Should Teachers Be Celebrities Who Earn Millions of Dollars?
Teachers should inspire, teach, and entertain. The best ones should be celebrities who earn millions of dollars.
I only spent first and second grade in Bulgaria. By second grade, I was failing math.
I loved reading the word problems but stopped short of solving them. My mom tried. My dad tried. My teacher tried. The neighbor tried. A nerves-of-steel tutor tried. Nothing worked.
They’d be like, “OK, Polina, so Train A travels 70 miles per hour heading east, and Train B travels 60 miles per hour heading west. At what point will the trains meet, and how long will it take them to get to Mars and then Pluto and then back to Earth again?”
Needless to say, math has never been my strong suit. But give me a pen and a notepad, and I’d happily write you a 15-page essay on why the trains were trying to meet in the first place.
The problem is schools aren’t structured in a way that helps kids develop and sharpen their curiosities. It’s impossible to measure creativity with a standardized test.
If my parents hadn’t consistently encouraged my love for writing, I would’ve ended up as the fish in this quote: “Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”
Overall, school did a poor job of challenging and stimulating my curiosities, but once my family got a computer, I turned to the best teacher of them all: the internet. I still remember the joy that washed over me when I discovered that I didn’t have to get my parents to buy me the magazines I wanted to read. They were all online — for free.
When I was 12, I submitted an article to an online teen publication, and it got published. Not only did it give me confidence, it gave me a small glimpse into what I might enjoy doing for work one day. As David Perell writes, “The internet is the best school ever created. The best peers are on the Internet. The best books are on the Internet. The best teachers are on the Internet.”
And this digital renaissance is happening all over again.
As you’ll find in this profile, the shift in education is already happening — and it’s starting at Harvard of all places.
David Malan, a young computer science professor, has become an international sensation with his captivating introductory computer science course, CS50. His class even has merchandise that students proudly wear, including CS50-branded stress balls and T-shirts that read, “I TOOK CS50.”
For many of Harvard’s professors, the sudden transition to online learning has been a struggle. But for Malan, it’s a natural extension of a decade’s worth of experimentation. Because he has embraced distant learning, he’s been able to reach more than 2 million students so far. (Just take a look at what his office hour looks like.)
Teachers should inspire, teach, and entertain. The best ones should be celebrities who earn millions of dollars. Like Malan, they should also be able to share their learnings with millions of students around the world.
“Online education inverts the learning process,” Perell writes. “In school, we start with the basics, and expand towards curiosity. Online, we start with curiosity and expand towards the basics.”
No matter how old you are, where you live, or how much money you make, all of us should be able to access world-class teachers and the highest-quality instruction through virtual means.
Then, and only then, can education truly be considered the great equalizer.