At TED2013, Sugata Mitra accepted the TED Prize for 2013 with a striking talk. His wish: for children to learn about any variety of subjects through self-organized learning. While this bold project will take form with a "School in the Cloud" in India, Mitra encourages members of our community to help with a global paradigm change by creating...

Scratch the surface of online education, and you’re destined to run into the names of two men. The first, Salman Khan, never intended to be an education icon. Instead, he simply watched with increased interest as videos he had uploaded to YouTube to help his cousin learn math were seized upon by a world apparently eager to learn via his thou...

Shai Reshef believes higher education is a right, not a privilege. In January 2009, he founded University of the People, a nonprofit, tuition-free, online university dedicated to opening up higher education to anyone in the world with a high school diploma and a willingness to learn -- “regardless of who they are, where they live or what soc...

Geoffrey Canada gives a very interesting analogy in today's TED Talk: He compares the current education system in the United States to the era when banks were only open between the hours of 10am and 3pm. “Now, who can bank between 10 and 3?” asks Canada to a big laugh. “It went on for decades. You know why? Because they didn’t care. It wasn’t...

Schools out of reach Daphne Koller is a third-generation PhD, and in her own words, she is certainly one of the lucky people. Most people, of course, are not. In some parts of the world, quality education is simply not available. In South Africa, for example, the higher education system was designed during Apartheid, and there are far ...

From age 6 through age 11, Shabana Basij-Rasikh risked her life to go to school. The Taliban had banned girls in Afghanistan from studying at universities and other educational institutions and, thus, Basij-Rasikh dressed as a boy, posing as an escort for her older sister. Together, the two would place their books in grocery bags and sneak off t...

What’s the future of education? It’s a popular question right now, with answers ranging from online learning to charter schools. But Liz Coleman is focused on a more fundamental issue: what will schools teach? And what does that mean for the future of our society? In her eye-opening talk at TED2009, Coleman shared her hopes and fears for the ...

Scratch the surface of online education, and you’re destined to run into the names of two men. The first, Salman Khan, never intended to be an education icon. Instead, he simply watched with increased interest as videos he had uploaded to YouTube to help his cousin learn math were seized upon by a world apparently eager to learn via his thou...

In South Korea and Finland, it's not about finding the "right" school. Fifty years ago, both South Korea and Finland had terrible education systems. Finland was at risk of becoming the economic stepchild of Europe. South Korea was ravaged by civil war. Yet over the past half century, both South Korea and Finland have turned their schools arou...

Photos: James Duncan Davidson Ainissa Ramirez comes on stage armed with a blowtorch. Well, that sure got everyone's attention. She promptly uses said blowtorch to straighten a piece of bent piece of wire. Her point: atoms often rearrange usefully to create entirely different types of structures. The Yale associate professor goes on to exp...

On Tuesday night, PBS and TED joined forces to air TED Talks Education, a one-hour televised special, featuring passionate teachers, students and researchers from the field who shared their ideas about transforming the US education system. We were so inspired by these spirited speakers that we asked them to curate playlists of their favorite...

From dancing math to teaching in languages other than English – this week’s X marks the spot is a selection of TEDx Talks about rethinking education. Each week, TEDx chooses four of our favorite talks, highlighting just a few of the enlightening speakers from the TEDx community, and its diverse constellation of ideas worth spreading. Below, find...