The Emergent Landscape Speaker Series- Adam Rubin

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With tangible passion and dedication, Adam Rubin spoke to the current MFA students about the state of education.

“The United States is forty-eighth in the world in mathematics and science,” he said. “It’s a national security issue.” His firm, 2Revolutions, combines social change revolution and labor market revolution to improve the national education system. In its fourth year, 2Revolutions is an education design lab that “designs/launches new ‘future of learning’ models.” Adam Rubin’s presentation, The Future of Learning (…and how you can help design it), illustrated the dire state of the education system in our country.

Three-fourths of high school graduates are not adequately prepared academically for first-year college courses. Schools are built to manufacture citizens for a twentieth-century solution, a world in which the only options after high school were college, factory, or farm. “The game has changed,” Adam Rubin said. “But we’re still using the same system.”

Education should be personalized with students “driving their own learning.” A successful learning experience should be based on competency and proficiency—essentially “outcomes rather than time.” No person should be made to feel inferior because he or she required more than thirteen years to complete K-12 education. It should be a personal experience, each child receiving what they need to get the most out of their schooling. “Fixing the education problem will maintain U.S. economic competitiveness, preserve democracy and respect for diversity, and drive social well-being and quality of life across society.”

Adam Rubin spoke at Champlain College as part of the Emergent Landscape Speaker Series for the MFAs in Emergent Media. His goals for recreating American’s perception of modern education are relevant and necessary to the successful future of the country. Education at the K-12 level is supposed to be enjoyable and entertaining, stipulations that foster success.

As a society we have to get rid of the notion that a four-year college education is the only truly right answer, especially for an eighteen-year-old kid fresh out of high school. “Our firm does not advocate ‘college for everyone,’ but every kid should have the option to go and be successful. They’ve just chosen something else.” Essentially, forcing children to go to school at eighteen is counterproductive, and something needs to change.

2Revolutions is working toward redefining education to reach all of these goals, to change popular perception of the “right” steps in education. Adam Rubin is beginning the revolution in his own firm, utilizing Talent Clouds to brainstorm and develop ideas. The talent cloud encompasses various talents and places them in positions of experts, project managers and researchers, with each person doing what they want to do in a form that they are really good at.

Adam Rubin’s goals to redefine the education system seem to be based on a similar idea: it requires people who are using what they love to do in a way that offers positive results. He said he hoped to include the MFA students in his talent cloud as well, in an effort to “unthink school to rethink learning.”

The future, therefore, should be all about “do[ing] what you love for good.”