In this post I want to continue my thoughts, started here about education as a public good or state-level enterprise, and about our assumptions, conscious or not, about what we think it does.
Once we have tasked education to educate people it has to solve four big problems.
Before we get to those, I want to take a couple moments to say that I’m deliberately pointing to something I’m calling an assumption stack. When I say, “once we have tasked education to educate people...” I am calling attention to the idea that education, or the institution anyway, is an invention and there was a moment when we decided it should perform particular tasks. Those tasks are based on a stack of interconnected assumptions about why, where, what and how education should happen within a society. I’m not saying any of these assumptions are necessarily wrong, though some may be. I am saying that they are more or less arbitrary and that we can choose to work with a different set of assumptions if we want to.
I will come back to this notion of assumption stacks in a later post. But for now, I just want to hint that the reason education reform doesn’t seem to stick is that we are trying to reform the wrong thing: the institution of education itself. Instead, I think we need to take another look at the relationship between education and society and why, where, what and how we think that education ought to happen.
Which brings me to the four big problems education has to solve, whatever its marching orders.
The first is the curriculum problem. That is, how does education answer, What are the knowledge, skills and dispositions we want people to understand, acquire and cultivate? The answer is two-part. We can debate about its details, but the first part is the core set of things that are essential to getting by—readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic, so to speak. The second part is made up of things that are more of the moment. We might say climate change, economic disparities and civics today, for example.
The second is the pedagogical problem. Although a lot of reformist movements focus on this, it’s actually less of a problem than you might think. We actually know a great deal about how people learn. Neuroscience is giving some new insights, but great teachers and great teaching have been around for a very long time. Think of Socrates or Lao Tsu.
What is called out as poor pedagogy is actually part of the third challenge, the delivery problem. How do we ensure that everyone has access to great teachers and great education?
The final problem education has to solve is the economic one. How do we pay for a great education for all? This is less of a total cost problem and more of a distribution problem. In the U.S., for example, education spending is approaching $1T. Yes.
You can’t really say any one of these problems is more important than the other, as all must be solved for education to happen. But I think it’s fair to say that one or another can drive education forward. For example, when Horace Mann, Ellwood Cubberley and the like were shaping early public education in the U.S., the driving force was the economic problem, specifically the allocation of money. School funding was fragmented and terribly uneven at the time, making it difficult for education to deliver on its task of educating as many people as possible as quickly as possible in order to meet the needs of a rapidly industrializing society. Note that at that time, the idea that education was a state responsibility—part of the assumption stack we work with today—was still rather new.
Today, I’m pretty sure the driver needs to be the second part of the curriculum problem—those things that are of the moment. We’re pretty good at the first part, the basics. Over the last 200 years or so, but especially since the expansion of public education in the 1950s, global literacy rates increased from about 12% to 86%. That’s a remarkable achievement that deserves some applause. Where we are struggling now is on issues of global warming, economics and governance. The kind of question we need to ask ourselves now, is how do we educate as many people as possible as quickly as possible about the climate crisis?
Would we invent the same institution to solve this? That is, does the same stack of assumptions work in every case?
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