The UX of Education Part 1: Strategy

I’m attempting to redesign our education system using the elements of UX: Strategy, Scope, Structure, Skeleton, and Surface.

Strategy asks the basic question that I think all sincere teachers ask themselves consistently: what’s the point of education? In UX terms, we’re asking what are the user needs and business objectives of the product?

So first of all, we need to define our users. There are two basic types of users: participants (students), and facilitators (teachers, administrators, custodians, cooks, secretaries, aides, and mentors). In reality, the students’ needs are the most important and take priority, but in order to meet those needs, we need to keep in mind the needs of the facilitators, without whom education would be pretty difficult (yes, I’m aware of MOOCs).

Next, let’s define success. Luckily, success is the same for both types of users: participants will obtain the right knowledge and skills to take on the next phase of life: adulthood. This is where we meet our first major discord with the present system in place. Presently, the core subjects are

• Language (English, literature, foreign languages)
• Math
• Science (physical and life sciences)
• Civilization (history, social studies, geography, government, economics)
• Arts

These subjects are actually a pretty decent breakdown of what everyone should know to a basic degree (though how it looks in real life is a different story), but say very little, if anything, regarding which skills are essential for modern life. So when I say “the right knowledge and skills” in my definition of success, I’m choosing those words carefully. Here’s my breakdown of the subjects, and yes, they overlap occasionally:

• Life Skills (financial literacy, physical education, health, home life, the arts)
• The Sciences (health, mathematics, life science, physical science, agriculture)
• Civilization (social studies, world languages, fine arts, agriculture)
• Technology (mathematics, information technology, skilled & technical sciences, technology & engineering, keyboarding, the arts, business & marketing)
• Communication (English, the arts, world languages, business & marketing)
• Careers

The main differences are the addition of Life Skills, Technology, and Careers. These three are taught to some degree, mostly in the form of optional classes. That’s a problem, because I firmly believe that financial literacy is a skill that will be used far more than the knowledge of biology (for example). I’ve also reorganized the other subjects because they make more sense that way to me.

So, the users need that knowledge and those skills in order for the product (education) to be successful.

That covers what the users need, let’s talk about the business need — the ROI, if you will. Why should our government, our taxes, pay for all these kids to gain the knowledge and skills to face the modern world as adults? No, any answer like “because it’s the right thing to do” is not allowed. I mean, I believe that; I believe that education is us making good on the promise/belief that all men are created equal and deserve as much of a shot as we can give them to the pursuit of happiness. But at the same time I’m kind of cynical, and I feel like “because it’s the right thing to do” isn’t good enough at a large scale. It’s good enough to get individual educators to sacrifice their time and effort for the good of education, but as a whole it’s not enough, and it should not be enough.

I’m not an economist, so I can’t give actual numbers, but here are two solid reasons that your tax money should fund education even if you have no children: (1) more educated people earn more, and pay more in taxes (I admit I’m talking about public, K-12 education and not college, but you have to do well in high school in order to make it to college, in addition to the earning power of a high school degree over no high school degree); (2) more educated people commit less crime, and spend less time in prison. Regardless of your beliefs in the nobility of an educated people, of how important it is for our politics to have an educated voting base, of how important it is for civil rights and environmental protections for people to be informed enough to take them seriously. The money alone says we need an educated populace.

So, our users (kids) need education, and our civilization needs it. Next up: scope, which is to say, the feature set and contents.