Contact: Michael Barnathan Telephone: 732-328-8268 Address: 26 McCue Rd., Morganville, NJ 0775 Email: michael@projectpolymath.

org

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION IS FAILING

A Polymath Answer For A 21st Century Renaissance It is already known that American K-12 education is failing in the global spectre what is often not realized is that our institutions of higher learning are also in a state of free-fall and failure, Findings from national tests found in the government study: A Test Of Leadership: Charting The Future Of U.S. Higher Education from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education that among recent graduates of fouryear colleges, just 34, 38 and 40 percent were proficient in prose, document, and quantitative literacy, respectively. What we are seeing is the inability of American college and university graduates to compete on the global frontier. A valid question is why America seems to be trending toward a place of academic and innovative failure. Robert D. Atkinson, PhD has recently written that Colleges are focused on teaching kids content, not on teaching them skills, and too many students are focused on passing the multitude of tests in the multitude of classes they take, rather than really learning. In short institutions are turning out capped and gowned graduates that know what to think but do not know how to think. An exciting development has started to forment with Project Polymath, a plan for a future university whose goal is to not only usher in a 21st century renaissance but to train the new DaVinci's to lead it. Michael Barnathan, Project Polymath founder and Google Senior Software Engineer, makes a strong case for why the United States is the place to launch such a paradigm shifting endeavor citing his conviction that America is the country with the most developed startup and research infrastructure, where polymath graduates can find the greatest amount of support for turning their inventions and projects into worldchanging businesses and research. Polymath Foundation is a non-profit 501(c)(3) educational charity. Driven by the passion and vision of a young group of professionals across many disciplines and walks of life it currently has a virtual presence as well as physical presence in New York City, Providence, Rhode Island, and Cleveland, Ohio. Project Polymath boasts some strong numbers despite it's fairly young incubation period noting that they have 1034 registered students with 68% of those students being from the United States alone. Clearly American students value the vision that Project Polymath seeks to advance. The mission of Project Polymath is stated simply as: To promote a second Renaissance in the arts, sciences, and humanities and to unlock and reaffirm the full creative and intellectual potential of the individual by providing capable students with an advanced interdisciplinary education, training an unprecedented number of polymaths. In short to graduate students who know how to think across a broad range of subjects and solve problems in a creative way, always asking Does this work? A look at past course offerings helps clarify this mission further. They have offered such courses such as; Data Structures and Algorithms, Introduction to the Creative Economy, Code Like a Rock Star, and Functional Neuroimaging and

Digital Diagnosis. Future courses that they are looking to offer are; Illusions of Control, Interdisciplinary Critical Thinking, Human Factors and Functional Aesthetics. For those who are interested in testing their own polymathic waters talks have been offered with perhaps the most popular being How to Learn Everything: Learning Skills for Becoming a21st Century Renaissance Person. Project Polymath has garnered partnerships and support from a variety of sources. Dell Hines, Founder of Axiom Capital has partnered with Project Polymath to launch the Brain Sciences Summit: a multidisciplinary gathering of the worlds leading neuroscientists, psychologists, computational biologists, and artificial intelligence researchers with a focus on curing currently intractable diseases of the brain and nervous system. The summit is taking place on Brown Universitys campus in the summer of 2012, with a longer-term collaboration to follow. Jeff Peace of Halcyon Charities has partnered with Project Polymath and offered a large amount of classroom space as well as access to their partner institutions of Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic, and Harman-Kardon, Inc from which industry collaborations could be launched and provides a source of faculty and students. They have also been awarded a Google Grant from the popular search engine which provides $10,000 a month in free AdWords advertising. The future of education will be a hard fought battle as Americans are forced to ask what sorts of thinkers and problem solvers will be required to sustain the level and expectation of innovation in the emerging creative economy. There will be choices to make as industry leaders and places of research begin to ruminate on what will make us not only sustainable but even competitive in the global economy. Will America turn out post-secondary graduates that know what to think or how to think? Perhaps more provocatively, when will the time be ripe for a massive paradigm shift as it nurtures and trains the future DaVinci's of our world?

###
If you would like more information about this topic , or to schedule an interview with Michael Barnathan please call 732-328-8268 or email Mr. Barnathan at: michael@projectpolymath.org