"The Astounding World of the Future" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJjUVIIYptE) satirizes a 50's style prediction of what the year 2000 would look like, painting an unfortunately realistic picture of what has really happened. The indirect gap analysis that this provides is disappointing and jarring.

Magazines such as "Popular Science" from the 50s are still inspiring: showing vibrant drawings of futuristic cityscapes, describing the civil behavior of future people, and detailing technology that would improve our lives. We seem to have fallen short of many of the lofty goals and visions that people had. Why did it happen?

My conclusion is that society hasn't been disciplined enough to actively manage toward, or structure itself for, these goals. The first priority should have been improving our collective brain-power, or, improving our educational system, in order to ensure that smart answers to society's problems are found more quickly. For faster and better collective brain-power, we need to restructure the way we approach the management of the education system, and stop thinking about it in terms of national boundaries.

Many people believe that government isn't efficient at getting things done...and yet they still wait for government to get things done. It's easy to blame the government for problems which we are now empowered to fix ourselves. "Us Now" (http://dotsub.com/view/34591ca8-0ef5-48fb-82e6-163a9f21298d --subtitles are available in Portuguese) talks about how we are at a tipping point in history. Linux, Wikipedia, reddit, etc. have all become successful collaboration-based models for getting things done. "Us Now" takes these examples and discusses the implications of living and breathing collaboration, and how modern technology + collaboration can (and should) replace paternalism in government.

What if we were to take an open-source model, for example wikipedia, and apply it to public education (Howard Rheingold would probably argue that this is also inevitable: http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration.html )? What if any kid or any school could download, for free, one program that has a complete elementary school curriculum suite (books, assignments, lesson plans, video lectures, self-correcting quizes...)? What if those who really are passionate about education were able to directly contribute to the educational curriculum of all children, all over the world? What if we set up an online community of elementary school students, providing them with tools and games to compete against each other in terms of knowledge and skills? Instead of relying on government to improve public education (and by default public funding, etc), through a constantly iterative process of collaborative contribution, I believe that this curriculum would become very good, very fast. It could be complementary to traditional schooling, providing a standardized curriculum of what one generation believes is important for the next generation to learn.

I'm sharing this concept for two reasons. I would like to know your feedback on the concept, and also any ideas that you may have on how to manage the effort to a tipping point of self-organization (for example, to a mature wikipedia stage). Maybe you know someone who can take this idea and drive it to fruition? Maybe you have tips on how to spread the concept? Maybe you have suggestions for the concept itself? What are your thoughts? Our schools have a lot of room for improvement. This improvement is important. Let's improve it now.

The problem with it is, there is no one at home to make the child do it ! In general parents expect the school to teach everything to the child . The school my son went to gave all kids a paper that said to teach your child the alphabet and to teach him to count before school started . Out of 12 kids only 4 new the alphabet and how to count to 100 . Most of the rest could not even write there name . It held the 4 back so the rest could catch up . Push the parent's and you will get fruition . Some thing like SAVE A CHILD AND LOVE YOUR CHILD WITH WIKIPEDIA .