Different "modular", but it came to mind: years back I saw a paper proposing a modular medical training regime for India, intending to make it reentrant and incremental commitment. Core observation was there's overlap between training say a community health worker and a nurse, an advanced nurse and a doctor, an optometrist and an ophthalmologist. So rather than having training streams diverge early, there'd be courses in common. And rather than having to restart from scratch if switching streams, or returned from profession to school to upgrade, you could place out of parts. Sort of like US layered nursing credentials, but writ larger. Hypothesized societal benefits included lower latency demand-response, easier/faster scaling, and greater equity.
Imagine if modular, rather than pipeline, was the default societal approach to structuring education?
(A personal aside: I'm interested in exploratory discussion of transformative improvement of preK-13 science content/progressions/interactives, using extreme domain expertise and SER mashups. Science and engineering are a richly interwoven interdisciplinary tapestry - what if they were taught like that? If anyone knows of settings for such discussion, I'd love to hear of it - thanks! Bonus fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUyVd1pO3nI 5-8-yr old picture book to vaccinate against natural selection misconceptions https://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2017/10/Emmons_et_al-2017-Journ... )
Which understandably focuses on individual deployable innovations. Rather than on exploring mashups of multiple hard-to-deploy innovations, with interdependencies, regardless of how awesome their potential synergies.
For example, on better teaching of deep time, or genetics central dogma, or natural selection, separately. Rather than on say "if all of those, and more, were simultaneously done cutting-edge-research well or better, what possibilities might that open up for an evolution-rooted biology learning progression? How about in K-6?" Or "if we managed to successfully teach both size/scale down to atoms, and a novel atoms-up foundation, in K-2, neither of which have been done even in (quite unimpressive) research, what might a broad and modern material sciences preK-8 progression look like? Including atoms-dancing phonons, gels, multiscale structure, and so much more."
And instructors are understandably focused on the performance art of triage education of their students at hand, towards standardized exams and incremental outcomes, under severe resource constraints. And textbooks... sigh.
So there are few incentives for anyone to explore "what might this all look like, if it wasn't wretched". And the expertise requirements seem extreme - like "biology tome with a hundred authors" extreme, but with extensive collaboration also required, and for something much much smaller. There's hope, but it's non-trivial.
Whole-program learning progression rewrites in life-sciences professional education is perhaps the/a closest analogy. But even there, time and effort constraints severely restrict exploration. You can't afford to explore both how to successfully give med school graduate students a firm grasp of size, and how to use that to better teach physical biology. The absence of each denying incentive to the other. So basically neither happens, on a timescale of decades. But perhaps, if there were a clearer vision of what it might look like, of the payoff, there might be greater motivation to work towards it.
Imagine if modular, rather than pipeline, was the default societal approach to structuring education?
(A personal aside: I'm interested in exploratory discussion of transformative improvement of preK-13 science content/progressions/interactives, using extreme domain expertise and SER mashups. Science and engineering are a richly interwoven interdisciplinary tapestry - what if they were taught like that? If anyone knows of settings for such discussion, I'd love to hear of it - thanks! Bonus fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUyVd1pO3nI 5-8-yr old picture book to vaccinate against natural selection misconceptions https://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2017/10/Emmons_et_al-2017-Journ... )