Mike Maples, Floodgate: "Kids Will Start Reading At Two-Years Old"

Soon kids as young as two-years-old will be reading.

That is the big bold prediction of Mike Maples, the co-founder and partner at Floodgate (and the host of the excellent Starting Greatness podcast).

How? Well, education apps have made it possible to ultra-accelerate the learning process. It's possible to do all the core bits of learning (reading, writing and arithmetic) in just a few hours a day. 

This means that kids as young as 2 years old can be taught to read. It also means that older children can do all their core learning in just a few hours, and then spend the rest of the school day doing something more exciting (e.g building drones!)

So what is stopping this from happening? What is really standing in the way of a better education system for the whole of K–12 (from kindergarten to 12th grade) is actually bureaucracy and old ways of thinking. 

For schools and teachers, they are incentivised to keep teaching in the old style, focusing on keeping everyone the same and learning at the same level. They don't want apps that adjust to every kid's pace.

That's just part of what we discuss with Mike on this podcast. Listen to the episode here or here, or anywhere else you get your podcasts!

Let us know what you think of this idea and this podcast at michael@firstminute.capital.