Redesigning Childhood Education (1 of 4): Introduction
My prediction of education’s future is more radical than most experts in the field. It’s underpinned by: a spike in the pace of technological advances; lack of faith in the ability of government to adapt quickly enough to lead the way (despite the best intentions and hard work of school reform activists); and a rejection of the bias in human psychology to assume linear progress (rather than fundamental breakthroughs that suddenly change the course of a field, even though that’s exactly what history tells us tends to happen).
There’s a lot of complacency in education. If you talk to nearly anyone in the Western world, they will say (from their own particular perspective) that it is broken. From students to teachers to parents-who-were-once-students, most acknowledge several of the issues highlighted in the posts ahead as frustrations in their own experience. Yet nearly everyone has also resigned themselves to unsatisfying acceptance of this system’s perpetuation.
That’s due to:
- the false belief that this is the way it’s always been and thus always will be;
- a false assumption that the standard school model must have proliferated around the world because “society” thoroughly considered alternatives and found it objectively superior; and
- a comparison between the existing norm and a false alternative: eliminating formal education entirely.
Most people in tech and beyond are skeptical about change or investment opportunities in education; I’m extremely bullish. I think education as we know it will transform entirely over the next three decades. It’s not a market that can change overnight, but there’s a movement for redesigning the fundamental models of childhood and higher education that is indeed accelerating rapidly and gaining serious muscle because of the outcomes it is achieving and can increasingly, quantifiably prove as superior.
The investment opportunities rest in companies creating and then taking advantage of this radical shift in the core way education is conducted. Such startups are far and few between at the moment but popping up more rapidly and will proliferate in a few years once we reach key proof points that highlight new models of school as viable paths.*
In the meantime, most of edtech remains under “the edtech delusion” that SaaS tools targeting different buckets of schools’ budgets are somehow the solution to a system broken at its core. Technology will play a huge role in this shift, but until you re-design the core model on which schools are built, the free online content, iPads in classrooms, enhanced learning management systems, etc. are for largely for naught. Focusing on them first is like focusing on how to improve the fuel efficiency of a ship that’s actively sinking.
In my opinion, every human is naturally intellectually curious and highly capable of learning and creating new things. Right now even well educated humans are probably running at about 5–10% capacity relative to what we could be though. It has never been that effective of a system, but it is especially misaligned with a modern economy. With a redesigned education system, the average 18 year old could be more informed, creative, autodidactic, and capable of complex problem-solving than the top 5% of peers today. New models enhanced by new technologies, as I’ll address in the following posts, will create a leap in human learning.
*i.e. the short term is not a time to invest in a lot of edtech companies and ride a wave, it’s a time to place a few big bets in the hopes of catching 1+ of the 2–5 outside-the-box ventures that will really kickstart this historic pivot, get value out of it early on, and rise the tide to become the first generation of new incumbents.
