In June 2013 alone, Gates donated nearly $5 billion to education, the Washington Post reports.
At the summit, Gates says that “going to a four-year university and getting a degree isn’t as much about what you learn in that experience as it is a badge” that you are employable, organized and you “like to be measured in terms of what you are doing.”
Gates, who famously dropped out from Harvard University after just two years to become an entrepreneur, has supported personalized learning as a tech-forward method of education. On his blog, he describes the method as “combining digital tools, project-based learning and traditional classroom work to let students move at their own pace.”
Gates says he sees today’s “gold standard” of physically attending a university just to prove you have learned new information and abilities as antiquated and ripe for change.
“I see those things decoupling,” Gates says, adding “the way you prove that you have certain skills can be very straightforward.” One digitally-savvy way to do so is by participating in massive open online courses.
These make classes offered at universities like Harvard and MIT more available to people so they can gain knowledge without traditional access to these institutions.
In the future, Gates says many of the people responsible for deep innovations “will be polymathic, they will be unusually strange people who learn a lot of things and, therefore, able to reason across the boundaries of two subject areas.”
And for the future of teaching, Gates says we must foster learning so that “the education that we provide [can] make sure innovation goes at full speed.”
“Fortunately, a very small percentage of society can do the innovations that benefit society very broadly,” he says.
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