What's the point of school?
When people reflect on Aaron Swartz's intelligence, they often laud his ability to reframe a problem. Asking the right question can immediately expose deeper fundamental issues and enable better solutions to arise.
I think the edtech space needs to take a step back and have a WWASD moment. There's wide media coverage on how education is the next big thing in tech, but there's little discussion on what the actual point of school and education is. How can we begin to rethink education if we don't first discuss its goals?
So, what is the point of school?
At a high level, I think the point of school is to build skills and shape attitudes that will make someone a valuable member of society, and set them up to live a happy, fulfilling life.
Happiness is a vague goal, but for this discussion, let's assume, as many studies have shown, that someone is happy when they are busy and accomplishing things that are valued.
So with this definition of success in mind, what should school teach?
Here's my take, along with some commentary on how schools tend to measure up today:
1. Reading, writing and communication skills. This is uncontroversial and I believe schools do an okay job of this today.
2. Logical and rational thinking skills. I actually don't think studying Mathematics is as important as learning logic. Logic is a basic building block for good communication and critical thinking. Most schools don't formally teach logic, instead you learn it implicitly (and therefore, possibly not at all) through Math, English, History and Science. I think Logic should be a core subject.
3. The ability to think critically and independently about an argument or theory. To push any scientific field forward or to innovate in any industry, we need people to think critically about the status quo. Evaluating what's wrong with the current state of affairs is the first step towards progress.
4. The ability and desire to teach oneself. Probably the most important of all, especially given the information available at our fingertips. In school we are conditioned on a rigid teacher, student model -- we are students, and we will learn from designated teachers. This isn't how it works in the real world. To be successful, you need to be able teach yourself.
5. Confidence and courage to solve a new, unknown problem. No matter how many facts you've memorized, or how many algorithms you know how to apply, if you don't have practice solving brand new problems, you won't have confidence in your ability to do so. Further, if you lack the confidence to take on a new, unknown problem, you won't be useful to society. Computers will be the masters of facts, and algorithms. We need brave thinkers to venture into the unknown and solve new problems.
Most curriculums are entirely deficient in encouraging people to explore the unknown. In school, you are typically taught something, and then tested on your ability to recall what you were taught. There's little experimentation and little discovery. Instead of teaching people to follow instructions, we need to teach them to explore.
6. How to handle, and not be afraid of, failure. School teaches you that failure is bad. You learn to be afraid of that big red F, but often, failure is an effective path to learning, and in some cases, the only path. People should be comfortable with failure and understand how to learn from it.
Apart from 1,2 and 3 most of the items I've layed out are attitudinal skills rather than hard skills. I think excelling in any domain, albeit Chemistry, Business, Law, Medicine, Mathematics, requires these attitudinal skills. Any specific subject matter can be learned if these blocks are in place.
Instead of structuring a curriculum around subject matter, perhaps we should structure it by these subject-agnostic learning goals. You can imagine a "Critical Thinking" class where you cover decisions made by famous leaders, scientific research, and mathematical proofs. Or a "Teach Yourself" class where you are given a list of 5 questions in various domains e.g., How did the Egyptians build the pyramids? Why is each snowflake unique?, and you choose one to answer through your own research and exploration on and offline.
The potential for innovation in the classroom is much more interesting and valuable once we start with the basic question of what should people learn in school.
Let's take advantage of this tech disruption to not only evolve how we teach, but what we teach.
