TED – Ideas Worth Spreading

Once or twice a year I stumble into the TED Conference Website.  TED is a nearly twenty year old conference that is dedicated to spreading ideas.  It is invite only and not exactly cheap with a 6,000 dollar ticket price.  All of the presentations are later put online (or at least 390 of them have been) and that is where I come in.

I stumbled into it today and watched John Hodgman entertain the crowd with almost a spoof of a TED Talk called “A Brief Digression on Matters of Lost Time” where he ruminates about the existence of aliens in a perfectly serious manner which is why it lends itself to TED so well.

I’ll embed it here since it was deadpan funny but that is not what made me write this blog. “However, with respect, I would like to point out two possibilities that Enrico Fermi perhaps did not consider: 1. Is that the aliens might be very far away, perhaps, I dare say, even on other planets.  The other possibility is that perhaps Enrico Fermi himself was an alien himself.”

Instead, I’m writing because of the next one I saw on how education stifles creativity and how the modern school system is just a drawn out college entrance exam.  Even further, Sir Ken Robinson says that in the next thirty years more people will have graduated education systems than in the whole history of the world.  As a result a degree will be worthless.  He calls it academic inflation, meaning that college degrees will be replaced by masters degrees.  He also talks about how colleges have created academic systems in their images and it seems that the academic system’s goal is to turn out college professors.  The whole thing is very interesting but also really funny.  I actually feel like he could be Eddie Izzard’s uncle.  Really funny.

~Forth