Welcome to the second episode of Patterns and Stories. Joining us today is Ben Nelson, the founder of Minerva University, an independent, non-profit educational institution whose classes are conducted as seminars capped at 19 students, who travel to and live together in residential housing in a new country each semester, starting their education in San Francisco, and then living in Seoul, Taipei, Hyderabad, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, Berlin, and then ending their program in San Francisco. Ben founded Minerva in 2012, and before that, he was the CEO of Snapfish. We will discuss the assumptions of traditional higher education that Minerva challenged. We are your hosts, Luca Dellanna and Ismail Manik. The AI-generated transcript was lightly edited for grammar and fluency. Subscribe to be notified of new episodes Highlights: * By the end of summer, after their last year in high school, a typical high school student has forgotten 60 % of what they've learned in three months. It is an outrageous, colossal failure. * In order to know something, you have to actually have space and deliberate practice in applying it. [But what the education system is doing is] the equivalent of trying to teach somebody the violin by letting them listen to the music. Even getting a piano and saying, okay, you know, press this key, press that key, press this key, and now you're done. Now you know how to be, now you're a pianist. And it's kind of absurd. Acquiring knowledge is not the same as the ability to use or deploy that knowledge. * What cannot be replaced by an AI is the learner. Sure, you can easily make the argument that says you can train an AI to deliver content. [...] But what you cannot do is have an AI rewire somebody's neurons, so they learn something they didn't know before. [...] In fact, in an age of AI, when so many of the standard elements are done by the machine, the imperative to know becomes even greater. * If you don't understand the core principles, you're vastly slower. You need more human resources, more brute force. And you can still be beaten by somebody with vastly fewer resources who understands the core down to first principles. * So, how does AI actually improve learning? Well, first and foremost, by enhancing the teacher's capability. * We're finally admitting that there is a deep rot at the core of secondary and post-secondary education, and that the only way to address it isn't with incremental tools for the teachers and professors that are stuck in the system, [but] by ensuring that we are providing an ability to reform the system and therefore uplift teachers, professors, and university and high school administrators to actually reform. And that's the core of what we're trying to do at Minerva. Full transcript: Ismail (00:00) Today, we have Ben Nelson, founder of Minerva University, as our second guest on the podcast, Patterns and Stories. Welcome, Ben, to the podcast. I was just going through the book about innovative universities, and there is a chapter dedicated to Minerva, which mentions the pitch you made to Larry Summers. Maybe you could just recount a little bit from that story, where you are, and how Minerva moved and developed. Ben Nelson (00:41) Sure, happy to. For those of you who may not know, Minerva was built as a prototype university – a university that demonstrates to the rest of the world what is possible when you reimagine learning and center it on wisdom or systems thinking, as opposed to this kind of cram for the test, teach the test, pass the test, then everything that was the model traditional universities employ. The premise was to generate the best university in the world, with the best student outcomes, better than Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, and Cambridge, but do it from scratch. And I think today, certainly since we've done it and proved that it's possible, and in general, because the collapse in faith in higher education has happened all over the world, today, it doesn't seem like such a crazy idea. Fifteen years ago, it was an absolutely crazy idea. Nobody believed me. People thought I was out of my mind, by and large. And I knew that I needed real, what was known as social proof, right? The ability to demonstrate that it's not just me, that serious individuals would back the idea, back the concept. And there really was no one more prominent in the world of global higher education than Larry Summers, former president of Harvard, former treasury secretary of the United States, a polymath, and brilliant economist. And I did have the opportunity to finally meet him after more than a year of thinking about this idea, being told by almost everybody I met that I was completely crazy. When I met Larry, we had half an hour, and he came in 15 minutes late to the meeting. It was all rushed, but he stayed for two hours, and he finished my sentences. He immediately understood what Minerva was gonna be about. And by the end of the meeting, he said, “Look, this is a great idea that should happen. I'd love to be the chair of your advisory board.” But I didn't have an advisory board. It was just an idea. But it was thanks to that that I could form the advisory board with Larry as the chair. I went out and successfully raised the capital that was necessary to start the university. As one says, the rest is history. Luca Dellanna (03:02) I've seen from some of the other podcasts that you said some interesting things about the pedagogical approach. I think I've heard that, for example, you don't have 101 courses where you teach the basics, because there is an assumption that students can use technology to find it. What are other ways in which you challenged the assumptions of traditional education? Ben Nelson (03:32) Yeah, you know, there are these two core fallacies that exist in the world of higher education. And the first fallacy is that exposure to knowledge equals the acquisition of knowledge. We're perfectly happy saying, hey, here's biology 101, the textbook is this thick, read the entire thing over 15 weeks, we'll administer a final exam, maybe a midterm. You cram that information in your head, you're able to retain it just enough to pass the exam, and now you know it. Well, you don't know it, right? We all know that we all took biology in high school, chemistry, and physics. Almost anybody listening to this podcast who then didn't go on to further study in those fields couldn't pass a high school biology test today. And that's because we simply don't retain information that way, right? In order to know something, you have to actually have space and deliberate practice in applying it. [But what we are doing is the] equivalent of trying to teach somebody the violin by letting them listen to the music. Even getting a piano and saying, okay, you know, press this key, press that key, press this key, and now you're done. Now you know how to be, now you're a pianist. And it's kind of absurd. And so that's kind of a fallacy number one. There's a second and even more dangerous fallacy about education, which is that knowledge and acquiring bits of knowledge are equivalent to a true education or real learning, authentic learning. That's also a fallacy because acquiring knowledge is not the same as the ability to use or deploy that knowledge, right? You know intellectually the difference between correlation and causation. You can study the concept, you can remember it, and you can apply it a few times. It's not a very difficult concept to know. It's really difficult to go around life and encounter all of these correlated events and understand that they may or may not be causal. That's a very hard thing for human beings to actually practice. They see things that wind up being correlated and assume one causes the other. Not necessarily the case. Could be underlying conditions that cause both. It could be unrelated, but just coincidental. It could be that what you actually think is the cause is the effect and not the cause, et cetera. And so there are all sorts of these types of things where you can quote-unquote know something, but you don't know when to deploy it. And that's again, if you want to use the piano example, you could learn to play chopsticks on the piano, very different than being able to do jazz and classical music, very different being able to do rock and roll, very different than being able to do a slow emotional piece versus one that is very fast and technical, one that requires a certain level of humor versus a certain level of seriousness, not to mention as the keyboard itself switches, You know, acoustic versus electronic, having various manufacturers, different timbre, and how to manage that sound. So there's a recontextualization, even in piano playing. Whereas if you think about it, you know, life and the infinite possibilities of applying the various tools that you learn, the imperative to learn knowledge in an applicable way that is applicable to what we refer to in psychology as far transfer and transferable way is really at the heart of what a real education is. And the Minerva model fixes the pedagogical problems that keep individuals from actually acquiring the knowledge that they're exposed to. So it ensures that people actually retain what it is that they learn by and large. Can't retain everything, but a large quantity. They are then able to apply that knowledge, no matter what context they are presented with. Basically, they're learning in a transferable way. Those two areas are perhaps the biggest ways in which we have challenged the orthodoxy of what education is all about. Ismail (08:14) One thing unique [about Minerva] is that there is no comparable kind of institution like that. So the students in Minerva, for the degree programme, study in seven cities. What has been the experience, and how did you manage during COVID? What are the lessons that can be learned from this approach to living in cities, and what is the lesson of it, or what can you learn fro
