Zuckerberg is probably one of the most admired and controversial leaders of Generation Y.  People have criticized him for allowing the public to open up their lives to each other, but as I have been saying for three years…Gen Y is GOING to change this world.  They have no other choice!  They have been handed a plethora of problems, and education is at the top of the list.

I did watch Zuckerberg on Oprah this past Friday, and I found this young man to be quite humble…almost embarrassed about the amount of money he has accumulated and what he is donating.  But he admitted that he had the good fortune to attend great schools throughout his life which led him to Harvard and he believes that every child should have a great education…not one that is simply “getting by”…and that was just the beginning of the rest of his life.  And for those of you who continue to criticize Facebook, maybe this was meant to be to help get us out of this mess!

This media frenzy is coming off the heels of the new movie Waiting for Superman, which debuted this past Friday, and with the release of the Movie, The Social Network, this week, timing could not be any more perfect.  Although Zuckerberg has commented that the movie is purely ficticious (and I have heard he had nothing to do with the movie), I think this is a wake up call for us as a nation to peek behind the building of the social network empire and to see what this generation is doing to HELP.  Most of us just sit and complain.  It is predicted that close to 7,000 students drop out of high school every day and that while the USA was once #1 in the number of men and women who graduate from college, studies show that we have dropped to number 9 on that list.

There is a huge debate over this issue…that charter shcools have the funding and the freedom to design educational systems that work…so if they can do it by scraping together money, we can certainly do something in our public school system.  In the Waiting for Superman film, it is heartbreaking…to watch children chosen by lottery to attend a charter school or to be put back into a public school that is broken (and I want to say that my children attended private school K-5 and then public school 6-12, so I have seen both sides of the coil).

Our education system is broken.  We have some wonderful teachers, and we have some teachers who use the classroom as a time to sleep and let their students text and sit on Facebook.  We are teaching from the blackboard, lecture and out of textbooks, and we are in a digital age.  Our education system has not changed since the Industrial Revolution, and we need an overhaul, and we need it now!

Bear in mind:  $100 million is not that much money.  It is going to take elbow grease and getting involved at a grassroots level to turn around our education system.   Also…I don’t think that this responsibility falls fully on our teachers and the education system.  Parents HAVE to turn around their family values and start focusing on homework, studies and getting involved.  I encourage you to get started today by connecting up!  You can meet up with concerned citizens in your community to move this initiative forward.  I am concerned that if we don’t act swiftly, in about ten years, we will not be the strong democracy that we are today.

Watch the trailer for Waiting for Superman and see the film in a city near you.

“Sir Ken Robinson is a visionary leader who led the British government’s 1998 advisory committee on creative and cultural education, a massive inquiry into the significance of creativity in the educational system and the economy, and was knighted in 2003 for his achievements. His latest book, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything, a deep look at human creativity and education, was published in January 2009.”

From TED.com

Video from 2006:

Video from May 2010: