The Issues With The Current 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 actively 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.
This is not to do with the people involved, there are often good people involved in education who want the best. It’s to do with the system itself.
I believe these issues are shown throughout the system in K-12 and higher education.
History
Learning, studying and transferring knowledge has been with humans for thousands of years - it’s one of the key reasons we came into being, and still exist today.
However, the modern schooling system was created approximately 200 years ago - during the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
What characteristics did employment have in these days? Show up on time, complete tasks that you’ve been told exactly how to do and go home. It was mundane work, but it was better than the hunter gatherer lifestyle that came before it.
The education system was developed to teach people structure and it taught people how to follow instructions extremely well.
How is the world different today?
“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.
Today we have computers to do a majority of the mundane tasks which has given us the ability to focus on solving more complex problems. This is vital for our growth as a species because these creative skills are unique to us (at the moment, if you happen to be an AI robot reading this in 2045). The education system is one of the final industries in the world that hasn’t adopted.
If we take a career after education as 45 years, there will be three times the amount of knowledge generated in the world while we’re going through this career. The message: teaching us what to know is pointless; we need to be taught how to know. This is the first of many problems I see in the existing education system.
Problems in education
1. We’re taught what to know, not how to learn
Jobs and industries change more frequently these days 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. This shouldn’t be seen as a negative - now you don’t have to be tied to what you were like as an 18 year old when you selected your career.
Education as it stands unfortunately does not prepare us for this type of career unfortunately. We’re taught facts, and we’re taught how to pass assessments. We are told the specific 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.
2. Life is about collaborating
The results of assessments are given based on a normal distribution curve so that you can compare students to each other. 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 someone else, the better your team performs, the better you perform (that’s the theory anyway).
3. You’re not taught how to make decisions
Our whole life is about making decisions, and good decision making based on unstructured knowledge is a skill to learn. Yet when we go through the education system, we’re told what to do the entire time. We’re told what subjects you should do to get you into your future career, we’re told what time to arrive, when we’re allowed to speak, what to wear and so on and so on.
4a. The world is complex and unstructured
The education system would have us believe there’s one solution to everything. Assessments (exams specifically) have one positive: they force students to recall what they’ve learned and apply it (to some extent).
It’s easy to see why assessments became the thing that every education institute implements - they allow the institute a very simple, and scalable, way to check how students are performing. They also allow districts and governments a way to see how these institutions are performing so they can allocate their budgets accordingly.
Does any of this help the students? Well, not really. Error feedback is an essential part of the learning process, and assessments do help with this. However, the way most assessments are set every few months encourages cramming to learn the knowledge just in time. This does not encourage long-term retention and application that is needed in the real world.
The world is complex and there are many solutions to many problems, and some problems don’t even have solutions. Because of this obsession with teaching problems that have one and only one answer, students are not taught how to deal with complexity.
4b. Results and outcomes in the world are not linear
The school system only allows for linear progress. The fact of giving kids grades every term or semester lets them exactly how they’re doing based on one metric that the school system has designed decades ago. If they’re getting good grades, they’ll be in a good place to get good grades along the pre-defined path next term or semester. If they’re not getting good grades, they’re not doing well at following this one path and they’ll likely be put off all future forms of education, learning and self-improvement into the future.
The system is designed to holds students accountable and to not tolerate failure.
Do you know who fails in the real world? Everyone. Success may come quickly, it may not come at all, but you can be sure that you won’t have success in a linear fashion. Assuming success can be quantified as a number, these are how school makes it seem vs what it’s like in the real world.
5. Assessments are scheduled at the end as the final destination
While we’re going with assessments. Almost all assessments take place at the end of the learning period, which encourages students to do everything in their power to ensure they do well in that exam - and that’s it.
Students are sometimes given feedback on assessments, sometimes they’re not. Either way, there is no encouragement from the system to reflect on what they’ve learned, and how they could improve.
I’m not anti-assessment at all; I think that frequent testing is one of the most important things that students can do to solidify any learning. But the way the standard assessment format works across the industry with one or two big assessments (and some smaller ones) throughout the year is the single biggest issue with the way the system works currently.
6a. The system saps the curiosity from kids
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.
There are many potential reasons for this, but grouping kids whose intellectual levels vary so greatly (at age 8, the differences can be stark) definitely doesn’t help the situation. The education system could learn from video games. They make the first level easy enough for everyone to get hooked, and progressively increase the challenges - but make sure each player finishes the level before progressing. This keeps everyone interested.
6b. Curriculum doesn’t allow for students to chase topics they’re passionate about and dive as deep as they want (curiosity part 2)
The ability to dive deep on topics is a skill that needs to be learned. Only in learning this skill do you improve the speed with which you can get to the deepest parts. And the people that can get the deepest knowledge the fastest these days are the most likely to succeed.
Unfortunately, most curriculum is set with such breadth of scope that students do well to keep up with what is being taught.
Let’s take history for example. A school will likely teach a 200 year period and some key events in this time. One of these key events may pique the interest of a student and it may well have been a world changing event. Existing curriculum would give the students the three main points to take away, and get to the next key event.
But what if the student found a book about the first event and wanted to learn more about that time. Then they found another book and researched some opposing opinion articles from back in the day. Now they’re so interested in that topic that they find historians to discuss the event with. All of a sudden, they’re deeply understanding the emotions people were going through. They’ve had to learn about adjacent areas to get the full picture. The thing is, they’ve done all this because they’re interested - they’re still curious.
To take this point further because it’s that important, keeping students interested and learning is so vital because no one knows where the next big idea or solution is coming from. Microwaves were created when their inventor was working on high-powered vacuum tubes. Rocket scientists discovered that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) were incredibly dangerous to the environment (on earth) by studying the atmosphere of Neptune.
There are countless other examples of this happening but the common thread is that the discovery came about because people were working on challenging problems they were interested in.
7. What success looks like to one person is very different to another
Some people want to change the world through business, some make music and design art to emotionally impact the world, others just want to live a life close to friends and family and enjoy the connection. Yet we currently have a one size fits all education system that assumes everyone is on the same trajectory.
I understand why the school system has been built this way, and I certainly don’t believe that it’s easy to fix. But if we don’t start trying now with the developments in technology in the past 30 years, then we are doing a disservice to future generations.
In the future, I’ll write about how I believe we can start making changes that put students first.