Education … Game Over.
Modern education is ripe for ‘disruption’.
‘Education’ was Made Up.
SCENE 1: It’s Tuesday morning, and on the shelf that holds my mother’s old books I find a 1978 reprint of a book written in 1763. Randomly picking it up, I completely ruin my work-schedule by reading it for two hours. It is an unconventional but heartfelt plea against the contemporary educational system of the time.
So old, but so relevant.
And that was written before the industrialization of education, an era in which most children even in the West weren’t yet run through a ‘system’. Fast forward a century and a half, and the system of homogenizing and ranking children was well on its way to conquering the world from Copenhagen to Calcutta, pumping out administrators, clerks and professional managers for the newly industrialized cities of Europe and its colonies all over the world.
The global game was settled, seemingly once and for all. So much so, that when a Bengali migrant family in the late 20th century raised me in Australia, my quickest path to status, both domestic and public, was to game the game. Absorb knowledge, ace the exams, give the system and the teachers what they expected to receive.
The education game felt to me like Tetris , using my mind to to create the ‘shapes’ that would ‘fit’ into the machine. I played it well and succeeded. Three degrees, and I almost went into academia. Education was good. Twenty-five years later, I am not so sure.
The Death of Knowledge Work
SCENE 2: Two other things happened on that same Tuesday.
CONTEXT: in early 2023, my LinkedIn feed is full of people posting about ChatGPT, the new AI wunderkind. Almost all of them re-posting the variations of the same half-dozen storylines (mostly without attribution): AI is going to take your job, whether you are a designer, copywriter or even lawyer. This makes knowledge workers quake with FUD.
And perhaps with good reason. In my own field of software development, AI is now writing code that is as good as the average coder in many situations — and it’s getting better fast.
Here’s another post that just popped up. ChatGPT writes SQL queries. I used to write SQL queries for a living.
This strikes home. It took me years to become a (kinda) good coder. But with any information manipulation skill, AI can now catch up. With the entire corpus of digital information (caveat: biased to Western knowledge work as it is) available for training, it’s only a matter of time. AI might do it badly, but it gets better and will do it well — eventually it will be “best practice”. Writing emails, legal opinions or calculating taxes, you name it.
As this revolution rolls through in the 2020s, huge areas of “skill” will be excised from economic systems and employment. The devaluation of “knowledge work” will be swift.
And exactly how much more slowly will institutional education adapt and respond to this tsunami? Even if you’re invested up to your neck in the current models, surely you’d have to admit — by at least an order of magnitude. The institutions will be pumping out JavaScript programmers and consultants and law clerks well into the second half of the century.
Markets correct, but markets as distorted as the education market are so inefficient that the stimulus-response lag is immense.
The Tertiary Status Game
SCENE 3: I have to justify that “distorted” jibe. So here is the second other thing to happen on that Tuesday.
I had a Zoom meeting. A big-time executive from an American Ivy-League university scheduled to meet from long ago. It strikes me straight away the she is branded, inside and out, from her Zoom background to her vernacular to her worldview.
The power dynamic of the meeting is intense. The perceived status asymmetry — she has the Ivy-League brand, we don’t — poisons the entire discourse from the beginning. We’re talking not to her, but the logo on her business card. Arrogance, miscommunication and resentment ensue.
I can’t be bothered looking up the history, but at some point (probably incrementally) the arrow of inference in educational status reversed*. Maybe, at some point Ivy League were Ivy League because of the ‘quality’ of the educational experience. But now, quality is inferred from the brand (correlated to price). The Anglo-First World runs an oligopoly, sucking in talent from the global South and “branding” them (the original meaning is apt) for the market. The brand is the product, not the education.
(*Kudos to my good friend Moses for this spark.)
Now, at least the status games as played elsewhere eg. in social media are dynamic; the winners rise and fall with regularity. But a branded degree is a leg-up for life, regardless of internal and external change.
And this ossification of tertiary education into a status network has knock-on effects everywhere, from the commodification of immigration to groupthink in politics to the insularity of Silicon Valley culture.
But maybe the worst effect is that it stifles and distorts the natural instincts of good people with good intentions who might want to change the system. In multiple decades of dealing with academics and education executives, we always get to the same moment with the same response — I’m sorry, I’d love to try change, but I can’t, even if I wanted to (and I really don’t).
Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Children?
SCENE 4: Actually, no, the worst effect of the current system is not what it does to the educators. It’s what it does to the kids.
My son’s maths teacher at his public school tells me — I can’t teach him maths, I don’t know enough maths to do it (direct quote). I am not shocked. My son is no child prodigy, just a kid who is curious, motivated and knows how to iterate through knowledge using technology at a rapid pace. He’s left his teachers — only one has a passion for his subject — way behind.
Students aren’t dumb. They know the score. Imagine being in a place where everyone cares less than you about learning something. Imagine being jaded at the age of twelve. It breaks my heart.
So that Tuesday night my son and I explore the world of maths using YouTube — we look up weird properties of prime numbers (super interesting BTW). His eyes are shining. Twenty minutes later, he’s enlightened and off to bed, and I reflect that as far as brute “knowledge” transfers go, that was about the peak experience available in today’s civilization — available 24/7 and unmediated by any educational institution.
Repeat that experiment one thousand times over three years, and now you can see why my little niece said — why bother with school? Well school’s only good for the socializing, other parents tell me privately (they never tell the teachers at parent interviews). When circumstances, unions and bureaucracy conspired to send students home online for two years, it snapped an unexamined pattern of behaviour and belief in the system.
(Why bother with university, outside of hard skills e.g. surgery and hard science? For the brand on the degree?)
The harsh truth: educational experiences suck. There’s a reason the archetypical story of the stand-out teacher keeps getting remade in Hollywood — it is the exception that proves the rule. I had two decades of uninspiring lessons, mercenary teachers and passive learning. I am lucky I discovered computer programming in my own time.
(Add to that the modern-day horror of the online learning / Zoom experience: camera off, alone, disengaged).
NOTE: universities kid themselves with “student surveys” — but they don’t spend time getting to know the kids. (When I asked the “student experience coordinator” at a major Australian university how many times she has a drink / meal with a student, she looked like she’d seen a ghost).
But students themselves can perpetuate this as well. It’s tempting to play the game instead of changing it (hard). There is that moment when you realize that the right words arranged in the right order can get you good grades (especially true in the “social sciences”). Even if you don’t understand what you’re saying. Even if you don’t believe what you’re saying. You’ll get the grades you need to start to win.
Something inside you recoils, but here’s a game skill that will take you far. Do you really want to exit now, at the moment of uncracking the code? So you push in your chips, and you’re in for life.
Once you teach people to say what they do not understand … it is easy enough to get them to say anything — Jean Jacques Rousseau
So — What Now?
SCENE 4: This is not just another disgruntled rant — my skin’s in this game at multiple levels.
My boys get one hour to play Minecraft every day. When Kynan Robinson first told me that kids should be playing Minecraft instead of being in class all those years ago, I was sceptical. But now I know the power of play, and Polynize in 2023 will be all about students driving change in education.
To begin with, we are asking ourselves — what are the human skills for the 2020s and 2030s?
Knowledge / data based skills get largely superseded, just as many manual, trade and craft skills were in earlier eras. And just as in earlier eras, we migrate to previously ignored and intangible skills: creativity skills such as intuitive leaps, imagination, juxtapositions; story-telling; collaborative skills such as time-bound communication and advanced theory-of-mind; a focus on systematic multi-disciplinary synthesis and “T-shaped” skills, reversing a century of specialization. etc.
(This is just a sample, there is a huge taxonomy of skills here.)
Also— let’s learn and teach how to both compete and collaborate with the machines in our lives. We’re already co-creating with the AIs (ever seen someone use advanced video- or music-editing software, or coding with plugins and helpers?). What are the meta-level strategies and skills needed? What are the boundaries between human and machine capabilities? How can we think about risk in such hybrid environments? etc.
Something else less certain: a breaking down of the tertiary brand status game. It’s running strong but perhaps it has peaked? The raw inequity of the First-World oligarchy may trigger an ethical response, but its likely to be something more prosaic (don’t know what exactly). Perhaps when the first AI replicates a semester of Harvard course content, who knows. :)
It Shouldn’t Be This Hard
I come from a family of educators, heavily invested in the system. I spent my youth collecting the trophies of high-performance in the existing system. It’s not easy for me to write this article.
I haven’t always thought like this. It’s been a long journey of first-hand experience, not second-hand dogma.
Education shouldn’t be hard. It isn’t hard, actually. A good teacher knows it’s not hard to be a good teacher — teach with love and be young at heart. If you can’t inspire curiosity or exploration or a love of learning, it’s because you stopped cultivating all those qualities yourself (you had them when you were a child, so you must have lost them somewhere along the way).
Very arrogant I guess, coming from someone without any of the required ‘qualifications’ in education, but I don’t care. That’s what it’s going to take to shake this up — outsiders to make up new ways to replace the insider made-up old ways. But nothing grandiose. Make it up responsibly and boldly, learn very fast and always always do what the kids love.
