TEDxYouth@Hillsborough: A radical take on education (YouTube Content): Difference between revisions

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And so that's a very interesting question. If genius is actually something prosaic, and analytic and definable, it means that we are frightened of even considering this cognitive city. There are fine private schools in New York, but it is a bit of a puzzle that some of the finest schools in the country do not produce Nobel laureates at anything like a clip that would rival, let's say the Bronx Sciences and Stuyvesant High Schools, which have produced many Nobel laureates. So the question is, do we have a vibrant educational system in our independent schools, or is it mostly trained on privilege preservation? Are we taking enough risk, and are we getting the kind of extraordinary performances that we need as a country to grow and to innovate?

So as I have two of these things in the hallway, I headed into the bathroom at the Speyer Legacy School, but there's not such great acoustic insulation between the hallway and the bathroom. And as soon as I disappeared from the scene, the kids start asking each other well what's this and what's that? The question becomes how do we have a map of dark matter? It's dark, how do we know where it is with that kind of specificity? And I was astounded that very quickly, the third and fourth graders figured out that you use the gravitational lens—that's one way of doing this—to figure out where the distortions in space and time are, and indirectly infer the position of the dark matter by its effect on visible light, which is a very advanced idea for people who don't know the Einstein field equations.