This article was taken from the January 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Thomas Hunt dropped out of high school after freshman year to develop his own curriculum for studying at home, based on what he was passionate about: curing cancer. His lessons included chemistry and public speaking. He also spent time at BioCurious, a community biology lab in Sunnyvale, where he met scientists and enthusiasts.
Now, aged 17, Hunt is one of the youngest 20 Under 20 Thiel's Foundation fellows, with a $100,000 (£62,000) fellowship that will allow him to pursue his dream.
We call people like Hunt "extreme learners". They aren't necessarily academically gifted, valedictorians or Mensa members.
Marc Roth, for instance, earned his bona fides as an extreme learner when he was broke and living in a homeless shelter in San Francisco. Roth dropped out of high school three times and never finished his community-college education.
While at the shelter he heard about the nearby TechShop, a membership club for DIY makers and inventors. He used his last bit of money to pay for a monthly membership and took a record number of classes in everything from sewing and vinyl cutting to programming. Within two months he moved from pupil to teacher and today is running the Learning Shelter, a 90-day training programme that teaches other homeless people high-tech manufacturing skills.
What makes an extreme learner is a drive to create one's own system for learning, often "hacking" it together from a variety of existing resources, many of them outside the traditional educational institutions. Although massive open online courses (MOOCs) promised to obliterate the need for physical schools and classrooms, the discussion on the future of education is missing the much larger point. We live in an environment in which knowledge, information and tools for learning are accessible everywhere -- on your laptop, tablet or smartphone. It is not just MOOCs, it is Wikipedia, WikiHow, Lynda, the Duolingo app for language learning, and many others. The challenge is how to entice people to dip into this knowledge.
The driver, it seems, is their social community, their peer group -- places such as TechShop, BioCurious, maker places and interest communities. We know that if conversation in your children's social group is about football, the children will memorise astounding amounts of data and history about it. If the conversation was about Dickens, they would go out of their way to read Dickens. And common to all of the extreme learners we studied at the Institute for the Future is that they created or found communities and spaces for learning -- although -unfortunately most of these were outside traditional settings. Extreme learners found opportunities in community labs, in hackathons, tech shop, science hack-days; hardly anyone we interviewed found it in school.
Learners will increasingly be able to hack together these alternative spaces and communities to pursue their learning. What "extreme learners" are doing today on the fringes will be the norm in ten years and beyond. This necessitates a much grander rethink of institutions and pedagogy than we have so far attempted.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
