This is one of my favorite TED talks ever. It reviews the paradigm of today’s traditional school environment as a leftover from a colonial-industrial age, producing interchangeable workers with basic skills.
The speaker discovered that children can be brilliantly self-taught with little or no supervision: in a few months, one computer left to play with in one village resulted in grade-schoolers teaching themselves microbiology in a language they hardly knew, with older children teaching the younger ones. The experiment showed a consistent, or even more amazing result in other villages in other countries.
Seriously, this is a must-watch for educators and parents alike.