July 12, 2023
Imagine pitching this to an investor: I want to spend $40,000 and 4 years of time to validate if the degree I’ve chosen is the right thing for me based on nothing other than what my parents recommend and what my friends are doing.
Would you invest? probably not …and yet this is often the very first financial investment most people make in their lives… How did we come this?
Solve education and humanity will have the tools to solve all other problems.
We’ve all had our gripes with the education system. This is an attempt at synthesizing my take on why we’ve gotten to where we are today, and where we’re headed.
Period bells. Roll call. Lines. Classes. Recess. Lunch break. Rows of desks.
All terminology used for today’s schools and students. However, it’s also all terminology used during the industrial revolution 100-300 years ago.
When the industrial revolution started, workers were recruited to work in factories away from home. This greatly improved factory output but what happened to the kids? Just as industrial machines were created to create carbon copies of goods, schools were created as daycare centers for children, while also creating disciplined carbon copies of future workers who would eventually populate the factories.
Scale makes personalization hard and even today, we still feel the cracks of the mechanical system that is a one-size-fits-all education system for students to conform to. In today’s society, the largely common strategy for assessing performance is standardized testing, reducing the heterogeneity of each student down to one homogenous number; a one dimensional benchmark of their performance: the examination result.
This benchmark then makes it easy to priority-rank candidates to quantity-limited resources that need to be rationed (selective high schools, university degree ATAR cutoffs, job applications).
Students learn the same things because that’s the fairest way of normalizing student performance along with being the most scalable strategy with one teacher paired up to every 30 students.
In summary, the two things that matter in today’s education: curriculum and examination results, are an exercise of data normalization.
While not the intention, here are some case studies worth considering that demonstrate pedagogical apathy: