Self Education: Our New Goal in Education

The past few months I have worked closely with college students at Duke, NC Central, and Durham Tech.  One conclusion from these daily interactions is that the traditional way of using experts (aka professors) to teach knowledge should be changing.  The reason?  Students must self educate to make it.

Example #1:
I gave a computer science student at Durham Tech a project to work on.  The project really needed to be done in PHP and HTML5.  Only issue was the student had not learned these languages.  I was proud of the student jumping in and trying to get up to speed fast so he could complete the project.

Example #2:
Duke is a fantastic school and I have grown to love it.  Liberal Arts education however was never structured to teach real world skills.  So most of the students I work with have picked up these skills on their own so they can launch their own ventures.

The Future
The ability to adopt new skills quickly will be key as technology continues it's growth.  What you learn this year must be added upon next year after you graduate.

So What?
How do educational institutions handle this?  They must have classes that encourage self education and entrepreneurial thinking.  Projects that require autonomous new skill acquisition will ensure students are ready to tackle real world problems.   For example, imagine assigning students to build a Wordpress site with little direction.  There is so much Wordpress documentation that enterprising students would have no problem learning in a couple hours how to do it.