- Education & Catastrophe
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- What School Could Be
Happy 2024, folks! This is John.
This newsletter is about human flourishing. Ostensibly it’s about better parenting and fixing education, but ultimately what I really care about is helping young people flourish.
‘What School Could Be’ is the first book I finished in 2024. Being reminded of how much the education system is stuck in time and how much better it can be is not a bad way to kickstart the year. Because ultimately this is what Education & Catastrophe is about - a call to action to rethink and reimagine education so that young people are set up to thrive and flourish.
One thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching the test because then you're not learning about the world.... All you're learning about is how to fill out a bubble on an exam and little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test and that's not going to make education interesting.... And young people do well in stuff that they're interested in. They're not going to do as well if it's boring.
One of the greatest orators of our time explaining in 80 words the fundamental problems with schools. Young people are not learning about the world. Education is boring. Students are disengaged.
The core argument Ted Dintersmith makes book is that K12 schools are preparing young people to be college-ready (or more specifically, college application-ready) when they should be preparing young people to be real-world ready.
WhatSchoolCouldBe.org
Machine intelligence is racing ahead, completely changing the competencies needed for fulfilling careers and responsible citizenship. Our children will be adults in a world that values higher-order competencies — critical thinking, creativity, audacity, collaboration, the ability to leverage resources. Yet these very competencies are undermined by data-driven education policies resting on a model designed brilliantly . . . over a century ago . . . to prepare kids for the industrial era. That era is long gone, and we need to re-imagine school to prepare kids for their futures, not our pasts.
If you don’t have the time to read the entire book, I recommend reading Chapter 8 ‘Doing (Obsolete) Things Better’ and Chapter 9 ‘Doing Better Things’.
Metaphorically, conventional schools are covered wagons carrying children who need to move rapidly in today’s world. “Do things better” leaders seek operational efficiencies from the existing model. They adopt policies equivalent to beating the mules harder and measuring the wagon’s speed more frequently. In contrast, “do better things” leaders realize the covered wagon is obsolete and look for modern, high-speed alternatives.
Education ministries all over the world are stuck in the stasis of making incremental improvements (e.g. PSLE Achievement Level Score instead of PSLE T-Score) when what we need is an overhaul of the entire education system to equip young people with the skills to be resourceful, resilient, collaborative, open-minded, ethical, accepting of others, inclined to take the long view.1
Ted Dintersmith doesn’t simply bemoan the inadequacies of the current system without offering solutions. He proposes a set of principles called PEAK.
Image credit: Chris McNutt
Purpose - Students attack challenges they know to be important, that make their world better.
Essentials - Students acquire the skill sets and mindsets needed in an increasingly innovative world.
Agency - Students own their learning, becoming self-directed, intrinsically motivated adults.
Knowledge - What students learn is deep and retained, enabling them to create, to make, to teach others.
Dintersmith believes children thrive in learning environments that share the four PEAK elements. Unfortunately, PEAK is rarely found in K12 classrooms. Instead of purpose, teachers and school leaders are singularly focused on performance - how well students do in standardised tests. Instead of essentials, teachers drill children on content to excel in exams. Instead of agency, we see widespread apathy among students. Instead of retained knowledge that enables young people to create, build, make, and design, students spend most of their time learning knowledge to take exams, knowledge they promptly forget the moment they walk out of the exam hall.
Dintersmith makes an insightful observation about Khan Academy, the much-lauded non-profit with tens of millions of users learning online.
I reflected on why Sal’s outstanding team had prioritized on test prep (SAT, MCAT, GMAT) over real innovation. I thought back to our first conversation. “Sal, why produce hundreds of lectures teaching kids how to do integrals by hand? They watch their video on a device that performs these operations instantly, perfectly. Let computers do the mechanics and teach kids how to solve real problems using math - something school never gets to. Help our kids leverage technology, not compete against it.” To which a staff member offered, “We need to focus on where today’s market is” - an odd priority for a nonprofit aspiring to improve education.
I’ll leave you with these two quotes from the book.
The result is that we are educating young people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it.
When it comes to education, if you can measure it, it probably doesn’t matter.
1 Toby Newton, in ‘Human Technologies, A Primer’
Further Reading
Review: What School Could Be - Chris McNutt
What If the Purpose of School Were Purpose? - Ross Wehner