OUT of them"

"It is time now we stop trying to do schools better and we start trying to do them differently...schools in the form they were constructed are no longer relevant to our kids' lives in terms of places to get information and knowledge. Information and knowledge are everywhere...we have to reenvision schools for a different purpose and that purpose is more meaningful, more important, more difficult in a lot of ways..schools for our kids have to be places of deep enquiry, where they are solving real world problems because they have a lot of problems that they will need to solve..places where we can help them find their passions and support those passions so that they can become the life long learners in this context that we all want them to be..and none of this is the stuff of test prep, all of that is the stuff of life prep"

"Do we want our kids being prepared for their futures by a system that hasn't fundamentally changes in 125 years?..We have to take back this conversation about education from the businessmen and the politicians..and we have to scream to whoever is listening that test prep and learning are two very different things and one has been lost at the expense of the other right now and this is not acceptable for our kids...The system was built for a world that no longer exists"

Another TED talk about the need of reforming education to adapt to the many possibilities of the modern world by Will Richardson. He has been blogging about the intersection of social online learning networks and education for the past 10 years. He is a former public school educator for 22 years, and is a co-founder of Powerful Learning Practice, a unique long-term, job-embedded professional development program that has mentored over 3,500 teachers worldwide in the last four years. Extremely interesting and inspiring talk, please take the time to watch.