I was the average kid. My parents didn’t push me. My friends didn’t push me. Only my grandparents said I needed to study to become successful. For me learning was without relevance: why would I need to learn history, physics or biology? It was boring. So I studied for exams, but only to pass them.
Since my classes didn’t hold my attention, I decided to start a school magazine. I enjoyed learning about editing, print, selling ads, distribution and more. Many things worked out, some things didn’t but I ended up publishing the magazine for all 4 years. It was super exciting and enriching. More importantly, it was the first time I realized that learning didn’t have to be this static, test oriented environment where grades were the focus at all costs.
After graduating with average grades from high school I signed up to study economics at university, because I wasn’t sure what to do and economics seemed “safe”. Unfortunately my situation still didn’t improve: lectures still bored me and I only studied when I had to take an exam.
I decided to start another business, this time a company (http://iphos.com/) that developed and hosted internet applications. Starting my first company forced me to face many challenges all at once. This started with simple things, like how to pitch, how to make an offer or how to build a product. I often lacked the skills or knowledge to even know how to approach problems let alone how to solve them. But while working on the project, a part of mastering the challenge was learning and applying what I learned. For example, when the company won our first contract to develop an ecommerce shop, this required us to learn a new development language. In order to keep our first customer happy, we learned on the fly and got rapid feedback. Back then it took a long time to find and access the right information. And I would have wished for more guidance. But the experience of having to figure out what worked, what didn’t and how to improve was invaluable.
By the time the company had started to scale, I had learned software development in depth and could count large companies like Allianz and Bawag PSK as loyal customers. All my focus was on the company and so I quit studying and left school.
This was the start of my career as an entrepreneur and tech enthusiast.
More importantly, this was the beginning of how I realized that overcoming challenges in the real world was the most valuable way to build an appreciation and habit for life long learning.
As a student at school and university, the goal was to display and regurgitate as much knowledge as possible. Teachers focused on providing a steady stream of facts that I had only hoped to pick up sitting in a lecture hall. There was limited interaction or time to test what you learned in real time. Knowledge and memorization were the limiting factors in order to grow and improve.
Today, thanks to the internet, knowledge is accessible, broadly available and you can teach yourself. You can now access more information on your phone than you could possibly memorize in a lifetime. Yet we still face significant challenges as a society. Access to knowledge itself doesn’t actually solve problems. Rather, like what I learned founding companies, it is the ability to learn, apply, overcome and finally master skills that helps you find solutions.
I now know that I wasn’t wrong for feeling disengaged with classes.
Schools just hadn’t caught up with this transformation in access to information. And they haven’t shifted to focus on mastery as the primary display of achievement.
When the pandemic started and my kids were forced into homeschooling, I was in the lucky position to be able to take the time to help them learn.
When I helped them to study, I noticed how hard it was for them to concentrate and to stay motivated. The teachers define when they learn, what and how they learn. They taught all of the kids the same topics even if the kids found it hard to concentrate or were uninterested in the topic.
Seeing my own kids struggle today reminded me of my own experience in school. I finished school more than 2 decades ago, and since then we know so much more about education, the internet provides an abundance of information and we have technology for better education. How is it even possible that we still educate students in the same way?
Looking at my kids, I felt lost as to how to help them understand that they are not the problem. How should these kids, who are told to just follow the teacher blindly succeed in a meaningful way? How will they be prepared for what the future will hold?
The challenges we face now as a society — climate change, fake news, wealth inequality, biodiversity loss, systemic depression - are only increasing in their scale and complexity. The skills we need to adequately address these issues cannot be taught with the education model we’ve inherited.
As they say, “You can’t do today’s job with yesterday’s methods and be in business tomorrow.”
There has to be a better model. And it has to be one centered on empowering everyone to be change agents, both locally and globally.
In my search to understand the problem better and look for answers, I was lucky enough to meet Thomas. While my experience is with developing products, his background was in education and student empowerment.
I remember our first very passionate conversation about education.
We both saw the rise and potential for scale in online education. But we also saw its shortcomings:
Both of us agreed on the problem and that now is the time to tackle it.
Together we founded Tomorrow’s Education. Working with Thomas from the academic perspective, we both shared the same vision:
To transform Education to be focused on creating changemakers.
In intense sessions and with much support we worked on Tomorrow’s Education’s core concept and thought about how we want to translate the vision into reality.
Tomorrow’s Education will deliver on this vision in three ways
One of our core beliefs is built on the promise that understanding technology is fundamental to any type of work in the future. All of our courses will reinforce this belief — in the coursework itself and in access and use of the platform.
Being tech literate must be a given in order to adapt.
Most importantly, my hope is that Tomorrow’s Education becomes a platform for building more adaptable and engaged citizens. In my own career, I have been in many different types of roles. Education can no longer focus on teaching you skills for only one job.
21st century societies demand that we build better, more well rounded citizens that can adapt to roles that will shift over time and are technology forward. Students/citizens will need to be able to build an entrepreneurial mindset.
My personal mission is to inspire others to build a world where everyone is conscious about their environment, their global impact and their own capabilities. With the skills and a growth mindset to learn limitlessly, I believe we will not just master the challenges of tomorrow but we will also like the world we have built.
We hope that everyone will join us in building a better tomorrow.
Join us in the journey at Tomorrow’s Education.