Well, as for the Generation Y project itself, all I can say is the obvious.
It’s great. And it’s one of the rare times that the US Department of Education is really funding a great project. I think it’s by far the best project funded by them, but I’d like to put it in a sort of bigger perspective and taking this personally, I see it in the perspective of, uh. In the last 45 years I’ve been on a crusade believing that school will change that school as we’ve known it, and the separation of teachers who are supposed to know everything, teaching a lot of kids who are supposed to know nothing.
This isn’t gonna last, but people often ask, why do I think this can change? A hundred years ago, John Dewey said about the same sort of criticisms as I’m making. And that didn’t have much effect. And there’s been one education reformer after another trying to cause it to change, predicting it’ll change.
What’s different now? Well, two things are different now. One is we’ve got a technological infrastructure. Without these computers, it rarely couldn’t change very much because school is designed to fit. The previous kinds of knowledge technology, like you know, chalk and blackboard and print and paper and that sort of stuff.
With a new kind of knowledge technology, we can have a new kind of learning. But there’s another factor in my last book, the Connected Family. I call this factor Kid Power, and this is in line with the philosophy of the Generation Y project.