Facebook has been involved in humanitarian work in some capacity almost since the company’s inception. There has never been a question about Mark Zuckerberg and his people caring about the world around them. To that end, Mark and his wife Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician and teacher, launched the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative back in December of 2015. The initiative was planned as a multi-faceted effort to improve the world around us all by helping the people in it to improve themselves, as reflected in the initiative’s slogan; “Advancing human potential and promoting equality”. Naturally, working toward advancements in the field of education would be a big part of that goal. Zuckerberg addressed the masses via Facebook today to announce that the United States Deputy Secretary of Education, Jim Shelton, would be joining up to lead the initiative’s education efforts.
In the announcement, the Facebook head honcho says that he and his wife, upon the birth of their daughter, asked if she and her generation would be able to learn 100 times what he and his generation learned growing up. He went on to say that the number wasn’t as crazy as it may seem, pointing to personalized learning as the answer. Since every child learns at a different pace and in different ways, a big part of the education goals for the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative will be to help spread the practice of personalized learning through working closely with school faculty, students and parents.
Naturally, influences outside the classroom, such as poverty, unsafe neighborhoods, issues at home and illness, will all be addressed in some form, mainly through funding and promoting nonprofit organizations that champion these causes through advocacy, research and development or more hands-on approaches. In every step of this process, Jim Shelton will be guiding steps, making decisions and evaluating proposals to ensure that any decision that affects education in any way is the best decision that could have been made in a given situation. With Zuckerberg predicting that artificial intelligence will surpass humans in many ways in the near future, a priority is being placed on education to ensure equality.