Thursday, October 27, 2011

The Prometheus Inquiry Concept

The following is a draft for an elevator speech.  At 3.5 minutes, it is probably too long:

Education in this country sucks; it wastes time and money without really adding proportional value.

Schools are in a repetitive and unsuccessful loop of reform, yet: college students require remedial classes, the problems of drop outs and illiteracy have been unresolved, ineffective public school education traps the poor in poverty, and unchallenged students complain that lessons are not relevant to real life.

Students and parents should have better options available; especially those stuck in public schools, which should be called “welfare schools.”

Yet technology today provides the means to overcome constraints. Great teachers and curriculum exist, but they DO NOT scale. Most students suffer under the direction of inferior teachers and methods, when better exists and could be available to them with the click of a mouse.

The path to enhanced compensation to the best teachers is not merit pay in the public schools, but greater productivity…teaching more students by scaling through technology.

Truly today, a student’s ability to learn is limited by the time wasted on public school assignments and the parental wealth destroyed through taxation. But that limited time and those limited funds available could be leveraged to bring enhanced results; like a flywheel, slowly building momentum to ever increasing learning.

Having worked in postsecondary education finance, I am aware that no honest partnership is possible between a private company and public education; as the public will parasitically drain the capital from the private company. Unfortunately, most private education ventures seek to leverage the public schools as their market; in the long run, that will diminish the shareholders for the sake of the stakeholders.

Therefore, the foundation the Prometheus Inquiry proof of concept is to start by creating on-line courseware to supplement the education of students wherever they may be. By using the correct conceptual approach to education, students and parents can access on-line courseware to remediate, maintain, and enhance the students’ educational development at a fraction of the present cost in time and funds. Contrary to the Japanese model of rote and memorization, the Prometheus Inquiry scales by leveraging the student’s ability to think conceptually and independently instead of them becoming a parrot or automaton. Starting with supplemental education for children and adults, this bootstrapped enterprise will expand to provide multiple educational solution channels at multiple price points, including eventually brick and mortar classrooms, focused upon enhancing the ability of individual students (children and adults) based upon the resources available for student time and private financing.