The title for this series, The Long Learning, comes from two ideas that I have about education. The first is that a commitment to life-long learning is an imperative in our culture (I’ll investigate this concept in a later posting). The second is that education has, for some weird reason, dodged the real implications of the industrial revolution.
If education were really “industrial,” we’d all be using optimized, consumer-friendly, inexpensive courseware globally. We would not be finding the same individuals simultaneously teaching calculus with a myriad of different textbooks and lesson plans all across the world. That’s more like a pre-industrial model, in which artisans worked in their workshops producing unique crafts, or apprentices did small individual tasks at home, “piece work,” for a master craftsmen. In an industrial educational model, we’d see efficiency and mass adoption.
And now, in the 21st century, I’d expect to see education participate in what Chris Anderson of Wired named “long tail”: customized, individualized products and experiences like we are becoming used to on the web. So we should be seeing the “Long Learning” now like a freight train bearing down on us. But where is it?
I only recently stumbled across the work Seth Godin has been doing around asking this same question in his work “Stop Stealing Dreams,” in both book form and in a great TEDx presentation. I can’t believe I hadn’t seen it until now.
He begins with a really simple question: What is School For? I won’t rehash his argument (that it evolved to be for making obedient workers, for making interchangeable industrial workers, and for training those workers to become consumers of the products they made). If you have any doubt about the currency of his claims, consider the recent New York Times story of the widespread use of Adderall for children without ADHD to improve their compliance in the classroom, purportedly evening the odds for low income children.
But what if we could answer that question a different way? What if school was for learning to be a life long learner? What if school was for helping individuals to become not just successful, but happy. In short, what if we started from scratch?
Following Salman Khan and others, Godin suggests 12 actions:
- Homework during the day, lectures at night
- Open book, open note, all the time
- Access to any course, anywhere in the world
- Precise, focused instruction instead of mass, generalized instruction
- The end of multiple-choice exams
- Experience instead of test scores as a measure of achievement
- The end of compliance as an outcome
- Cooperation instead of isolation
- Amplification of outlying students, teachers, and ideas
- Transformation of the role of the teacher
- Lifelong learning, earlier work
- Death of the nearly famous college
In this post-industrial model of education, we would be teaching children, adolescents, and adults to explore, to search, to thirst for knowledge. As Godin sadly comments in the TEDx talk, if someone came into a bookstore excited about a topic like the American Civil War, would you hand them a textbook? Of course not. You’d encourage their love for learning, you’d feed it with personalized, diverse content, you’d reward them for their interest and their progress, and you’d connect them to a network of like minded, creative people longing to know more.
With the tools now at our disposal, it’s possible to really hack education in a way that leaps over commoditization to customization. It’s not just possible, it’s inevitable. And soon.
