It is Time to Change Education (ask anyone who has thought about this deeply)

Here are my comments on this:

Education is not that complicated a subject. Its history is rooted in religion. There is truth to impart and each religion has established schools to impart it. While many from Plato to Dewey have mentioned that people learn by doing, we nevertheless insist that people can learn by listening.

So we have schools that teach the truth by telling it to us. In non-religious schools, real truth is hard to find, so we insist on teaching algebra, or simple science, or we make people study literature.

All this must and will change. The fact that students are burdened with fantastic debts to attend schools like Harvard, does not attest to the value of the education received at Harvard, but to the branding. Say you went to Harvard and people will think you are smart. Companies will hire you because you went to Harvard. It's irrational, but true.

The great inhibitors to change are many, but my three favorites are: top universities, the government, and parents. They all know that school should be like… well, school. There should be classrooms and tests, and college admissions, and lots of requirements.

Here is what should exist in place of all that. In a world of computers we have the possibility of replacing the existing courses, by a wide range of stuff that might be fun to do. Each kid would choose their own fun. The teacher’s job would be to make sure that kids did, in fact, do something, and that no one was being mean to them while they did it. Teaching would cease to be a teacher’s job. I am not the first to say that nothing worth learning can be taught. Kids need help when they try to do things. They need an environment set up for them to try things out and they need help from people who know more than they do when things go wrong. They need to be able to fail and to have conversations with someone else about why they failed, so they can try again or try something else. And they need to be working towards their own goals and definition of success, not for grades.

Can we create learning environments where kids can learn what they want to learn? Sure. Gardner mentions data sciences. We have built a thorough online course in data analytics. Could we offer it to high schools? Of course not. It wouldn’t fit in the curriculum. It wouldn’t be state sanctioned. Parents would wonder why it wasn’t physics or whatever else they thought was more important. Colleges wouldn’t know how to deal with it in college applications.

And the Gates’ and Zuckerbergs of the world would fight against it, because they like everyone else, know how to fix education. (Their answer is usually more tests.)