Dear Rob,

While I understand the point of identifying the one in a million, there is an inherent problem.

If there really are as many as one in every million, there are only 7,000 of them on the planet. They occur in all ages from just-born to nearly-dead. Allowing for the bell curve across all age cohorts, slightly biased toward the young, that would mean fewer than 3,000 for us to identify -- and it's not clear what we'd do with them, since only a few would be young enough for us to assist their schooling.

Now of those 3,000, their interests will spread across all professions, disciplines, and subject fields. As many will likely be interested in playing chess or the cello as will wish to invent cars or computers or find new ways to manufacture objects.

Assuming we COULD identify them, however, I'd wonder who it is that I'd trust to design the education system we run them through. While I see how to make significant improvements in the system we have today, I can't see a system so much better that anyone could hope seriously to educate the one-in-a-million girls and boys any better than they can do for themselves. For that matter, I can't imagine how today's politicians could shape ministries of education that could do the job. It's not in them, and if it were, their voters would not allow them to do so or give them the required resources -- at least not in Australia or the United States, and I doubt that any other nation would be that much different.

My view is that we may as well get on with the job of staffing and funding better primary and tertiary schools to bring the general level up, then building better universities to enable secondary school leavers to develop as well as possible within the constraints of a shrinking world economy. In this way, we'll educate a broad society that will be better able to nurture and manufacture the innovations and inventions of the new Fords, Dysons, Jobs, and the rest. And it will be a better society by and large for all the rest of us as well.

Try W. Edwards Demings's Out of the Crisis. He offers robust suggestions for better education. 

Your idea offers interesting grist for the mill -- I'd argue that we've seen a lot of work on the challenges already, and we can go a great way by adopting and adapting what we've learned from people like Deming, Sternberg, Maslow, Dewey, and the others. Until we get that done, there would be no socially structured system of education and development that is better for a one-in-a-million genius than staying home.

Yours,

Ken




Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS
Professor
Dean

Swinburne Design
Swinburne University of Technology
Melbourne, Australia

Telephone +61 3 9214 6755 
www.swinburne.edu.au/design