Jimmy Wales: belief

Transcript context

…You are, then, an expert on education. [laughs] I also can reflect on my own education. For me, I think if you put me in the camp that says, there is a big downside to traditional education in terms of, if you aren’t careful you can get into a very rigid process that is not good for creativity. I would say my ideas in that area are similar to — unfortunately, he recently passed away — Sir Ken Robinson. For me, when I was young, I had a very unusual educational upbringing. Sometimes it’s reported it was Montessori. It wasn’t technically Montessori, but it was very open, and we had lots of free time. I basically spent a lot of time reading the encyclopedia. Incredibly valuable just to have time to explore, be encouraged in following your curiosity, as opposed to rigidly sitting in rows and meeting testing standards and all of that. Having said that, I’m not opposed to having standards for schools, and tests are a good way of measuring that. But I think you need to really focus a lot on creativity because if we look forward, the world faces a lot of problems, and we’re going to need a lot of innovation to solve some of these problems. If you had $100 million to give away, putting aside your own enterprises, what would you do with it?…

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