02 Oct A Few Thoughts From A Weekend At The Nantucket Project
So 3 days of brilliant, famous, people at the forefront of their industries sharing their visions have past. People you might not seek out on your own and others you might. Idea after idea tossed out to you with little time to digest. Rapid fire, mind exploding, summations of peoples’ life work all in three days. So much information I wouldn’t even try to summarize. But what was the common thread? Sure Rethink was there theme but what were all the presenters talking about.
Doctors, economists, inventors, scientists, engineers, financial service providers, artists, politicians, designers all discussing their thoughts on a topic or two and the world at large. Robotic arms for soldiers, the economic collapse, movies on your iphone that change everything, buildings that grow food and butterflies, the collapse of societies, opera, the human genome project and philanthropy were all discussed and then some. Their slogan “infinite ideas” didn’t even begin to scratch the surface of what you would experience at The Nantucket Project. For an person whose mind works like mine it was almost overwhelming.
So on the last day in the last hour as I am sitting listening to the last two presenters on a panel discussing the financial collapse in the U.S. thinking back over my last 48 hours. 30 plus presenters and the single common directly stated theme… we need better education for the next generation. “We need financial literacy education”, “We need more arts education”, “We need more/better science and engineering programs in our schools”. Over and over education was discussed. Who will step up an develop the prosthesis of the future if they didn’t get the arts to help them imagine, science and engineering to help them build and financial literacy to stay afloat long enough to see it through to production. Are we truly neglecting our next generation? I would say we are. I felt that way before the Nantucket Project and this past weekend only validated that idea. The U.S. is a nation that is still using the majority of our schools to quiet the multitude, train for the factory worker and push kids along. We are doing it with less and less resources, relying on younger and younger teachers, for more and more kids in older and older facilities.
What I hope comes from The Nantucket Project, if nothing else, is an understanding that for the future of our planet, country, ourselves we need to invest in our kids. We have more resources than ever before and there is no reason we are still educating our children to compete for jobs with the $3 an hour job market in India. We need to be showing them how to invent, imagine and execute. You’ve never seen a gathering of politicians, engineers and wealth to celebrate customer service call banks and data entry clerks why are we aiming for that with our national education system. How do we work for something better?
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