Mark Twain once said, “Never let your schooling interfere with your education.” But what does he mean? What’s schooling, and what’s education? Is there a difference? And most importantly, how do they affect you and how much you enjoy your life? In this discussion class, we'll put basic assumptions about school and education to the test and then explore what all this means for education policy.

Did you know that most people's friends are more popular than they are? That in a classroom of 23 students, there's a 50% chance that two share a birthday? That it's easy to make a (false) statistical argument that smoking cigarettes will increase your life expectancy? In this class, we'll explore a bunch of powerful paradoxes in statistics and think about situations where our common intuitions about data fail spectacularly.

Mark Twain once said, “Never let your schooling interfere with your education.” But what does he mean? What’s schooling, and what’s education? Is there a difference? But most importantly, how do they affect you and how much you enjoy your life? And why should we even care? (This “class” won’t really be like what you have at school — instead, it’ll be a relaxed and free-form discussion.)

How do you think you will think in 30 years time? The way we interact with knowledge has always been changing — just as there was a revolution 572 years ago with the invention of the printing press, there was also a revolution 6 years ago with the invention of Twitter. In this class, we will cover various topics related to our changing relationship with knowledge. Be ready to speak-up, question, and discuss YOUR future!