What should be the purpose of our public education system? That’s a question I’ve wrestled with for a long time.
I work on the fringes of education – this is a deliberate depiction. In my former position, I sold ‘educational technology’ and ‘21st century science content’ and other nebulous buzzwords that all serve to allude to certain inefficacy of the traditional classroom: its failure to produce qualified participants to the modern economy.
That may be a bastardization of well-established criticisms of modern education as a remnant of the Industrial Age, but is this not what the market (or more generously put, society) wants? That the output of the education machine should be well-formed participants capable of good decisions, creativity and problem solving? Our current system does a poor job at this. A combination of media and tech and open-minded teachers could do better.
But technological disruption seldom consider the disrupted – the millions of teachers and administrators around the world trained under old-world-norms, constrained by obsolete infrastructure, shacked by bureaucracy, and coursed by entrenched policies. When I left the technophiliac bubble, it seemed as though technology – in the pursuit of ‘educational outcomes’ has outpaced the folks it ought to serve.
That calls for some existential reflection, a healthy engagement as we dismantle a whole industry: what should be the purpose of a public education system?
I recently read a clickbaity article on “Why schools should not teach general critical-thinking skills”. The author draws our attention to the importance of ‘situational awareness’, a skill that some researchers have identified to be domain-specific. Somewhere along the subsequent paragraphs, an equivalency is drawn up between domain specific cognitive skills, learning skills, mindset and critical thinking, concluding that because researchers have shown domain specific skills to be non-transferable, schools should teach students to recognize contextual knowledge.
Yep, it’s a poorly constructed argument, though my point is not to critique. In fact, this was almost word-for-word the message I used to formulate in sales pitches.
This proposition perpetuates an assumption about the purpose of school education. Do we ready children to become successful economic agents or to be successful humans? Today’s education system prioritizes job-related skills-training over life-required skills-learning, when by necessity it should be just the opposite, not because job specific skills are easier, but because the skills of life are deceptively harder. It takes year to become good in any domain, it takes a life time to become a better human.
That to me is the great challenge of modern education. Literacy and numeracy alone isn’t sufficient anymore. We need to learn to be culturally aware, to make arguments, to communicate emotions, to overcome biases, to discern lies, to plan, and to compromise.
Here, then, is the great opportunity for ‘disruption’. How might we leverage new tools to fundamentally reinvent the way we prepare people for adulthood.
#00117F 