Future of Education

A colleague on the Rules Committee recently shared a message that included the statement "we are all better off when education thrives". I wrote the brief reply that follows:

Let me play devil's advocate for a moment:

Universities were constructed in a time when you needed a place to contain the accumulated knowledge of humanity (educated people and their books, journals, etc). Now, the information mostly resides on the internet and it's easy for people to access it directly. A kid with a smartphone anywhere on earth already has access to more-and-better information than the most powerful, richest person on earth had 20 years ago.

This isn't to say that education has less value, but the nature of that education needs to change. Education used to be about "knowing things" and transmitting that knowledge. There are still a lot of university classes that are taught (and assessed) as though that's what education is. That kind of education now has little value. We need to demonstrate that we're providing a kind of education that does have value.

It also is much less clear that people should have different phases in their lives (ie, one where they "learn" and then a later one where they "do"). We need to start life-long learning much earlier and have people start "doing" in kindergarten, even as we have people continue to "learn" throughout their careers. It's not clear that our current educational system supports either effectively. But it's becoming clear that education is not our generation's key challenge.

It's becoming clear that our current economic system is simply breaking down. Robots and computers can already do many of the things that people do, only better. Soon that will be "most of the things that people do". We need a new economic model that will ensure that the fruits of such a system of production are equitably shared. No kind of university education will help you much in the kind of hellish kleptocracy our society will become without economic reform.

We need more than platitudes like "we are all better off when education thrives". We need to ask questions like "what kinds of education?" and "education for what?"