How Education is Ruining Your Life

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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/.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.