Fast Company magazine online recently highlighted a new philanthropreneurial venture aimed at providing “mezzanine financing” for start-up schooling ventures that government schooling in its big “blobness” otherwise fails to serve.
The interview… editted below… rings with the sounds of similar Parents ‘n Schools sensibilities.
What would happen if you took the principles of a startup incubator… and applied it to improving education? A new philanthropic venture called Startl aims to find out… Startl is entirely focused on educational entrepreneurs… Fast Company caught up with Co-founder and Managing director Phoenix Wang to learn more and find out what’s coming next.
Fast Company: How did Startl get started?
Phoenix Wang: Startl is a group of foundations that got together 18 months ago to start thinking about the failures of a lot of interesting learning products that have had great potential but never make it to scale… There’s an emerging set of young players who really want to change education in fundamental ways and they have nowhere to go.
FC: What are the most important forces for change in the education world that you see right now?
PW: Technology is one set of forces. Decreasing cost is another… And it’s not just these new enablers, it’s that people’s expectations are changing. There’s a whole new generation of kids who expect I should be able to have control over how I learn, what I learn, and where I learn. I’m not just a consumer, I’m a co-creator and collaborator. I can share/mashup/remix knowledge.
FC: … it’s a huge market, it’s a real opportunity, but so much of the investment is locked down by the fact that governments are the biggest buyers.
PW: Exactly. There are $600 billion in public dollar investments in education around schools. But there’s a disconnect between the school districts who make the purchases and the students who are supposed to use it. So oftentimes what gets pushed down to students is not really aligned with their interests.
… I think a lot of times government money is about the codification of innovations–that is, institutionalizing things that already work–and they’re concerned about making the existing system better. We’re interested in leveraging what’s coming from the outside: how technology can improve people’s lives and how it can play a role in shifting the culture of education to a more learner-centric model as opposed to institutional efficiency…
And for that reason, our whole focus is operating on the edge between school and non-school, formal and non-formal; placing the learner in the middle.
FC: At the “hacking education” summit at Union Square Ventures last spring, one of the most frequently re-tweeted lines was about classroom teachers today being like bank tellers of the 1970s. Do you think that’s true?
PW: I was a management consultant with Accenture in the mid-90s when the Internet first came out. Every financial services client we had was panicking about disintermediation: that banks, travel agents, brokers would all go away. You know what? It’s not so much they’re all gone today but their roles have changed. They have to be better at what they do, redefine roles or add different kinds of value. I think likely that some level of that is going to happen to what we call schooling. It will be part of a whole ecology of institutions or modalities of access available to learners to enable them to develop an interest, engage, deepen and extend their learning.
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
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