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A child’s youngest years are some of the most crucial for determining what kind of person they’ll become. During early adolescence, one’s brain is still growing, and a well-educated child absorbs enormous amounts of information that they will use to craft a world view, develop skills, and eventually give back to society. Accordingly, a good education is paramount, yet not all the world’s children are given the same attention during this phase of life. Even kids in the same educational system or school aren’t on a level playing field, with some who are quick to grasp certain subjects while others drop back, or fall prey to teaching methods that they aren’t compatible with.
Confronting this problem is difficult because we must come to terms with what looks like a lose-lose situation. Schools can’t afford to educate students individually based on their personal aptitudes, preferred pace or learning methods, but the failure to do so means that some are left to face life at a serious disadvantage. This impacts us all. Blockchain offers the educational realm a chance to address the issue, and can demonstrate how proper incentives and tools are enough to disarm the institutional model and create a more equitable schooling paradigm.
Molding a Good Person
While education doesn’t necessarily influence a person’s ethical or moral side, it does expand their brain and teach them to think differently. With math, science, history, and language studies, students become more articulate and capable of solving problems that will do tangible good, or at least get them paid. Growing up in a family or town that has the means to emphasize a good education during early life is a huge advantage, but the importance of a great teacher is unmatched. However, the way that the educational system is set up effectively ensures that teachers are only ever working within schools, which makes them unreachable to many.
It makes sense that schools keep an iron grip on teaching talent, given that they provide a measure of progression, organization, and convenience to the system. For both teachers and their charges, school is the intermediary that translates their hard work into something useful—a salary and a degree, respectively. Schools with a strong reputation for preparing students for the world can ask for higher tuitions and therefore pay higher salaries to the best teachers. There is currently no “freelance” teaching model that can effectively provide a real education to students who don’t attend school for any reason. However, technology is slowly helping these kids catch up.
Tech Can’t Teach
The proliferation of smart phones and easy access to the internet helps students to bootstrap an education of their own, but it isn’t a proper substitute for a classroom or patient teacher. One can learn SEO, coding, or graphic design on the internet exclusively, but these skills aren’t enough to provide the same kind of upwards mobility as a well-rounded education. There are some online avenues that connect eager students to tutors and more traditional subjects, but their quality standards are unenforced and largely inconsistent with their institutional counterparts. Moreover, they’re all behind paywalls, forcing kids to connect their parent’s credit card, or preventing them from gaining access altogether.
Blockchain and its novel technological applications is helping to show educators how tech can complement an institutional education, instead of hopelessly competing with it. The decentralized ledger technology can host services and applications that are more advantageous for users and disrupt industries that that were once impossible to topple. While there aren’t yet blockchain universities, some innovative companies are simply showing how it can be applied for the purpose of forming better connections between students and teachers outside of the classroom environment.
Education on the Chain
Instead of trapping the best educational talent behind ivory walls, blockchain platforms can incentivize tutors, teachers, and experts to participate outside the linear system to which they have grown accustomed. Tokenized models like that of Cooocoin motivate specialists within any discipline to share their wisdom with students by paying them in cryptocurrency for giving remote, web-based lessons. Cooocoin is helping to onboard professional credentials from people across every industry and geography, giving them all access to an open marketplace where they can transfer their knowledge.
Platforms like Cooocoin must be comprehensive to combat the convincing institutional model. Cooocoin accomplishes this feat by providing a suite of deep communication tools, like chat, document upload, an interactive whiteboard, voice calls and more. Its charity model is for those students who want to use Cooocoin but can’t pay anything for the privilege, almost like offering free tuition for students who want to practice their language or coding skills, for example. This is one of the biggest goals of the platform—to improve global access to information for the world’s underprivileged. By using administrative returns to subsidize the education of the neediest Cooocoin users, Cooocoin supplements the teachers and tutors who charge lowered rates for a charitable purpose.
Other blockchains, like Edgecoin, are more about providing better tools for new educational projects. With Edgecoin, a platform with an ambition to become a legitimate online school will find everything they need to make it happen, including a smart contract module, document-sending utility, issuance of blockchain-notarized certificates, class schedules, cryptocurrency payments, and online classrooms. It’s almost like a school supply store for institutions based on the chain.
A Rising Tide
Education should be treated as a basic human right. Though both private and public school models have been good enough at educating our youth, we should hold ourselves to a higher standard. Blockchain may not tear down the institutional education model, but it does create new ways for young learners to gain in-demand skills and complement their existing studies. Blockchain continues to build more flexible relationships between students and teachers, or novices and experts, and will be the “rising tide” that lifts the educational baseline for all of civilization. While moving the common denominator isn’t a one-way ticket to utopia, it will surely have a remarkable effect on the future of education.
Disclaimer
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not reflect the views of Bitcoin Insider. Every investment and trading move involves risk - this is especially true for cryptocurrencies given their volatility. We strongly advise our readers to conduct their own research when making a decision.