Two months ago, Union Square Ventures convened a group of educators, entrepreneurs, and researchers to talk about “hacking education.” The event went on for six hours and last week Brad Burnham posted what his partner, Fred Wilson, says is the definitive take on the event.

I sent this excerpt to a brilliant student I mentor; a student who is bored by much most of what we in the the academy have to offer today. A student who is not heard, understood or reached by anything faculty or administration is doing. Mostly, through no fault of our own but rather through an institutional bias that blinds, we seem to be ignoring him:

Rob Kalin kicked the discussion on the separation of learning and credentialing into high gear with this story.

I graduated high school with a D minus average. …My guidance counselor said “drop out of high school, you’ll have an easier time getting into college if you just get a GED.” I [decided] to graduate with this D minus and see what it does for me. I didn’t get into any accredited school. I got into a diploma program in an art school in Boston, and it was near MIT. … I used the art school to make a fake ID to go to MIT. Someone said [college is] expensive. I said no, it’s free, you just won’t get credit for it.

Today, no one is going to ask Rob for his college transcript. His credentials are the companies he has created. Not every student can be so cavalier about the lack of a diploma, but the web is having an interesting impact on the value of credentials.

Brad goes on to describe how Fred sees it:

Fred pushed the conversation about disaggregation to another level when he suggested that in the future, he’d like to see students be able to opt in or out of a school on a class by class basis.

When I think about where we are going to be in 50 years, I think we are going to have a marketplace model for education where the student is in control of their education and they determine who is going to educate them, when, where, and how… I’d like my kids to be able to avail themselves of the quality classes and teachers they have in their physical space but then opt out of those [classes] that aren’t good and go get that knowledge somewhere else.

A byproduct of the disaggregation of education will be to weaken the authority of schools, but the bigger challenge may be to align their cost structures and business models to remain competitive in a hyper connected world.

Following Fred is Bing Gordon who proposes that we should work to drive the marginal cost of education to zero.

With that you can understand why Amanda French calls it “Blue Sky thinking.” I have to agree, it is. But it’s a brilliant Blue Sky and academics ambivalent about the use of the word “industry” when talking about education would do well to listen up.