How Breakthroughs in the the Cognitive Sciences, Technology, Market Globalization Will Usher In A New Kind of Education
For years, Google tracked the performance of employees at work and linked it back to their performance at school. The company’s conclusion: How well individuals perform in school has zero predictive value long term for how well they will perform on the job — none. From engineering to operations to sales to finance, where workers went to school, their grades, class rank and standardized test scores have no bearing on real world performance and success. Google hires the best and the brightest from institutions such as Harvard, Stanford, Yale, MIT. It is a stunning revelation.[1]
Equally revealing, Todd Rose, professor at Harvard, documents how the opposite — failing in school — also means little for success in life. Beyond the well-known examples like Einstein, Disney and Richard Branson, Rose studied scores of individuals who supposedly did not have what it takes judged by school performance and success yet go on to achieve great things. They build competences despite school and follow their own path to fulfillment and excellence in life.[2]
These two extremes beg the existential question: Does what we learn in school matter for what we do in the real world? If not, as Google and Rose have concluded, what’s going on? Does the emperor have no clothes? What should the purpose of modern education be? What should be learned and how should we educate individuals in the 21st century innovation age with its Fourth Industrial Revolution?
Education is at a crossroads and the cusp of a historic transformation. I predict we will see more change in the next 20 years than we have in the last 2,000. Our current concept of education rests on ideas that are literally thousands of years old. These ideas and assumptions form the foundation of our traditional compulsory schooling model — classrooms, teachers, textbooks, lectures, worksheets, memorization, lots of tests and A-to-F grades. It is comprised of a narrow set of performances that don’t seem that relevant to competences for life in the real world — not just our professional lives but our personal and social lives as well.
We all know this “schooling” model as we have all lived it. In fact, it is tough to imagine anything different. This schooling paradigm, however, is an outdated and limited conception of what education can be. Should the priority be retaining and tinkering with this old conception and industrial age model, educating for a world that no longer exists? Or should we reimagine and reinvent a new paradigm, a new kind of education for the postindustrial age of exponential change and innovation we live in today?
Most agree the old systems are broken; it has become a viral mass media meme [Watch Video: I Sued the School System]. It’s tougher to agree on what the future of education should look like. The answer requires all assumptions about education, how to teach and what to teach, to be reexamined based on first principles. The problems with our current “how to teach” methods is touched on above and will be in the next blog post. The purpose of education or “what to teach” has evolved depending on the time and place. The original etymology of “education” is derived from ‘e’ which means out of and “duco” which means to lead, i.e. to educate means to lead forth or “to draw out” the best version of the individual. This origin emphasizes the role of education and the educator as support in an individual’s journey to self actualization and self transcendence — to be the best version of themselves. It implies the individual was in the lead as a self directed agent in a “pull” model where the educator was in a support role helping draw out the individuals full potential, their full flourishing in a more bottom up way.
Since historical records have been kept, education seems to have become a more top down “push” model where society wanted to deposit certain goals into the learner. There have been at least 4 major goals for what to teach: (1) Cultural Values and (2) Adult Roles (vocations and professions), (3) Notational Systems (3Rs of Reading, Writing, Arithmetic) and (4) Academic proficiency (in subjects like biology, physics, history). Every society worried about and ensured that its most important values were passed on. Every society also worried about and prepared their learners to take on the most important adult roles and helped them go up the competence hierarchy whether in the domain of hunting, food preparing, gathering, trading, sailing, blacksmithing, whatever critical societal profession. More recently societies needed more sophisticated notational systems to support work in all domains, especially during the industrial age. Learners needed to master the elements of these notational systems and how to use them fluently.
For the modern age of accelerating change and innovation, we need to revisit the why and purpose of education. Societies certainly still care about the above goals which are necessary but I would argue not nearly sufficient in today’s world. Perhaps we need to go back to the origin of education and its notions of “drawing forth” and better balance the dance between what the unique individual wants or needs and what the society or authorities want or need. Perhaps the drawing forth and achieving an individual’s full potential requires a negotiation between the demands of the individual and the demands of the environment.
This series of blog posts will try to paint the broad outlines of a bold new vision, sharing details of what the future of education could be. There are all sorts of innovative ideas being thrown at the walls of the old schooling paradign. Please follow along with me as we explore the terrain.
[FYI: my old blog posts can be found at: https://donburton.tumblr.com]
[1] Google’s Project Aristotle and Project Oxygen; Summary Article in New York Times, by Charles Duhigg, Feb. 25, 2016
[2] Todd Rose, Dark Horse (2018)