
How Education is Ruining Your Life - r11t
http://davetroy.com/?p=888
======
pg
"Because of the reliance on the corporation, we set out to design an
educational system in its mirror image. The linear journey from first to
twelfth grade, then bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate degrees systematized
learning in a way that turned people into interchangeable parts and valued
mobility."

This is false. This progression predated the corporation.

The present educational system has been _influenced_ by the desire to produce
employees, but that's not where its structure originated. The structure is
medieval.

~~~
jcromartie
The progression existed, but it was for the elite. Most people didn't spend so
many years in school when they were going to work on a farm or join a trade
where they would be apprentice. The idea that _everyone_ should go through 12
years of compulsory age-based schooling and then ideally through college and
into an office is fairly recent.

~~~
pg
Different bits of it were at different times. In Europe middle class kids
started going to schools in the late medieval period. Whereas college was for
the rich roughly till WWII.

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davetroy
I'm the author of this piece. For what it's worth, I had a pretty good
experience in our educational system. I excelled in high school and was voted
most likely to succeed, graduated with honors from Johns Hopkins, then went on
to form a tech startup which I sold at age 32.

What I object to is the design of the system and particularly to the
denigration of sense of place.

I should point out that I have a series of articles in mind to write, and this
particular article was something foundational that I needed to get out in
order to make some later arguments.

Ken Ronbinson's label of "agricultural" model for education is perhaps less
than ideal, particularly because it creates associations with pre-industrial
economics. I think perhaps what he means is something more like "organic"
education.

Thanks for all of the comments; wish they were directly linked to my blog so
others could more readily benefit from them.

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gfodor
A common problem I have with articles like this is they are often coming from
folks who had a horrible experience going through the contemporary educational
system. This results in them throwing the baby out with the bathwater, and
oscillating in the extreme opposite direction, trying to move us as far away
from the way things are today as they can.

At the risk of being called a South Park philosopher, I think for education
the right solution lies somewhere in the middle. I think having people be
transplanted away from their families and friends for a 4 year hiatus to focus
on learning is a crucial part of becoming a well rounded person. That said,
the current methodology of cramming knowledge into students' heads is highly
flawed, simply because it doesn't try to leverage the way the brain actually
learns new things.

I think a more flexible model for education that still fits within the current
"go off to college" model can yield huge improvements while both being
possible and practical. For example, students should be able to have more
control over the direction of a class. If a topic comes up that a large number
of students are interested into going into more depth, then they should be
able to 'fork' the class and go thataway.

Additionally, assessment is totally broken. Assessment should be a means of
re-enforcing knowledge not verifying that it has been absorbed. There's a
whole host of thinking about this, but it really comes down to changing the
timing, content, and impact of administered exams towards one that
disincentivizes cramming and incentivizes true learning of the material.

~~~
jcromartie
> I think having people be transplanted away from their families and friends
> for a 4 year hiatus to focus on learning is a crucial part of becoming a
> well rounded person.

If someone asked you how to educate a society and this was the answer you
gave, they might think you were crazy.

~~~
pbz
There are other things you need to learn beside what's in books, like how to
live on your own, be responsible for your actions and so forth. Living away
from the nest can be helpful in learning these things. I don't understand why
this would make you "crazy."

~~~
gfodor
Right. Another big thing I didn't mention explicitly is that college exposes
students to people outside their comfort zone. Cross pollination of ideas and
culture are hugely important if we want to stamp out racism, ignorance, and
intolerance.

~~~
coryrc
From your comment, it seems your political indoctrination is more important
than cost (monetarily, level of quality, breaking of relationships, etc) of an
education.

~~~
gfodor
And where in gods name did you extract the notion of political indoctrination
from my comment? So is it now the case that suggesting people should take an
opportunity to live in new places around new people is considered a political
statement or one that suggests that that experience is itself indoctrination?

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barnaby
Well, he is right. The education system I went through was designed around a
myth of what the corporate landscape supposedly looks like and it's out of
date in the information age. I don't know that I'd go so far as to call
"anything that asks you to uproot your relationships with place and with
people as evil" nor would I return to an agricultural model.

It's worth reading.

~~~
jerf
I don't think by "agricultural model" people mean "move out to the farms" or
anything; I think he means more that the values of self-reliance in matters
educational is what he is pushing. A bunch of city kids could adopt the
"agricultural model" with no contradiction.

Personally, I think it's a bad moniker; it makes it sound like a step backward
and invites misunderstanding. We need a network-age education that takes
advantage of the things we had that never existed in agricultural times; it
may happen to resemble the agricultural model in some ways, but it will still
resemble the industrial in others, and in other ways won't resemble either.

(Incidentally, this is why I want to homeschool my kid(s). I want to give them
the 21st century education they can't get anywhere else right now. Maybe
_their_ children won't find it so hard.)

~~~
barnaby
"agricultural" is a bad moniker for sure. Still, a model that emphasizes
growing ties to your location is a poor one. David Weinberger hit the nail on
the head in his philosophical arguments in "Small pieces loosely joined" that
our understanding of "place" has completely changed in the information age.
Perhaps the author should have focused on an education system that focuses on
ties to _community_ rather than on the place their from?

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amohr
While I agree with most of what he's saying, I think the solution doesn't
start with education.

Consider this: why did we create the education system as we know it today? Not
for some altruistic desire to have an enlightened populace, but to fill the
needs of our industrialized society. The change didn't come from within, it
came from the corporate world.

As long as companies keep requiring a minimum GPA and a degree from a name
brand university, higher education will be crippled by a constant need to
establish themselves as one of those name brands, emphasis will continue to be
placed on numeric performance, and admissions will be based on likelihood to
achieve the all-important high gpa because those will be the people that get
jobs and make the school look good. As long as this is how higher education
acts, high schools around the country will continue to groom kids for a career
of servitude in the same system.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, I think you would actually see more idealistic innovation in schools,
especially those considered mid-tier in prestige, if they felt they could get
away with it. As it stands now, schools below the top-tier are spending all
their time worried that their grads won't be able to get jobs anywhere, so
don't feel they can take any chances on something that would seem experimental
and crazy. There's a _lot_ of defensiveness and worry about seeming wacky or
non-mainstream.

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kmcgivney
Towards the end of the article, he reaches a conclusion about the importance
of regional self-sufficiency which I don't understand at all. Firstly, because
it has seemingly no connection to anything he was writing about. Secondly,
because it contradicts basic economics of comparative advantage.

~~~
davetroy
Regional self sufficiency is exactly what I was writing about; did you miss
the part about disconnection from place?

And no, it doesn't contradict notions of comparative advantage. It puts a
value on connection to place that the current system has valued at zero. By
valuing connection to place you neutralize notions of competitive advantage
achieved by absolute mobility.

This doesn't mean physical mobility is a bad thing, it just means that long
term connection to a place should be valued. As such it acts as a tempering
force against mobility. There's a reasonable middle ground and our system
denies that.

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pmiller2
The problem certainly isn't that "education" is ruining peoples' lives. It's
that the way our schools are structured (with the exception of some private
schools), they're almost certain to squeeze anything resembling creativity and
free thought out of a child before he learns his multiplication tables. One of
the fundamental functions of schools seems to be to keep kids occupied, lined
up in rows of desks, while their parents are at work.

I think the reason we could get away with this type of educational system in
the industrial era is that factory work doesn't require a whole lot of
knowledge or critical thinking skills. For that matter, neither does low-level
management at most companies (I'm thinking of the "shop foreman" or "team
leader" type positions here).

Educating people for a knowledge economy is likely to be more labor-intensive
than the 30+ student per teacher classrooms we see sometimes in public schools
today. So far, the best model I've seen that even comes close to educating
children to be creative, critical thinkers without fundamentally denying what
it means to be a child is the Montessori model. Unfortunately, the Montessori
model isn't a practical one upon which to base the entire country's education
system right now, in no small part because there just aren't enough teachers
to make it work.

I really wish I had the answer, but I don't.

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apsec112
I agree with many of the points in this article, but this:

"You’re asked inane questions about what you want to study (unanswerable at
that age), shown some brochures, and make a fundamentally random choice about
where you want to spend the next four years of your life."

is lies. Lots of upper class and upper-middle class children are told
explicitly by their parents that they should go into the most prestigious
college they can get into, and most follow that advice. The middle class
doesn't as much, which helps the upper classes preserve social immobility.

"Is it so hard to see now why so many wealthy, jet-setting people are unhappy
and commit suicide? "

More lies. Rich people are, in fact, happier (on average) than non-rich
people. See, eg. <http://lesswrong.com/lw/ub/competent_elites/>.

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T_S_
It's an interesting mishmash.

Presumes educators won't adapt to the changing economy. Perhaps they won't,
but consumers of education eventually will, and will find new educators. The
bigger problem to me is that the skills needed in the future are not terribly
obvious to most people.

The devaluation of place argument is unusual. If I sit still what how will I
be benefitting from repeated interaction with the local yokels? I must be
blinded by my corporate education. Seems to me we can interact with people
across time and distance using technology, but we are still learning how.

The experiencing self v. the remembering self is a nice meme. Must write a
note to my remembering self.

~~~
dkimball
How different are the experiencing and remembering selves from the Freudian id
and ego respectively, though?

~~~
T_S_
Good point. The names are more self-explanatory. And no super ego I guess.

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dkimball
I'm coming late to commenting on this, but I have to ask whether the
cultivation of a sense of place is really a good idea. An "idea economy"
functions best as an urban economy, preferably one composed along the lines
proposed by Jane Jacobs; but the author of this work, as far as I can tell at
least, has a "neo-agrarian" outlook that thinks in terms of villages, not
cities -- if the defining characteristic of a village, including a "cluster of
villages city" like Somerville in Boston, or Tokyo in the Edo period, is that
one is fundamentally rooted to the village and unwilling to leave it even to
pursue greater opportunities. Geographic immobility is not the friend of
intellectual enterprise; just ask Paul Graham, who requires all Y Combinator
startups to move to Silicon Valley (IIRC) for their initial stage.

So I think this proposal would make things worse, not better; it would be
better to cultivate the "moral roots" of the final stage of the Freudian model
of psychology (or of Zen, if it comes to that), which permit the individual to
function well whatever his environment and whatever his social group or
acquaintances.

Let me also point out that highly rooted village life encourages clannishness
and asabiyya (the nasty variety, the type condemned by Muhammad, which
includes nationalism, racism, and xenophobia), while rootless, urban life
discourages it -- in favor of either purely personal selfishness, or objective
moral standards. Obviously, the second, not the first, are what's to be
pursued; but objective standards are much harder to attain in the village
model of life.

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tarkin2
If anyone understood this, I'd be grateful for a summary...

~~~
samdk
The overall idea is that our educational system was designed for a world that
no longer exists and is unsuited for what our world is becoming.

Essentially, he's saying that our educational system is designed to produce
people that can operate interchangeably, and in doing so is suppressing
individuality and twisting our values. He's saying that we've been conditioned
to ignore the value of having roots and of being individuals.

This might have worked (and our educational system might have worked) when our
economy relied on production and required "cogs", but it's crippling us now
when we rely on ideas and creativity.

I'm probably missing half of what was there, but hopefully that helps. I'm not
sure I agree with everything there, but that's mostly because I think this
raises some excellent points/questions that bear a lot of thinking about and I
haven't really had a chance to do so yet.

~~~
godDLL
Yeah, we all know it was broken, hackers know that. Many of us felt like
misfits, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with us. And this guy might
have some idea on what to do about education and the whole institute around
it, it's down there at the end of the article.

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xtho
In German, the notion of education (Bildung) is distinguished from training
(Ausbildung). It seems to me that in English these two concepts are often
intermingled and that, for historical reasons, a concept of education as
Bildung is missing.

Anyway, the article is IMHO a weird mix of extreme right and left wing point
of views. I particularly liked the fact that a Sir speaks in favour of an
agricultural education system.

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zandorg
I dropped out of school and later earned a BSc. I found out later that rather
than taking the performance of the highest scholarship award you have, some
people and companies take the entire history of your education when deciding
on jobs or further education. This seems wrong to me.

