Socrates at Newtonbrook Secondary School: Be Unreasonable!

Yesterday I went to speak to a class of grade 12 students from the Newtonbrook Secondary School in Toronto. I have been looking forward to this opportunity to challenge and be challenged by the next generation of bright young minds, and was not going to be prevented from going there, be it by a Canadian winter storm of by any other of life’s tragedies. Needless to say, I enjoyed speaking to the students very much and hope that they benefit from talking to me as much as I did talking to them. My Talking Points for Newtonbrook Secondary School: Newtonbrook Secondary SchoolI want to begin today by acknowledging your teacher Hermine Steinberg – Hermine doesn’t know what I am going to say today and she probably wouldn’t approve some or much of it. What she certainly knows is that she is taking a risk by inviting me here. And, from my life experience I know that you risk, you take a chance only if you care about something or someone. So I want to recognize her and tell you that you are lucky to have a teacher who is willing to risk for you, because she really cares. Who am I and why am I here today? My name is Nikola Danaylov aka Socrates. I am the blogger behind SingularityWeblog.com and the host of the Singularity 1 on 1 podcast. I get about 50,000 unique visitors per month and have had over half a million downloads of my show. Two summers ago I was very fortunate to be one of very few people who had the opportunity to go to Singularity University which is located on NASA’s Ames Campus in Mountain View, California. There I met some of the most incredible people in the world such as Steve Wosniak, Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Aubrey de Grey and astronaut Dan Barry and had the chance to visit companies like Google, Facebook, Cisco, Tesla and many others. But enough about me. I am here to talk about you! One of the big questions in schools today is: Are students Bored or Apathetic?! My hypothesis is that students are bored. Just like I was bored when I was in school. So for the next 40 min or so I will throw some of today’s biggest ideas at you to find out if I am right or wrong. After I am done we will start a conversation where you can say what you think and how you feel. So, let’s start our conversation with education: the thing about education is that it holds a promise. A promise that was probably told to you by both your parents and by your teachers. “Do your school work, get good grades in your classes and you will get a good job and a good life.” Well, I am here to tell you that your school grades don’t matter that much. In fact, they don’t matter at all. Let me give you 2 examples: Bob McDonald and Jack Andraka. So, in short, I don’t care that you barely passed or even failed biology or chemistry. You can still reinvent the meaning and the scope of biology, chemistry or anything else you put your mind to it. As someone who spent a long time in school and has had a few academic awards, I have come to discover that success in school doesn’t mean success in life – neither personally nor professionally. Education is historical i.e. to say it is retrospective in nature. It is about the past. But what I am here for is to propose that we must look to the future. And so: Why talking about the future is as important, if not more, than talking about history?! Let me give you 2 reasons... read the rest at: https://www.singularityweblog.com/socrates-at-newtonbrook-secondary-school/