Catallaxy describes a "self-organizing system of voluntary co-operation" -Friedrich Hayek
Topic: A doctoral candidate named John, who currently teaches in Hawaii, calls in to the after-show to discuss education as a self-organizing system. He references a TED Talk by Sugata Mitra and some interesting outcomes from the One Laptop Per Child project in Ethiopia.
Excerpt: "We left the boxes in the village. Closed. Taped shut. No instruction, no human being. I thought, the kids will play with the boxes! Within four minutes, one kid not only opened the box, but found the on/off switch. He'd never seen an on/off switch. He powered it up. Within five days, they were using 47 apps per child per day. Within two weeks, they were singing ABC songs [in English] in the village. And within five months, they had hacked Android. Some idiot in our organization or in the Media Lab had disabled the camera! And they figured out it had a camera, and they hacked Android."
This is a portion the 11-1-12 After School (Sucks) Special. School Sucks is live on the Liberty Radio Network and UStream Thursdays at 10pm EST.
Look Closer:
Ethiopian kids hack OLPCs in 5 months with zero instruction
http://dvice.com/archives/2012/10/ethiopian-kids.php
Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education
http://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_the_child_driven_education.html