Bob, the education system
There is nothing wrong with the current education system. It’s just that it promotes inequality, doesn’t really help with learning (in fact, often discourages people from learning) and doesn’t prepare students for success in most roles that exist in the workplace. Other than that, it’s great.
The problem is the system itself, not necessarily people within the system, and it holds true for K-12 and higher ed.
I’m about to say ‘education system’ a whole lot in this article, so instead I’m going to replace it with Bob. Bob is old, adamant in his views and hard to wear down.
Bob’s short and sharp history
The modern Bob was created approximately 200 years ago – during the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
To succeed in life after education back then, you needed to show up on time, listen carefully to what your boss told you to do and complete tasks that had clear steps to follow. It was mundane work, but it was better than the hunter gatherer lifestyle that came before it.
Bob was developed to match these skills. It taught people structure and it taught these people how to follow instructions. It did its job well.
Today, we have computers to do a majority of the mundane tasks, which has enabled us to attack more complex problems. But the current Bob doesn’t teach us how to attack complex problems.
We’re still taught facts and we’re taught how to pass assessments. We’re told the approximate subject matter that will be on an exam, and we understand that if we study the right facts hard enough, we’ll get a good grade. There is very little thinking involved in this process, and solving complex problems requires deep thinking.
The world as it is now
“The half life of the technical knowledge you learn in school is about 15 years – in 15 years half of it will be obsolete (either we will have gone in other directions or will have replaced it with new material).”
Richard Hamming – The Art of Doing Science and Engineering
Jobs and industries change more frequently now than ever before. It’s extremely likely that you’ll finish your career in a vastly different job to one that you started it in. The good news: now you don’t have to be tied to what you were like as an 18 year old when you selected your career. The bad news: you’re not being prepared by Bob to succeed in this world. Let’s look at some of the reasons why:
Bob is not setup to help the most important person in the system – the student
This is an all encompassing statement on the negatives of Bob, but it’s important to point out as it’s rarely thought about. The system as it stands is designed to make the teachers’ lives easier, to make it easier for future employers to rank students and for administrators to hand out grants.
The only person it’s not designed around is the student. Specific examples of this are below.
Bob is not setup to teach students how to solve complex problems
Complex problems don’t necessarily have an answer, and even when an answer is given, it will need updating when more information comes to hand. They’re multidisciplinary and they require a lot of deep thought, research and discussion. Bob is typically set up in silos, where one subject is taught for an hour before you move onto the next subject.
Just like solving complex problems, students aren’t taught how to make decisions.
You’re actually passively taught that you don’t need to make decisions. Bob is about telling you what to do. You’re told what subjects you should do to get you into your future career, you’re told what time to arrive, when you’re allowed to speak, what to wear, what part of the curriculum is likely to be on the exam. Other than deciding between chocolate or strawberry milkshake at lunch, there’s hardly a decision you have to make.
Bob is about winning, life is about collaborating to win.
The results of assessments are given based on a normal distribution curve. Every student is either better than someone in the class, or worse than them. You’re all trying to win. The incentive structure in education is literally to not help anyone else, because it may cost you a grade.
When you get to the post-education world, you’ll quickly realise that the best way to get ahead is to collaborate and create a culture of win/win. The more you help others, the better your business performs, the better you perform.
Get this question right and you win a million dollars.
Yes, that’s a TV show. It’s not real life. But Bob’s exams have the same premise to Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. There’s one solution to every question in an exam, and you get it right or wrong. Then you get to real life and complex problems, and quickly realise that there may be no right or wrong. What is a student meant to do when they’re so used to only being 100% right or 100% wrong?
Even Who Wants To Be A Millionaire has a leg-up over Bob
After you get a question wrong, they tell you the answer. Most parts of the education system don’t even give you the courtesy of that. You just get an accumulated number a month or two after you take the test.
Timely error feedback is one of the four key pillars of learning. If you don’t know what you got right and wrong, how will you know what you actually knew and didn’t know?
Dealing with failure may be the most important trait that needs to be learned
Bob doesn’t have any ability to encourage failure amongst students. Throughout school and higher ed, we’re led to believe that failure on a test = bad. Therefore, we become fearful of failure. Now, when we’re trying to get out in the real world, we’re scared of ever making a mistake and therefore take the most risk averse path we can find.
Bayesian probabilistic thinking is one of the most important thinking concepts we can understand. This type of thinking is assigning a hypothesis to a situation, testing whether it’s right or wrong and updating your mental model on the situation based on your findings. It doesn’t matter whether you’re right or wrong, it matters how you update your thinking.
When you fail in Bob, it’s not seen as chance to improve – it’s just seen as bad. By doing this, it increases anxiety (and possibly even disgust) towards education, learning and self-improvement more broadly.
Kids are curious, and then they’re not
Speaking to teachers, there is a clear turn around grade 3 (8-9 year olds) where kids go from wanting to know and understand everything (loving school) to doing the bare minimum and being too cool for school.
While appreciating there could be a multitude of causes of this, I believe the most important factor is not teaching students to their intellect level. Let’s quickly look at video games.
Video games start with really easy levels and only allow the players to get to the next level after passing that one. They allow as much time for the player to get it right as they need, but they know they’ll be equipped to handle level 2 because of it. Yet students have to deal with this issue all the time as the class can only go at one level (this doesn’t even mention that the other half of the class are bored because the content is below their level).
How can you find your passion when you can’t go deep into any topic?
Bob’s curriculum is relatively set in stone, and it’s generally a tight squeeze to fit it in in any given period. The most joyous part of learning though, is discovering something that fascinates you and digging in so deep you forget which day it is.
Microwaves were created when their inventor was working on high-powered vacuum tubes. Rocket scientists unintentionally discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were dangerous to the environment on Earth by studying the atmosphere of Neptune. The common thread is that the discovery came about because people were working on challenging problems they were interested in.
If life after Bob followed the same regimented structure, there would be very few (if any) groundbreaking discoveries in our lifetime.
We assume that everyone wants the same thing from Bob
What success looks like to one person is very different from the next is very different from the next and so on. Our old friend Bob thinks that everyone wants the same thing though.
There are many obvious reasons why Bob has turned out the way he has, and it’s not an easy fix. But if we don’t start trying now with the developments in technology over the past 30 years, then we are doing a disservice to future generations.