I applied to speak at TED.

Full disclosure: I did it last year, too. My theme was "Why You Should Not Have Me Speak at TED," which you'd think would have been pretty interesting. I think it would have been. I did get to the second round. Here's my pitch.

But I didn't get in. So, hope springs eternal. I had the application for this year up in my browser for two weeks before I decided to send something in (I don't like being rejected any more than the next guy). This morning, I sucked it up and made my pitch.

This year, I've been spending a lot of time speaking around the intermountain West about education (I teach junior high, sometimes). I believe that the 21st century is going to require different thinking than the 20th did, and that our educational system is not designed to produce those kinds of thinkers. So much, so very meh, but I also happen to believe, because I teach in what you might call a black-flag school (it's a piratical charter school, and I have ten years teaching homeschool co-ops and at private schools as well), that public school is a necessary part of the educational mix in the country.

MIX being the operative word. What we have right now isn't much of a mix. It's like calling the below a BLT.

Incidentally, Tony's Restaurant on I-75 in Michigan, just south of Frankenmuth, does call this a BLT (there really is lettuce on there, somewhere) (and a tomato. Or so I'm told).

What we do with education is much like this. We operate as if what we're going to need in the 21st century is 19th-century workers, that can stand for hours at an assembly line, tightening bolts. I personally disagree that this is even primarily what we need, and I believe that a school system intentionally designed to produce these workers is doing a large number of our children a disservice.

What do we need instead? Not so much instead as in addition to. I believe a large percentage of our kids--maybe as much as half--will do just fine with a basic, assembly-line education. But there is a large percentage that won't. That group needs a whole range of educational options, from homeschools to charter schools to private schools to no bloody school at all. No testing will find them. No program will identify them all. We have to make the options available so that they can choose, they and their parents, for themselves.

Fat chance. And yet, I'm hopeful. Anyway, I'm going to lay out the reasons we need these other schools, and maybe TED will be interested. We shall see. I'll lay them out for you, in the next post, and you can tell me if you think I'm crazy.