Is it designed around what it’s for?

“School gets a bad rap but it’s actually really impressive: juvenile human brains are constantly learning from any available context and the fact that school manages to halt this process is an engineering feat on par with stopping a lava flow.” – @LiteralBanana (link)

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Imagine you were an alien. On your planet, there aren’t schools. From your spaceship, you spend some time observing  one of ours. What would you guess schools are for?

I bet that education wouldn’t be the first of your hypotheses. After all, schools deliver much better on other metrics. Did you ever notice that most degrees are of the same length regardless of the complexity of the underlying field, and that some subjects are obsolete, as if their purpose was to employ teachers rather than teach useful skills? It is almost as if universities were designed to serve their teachers and administrators rather than their students.

Sometimes, it takes being an alien to notice that systems with a stated purpose aren’t designed around it. Some examples outside education include committees (as Taleb noted, they are not designed around taking decisions but around distancing decisions-makers from the risks of their decisions) and foreign interventions (as the last 20 years in Afghanistan showed, they’re not designed around improving the lives of poor populations but around enriching the military-industrial complex). [1]

The point is not that schools are bad. They’re great at many things – daycare, for example, or mitigating the outcomes of some difficult familial situations.

The point is that we shouldn’t trust the stated purpose of systems. Instead, we can disbelieve the illusion and ask ourselves, what are they great at? And if we don’t like the answer, can we redesign them around a different purpose? [2]

For example, what if tests weren’t to grade students but to show them that practice leads to competence? What would they look like?

And what if subjects weren’t a checklist of “must-know” concepts, but represented a set of skills, what would they look like?

And if teachers weren’t there to regurgitate books but to motivate students, what would they do, and how would they be selected?

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Also: on the subject of, “what are schools for?”, here’s a thread of mine called “10 theses on education.”

Also: an early reader of this essay signaled to me that there are already some schools redesigned with education and skills in mind, such as this one he co-founded.

Notes:

[1]: By some estimates, the US spent $2B on the recent Afghanistan intervention. That would amount to $53k per Afghan. Did their life really improve that much? Did it improve at all, for those far from the geographical/social/political center of the intervention?

[2]: By “can we redesign schools around a different purpose,” I do not mean that we should. I see a lot of ways in which such an intervention could fail at scale – for example, by changing teachers too fast, with the result of not finding enough good new teachers, and either lacking personnel or hiring bad ones. Instead, we can start with little, localized experiments. Testing what works, and doing more of it, little by little – a better approach than applying what makes sense (but might not work) all at once.

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