Jihad Kawas is an 18-year-old Lebanese entrepreneur, founder of Saily, and one of the new Thiel Foundation fellows, winner of a $100,000 tuition to drop school and develop his start-up.
His story is worth reading as he taught himself how to code and built his first mobile application by the age of 14, and is already a “serial” entrepreneur at the age of 18.
What I found interesting in this specific talk, his second at TEDx Beirut, are his insights into why he was bored at school. He identified 3 main problems with school, as far as he’s concerned, but I think they’re applicable to others:
1. The way time is spent: especially all the time spent WAITING for things to happen vs doing or learning. Of course, the takeout would be “how to spend more time doing things instead of learning how things are done?”
2. The way students are assessed: what they love to do, doesn’t count at school. Also, Jihad stresses how much he learns from failure in his entrepreneurial life, when failure is not a path to improvement at school. According to him, students should be allowed to fail more often at school.
3. “Why do we have to learn with kids our own age? What’s the strategy?”
Worth pondering …
(This article was initially published on the blog momslearningtocode.com, now closed)