I have no special talent. I am only passionately curious. - Albert Einstein

There’s a plethora of fantastic education quotes that all could have just as well represented my view on education. I grew up alongside personal computers and the internet, and I feel this gave me the unique position of remembering how to navigate a physical library but being equally at ease in a digital one.

There was a time when education was an inherently expensive process. Books had to be printed and teachers only had so many hours in the day. That’s still true, but now we have the next generation of the printing press, called the internet. It can make the marginal cost of copying information to new readers effectively free.

In this context, I’m a huge believer in making education free. Not necessarily in the sense that we offload it to taxpayers (that’s a different conversation), but actually free. Write a textbook and post it online for anyone to download. Better yet, skip the textbook and make an interactive open source application that others can fiddle with and learn as they fiddle.

You’ll find as I write on other topics that I often refer to free educational resources, because they’re what I use to learn, and on principle I believe free, at-your-own-pace learning is the future of education in the long term.