We Need to ReThink Education

On May 3, 2020, New York Newsday published a provocative opinion piece entitled: One way to rethink higher education, by Oliver Roberts. His premise is that if schools are closed because of the coronavirus, why isn’t now the time to rethink Higher Education. I agree it is a good time to rethink education in general, but I think his solution for what needs to be done is too narrow and doesn’t solve the challenges of all education at the end of the industrial age. Roberts posits in his piece:

With prolonged university closures, lawsuits for tuition refunds, and economic uncertainty ahead, now is the time to reform higher education. But in our hyperpartisan political environment, that is easier said than done. If we truly want to improve higher education, we must pursue a bipartisan approach that lowers tuition costs, reduces student loan debt, expands college opportunities for high schoolers, and comes without raising additional taxes. Currently, there is only one reform path that fulfills these goals: Degree-in-Three Reform.

To take Roberts’ solution at face value means you believe that the industrial age will continue to produce jobs in the 21st Century, at the same or higher rate than it did to absorb workers in the 20th Century. But data disputes that. As early as 2013, AP ran a story talking about the loss of jobs from the great recession and that many of those jobs weren’t going to return.

“Most of the jobs will never return and millions more are likely to vanish as well, say experts who study the labor market. …[T]hese jobs aren’t just being lost to China and other developing countries, and they aren’t just factory work. Increasingly, jobs are disappearing in the service sector, home to two-thirds of all workers. They are being obliterated by technology.”

Robert’s proposal is short sited because it looks at the length of time and cost to get a degree as the existential challenge facing students, as opposed to the system itself. The industrial age (basically the 20th Century) has shaped all institutions as we know them. But cognitive systems and other technology are stalking the industrial economy, aiming for and eliminating jobs that were previously thought to be cognitive.

Jobs that previously required educated human capital are now being done by machines. What are companies investing in now? More robotics and artificial intelligence. Companies aren’t looking for the kinds of employees 20th Century education produces.

To prepare people to function effectively in light of competitive computers, educational institutions, from pre-k through 12 and 12 through 16 must change in both curriculum and pedagogy.

The industrial age assumed that mastering certain facts was the information platform for working all of your life. Now we have “Google”. A search engine can find in 5 minutes, data that previously took years to learn. Until the end of the 20th Century, less than 25% of American adults had college degrees and most of those degrees were 1 and done. If you had a BS or BA degree you didn’t need to do further education.

In the digital age, whole industries are being swallowed by technology. New technology can make information skills obsolete, or remove distance as an obstacle, allowing work to be moved to different parts of the world for a different set of workers. We need an educational system that prepares workers to live in a digital economy with its incessant creative destruction of jobs and industries.

We have to tell ourselves the truth that machines are taking over low wage, low skill work, some service-based work, and some work that we previously thought to be the sole province of human capital. We also have to be truthful that workers are increasingly fending for themselves in a free agency economy. Companies are outsourcing labor at a rapid pace, and they aren’t likely to want to change that in the future. Solving those challenges means that we must expand the footprint of “work”, and expand the education system to prepare humans to do that “work”.

If we take the solution proposed by Roberts we are assuming that the current education system is preparing workers for the digital age. Instead, we need an entirely new system to educate workers for the digital age. The cold reality is that the current education system is preparing workers for jobs from the industrial age and those jobs are being taken over by technology.

What does the education system for a digital worker look like? It starts at universal pre-k and understands that pre-k is now part of the education system that focuses on student’s readiness to learn rather than forcing them to rote learn information and facts whether the learner is not ready or perhaps just not interested.

Such a system would also expand the notion of intelligence beyond children who are gifted with memory to include other kinds of recognized intelligence including (naturalist intelligence, musical intelligence, logical intelligence, interpersonal intelligence, kinesthetic intelligence, linguistic intelligence, and spatial intelligence), and also become project-based to teach work skills instead of just theory.

In other words, instead of trying to create and nurture one kind of genius, we will nurture and support multiple kinds of genius to be able to create and sustain work beyond today’s factory models. Beyond including universal pre-k as part of the educational system it also requires changes to the rest of the system.

How does that work? If most children are starting school before age 5, should we still have 12 years of additional learning after universal pre-k? Probably not. Implementing early learning implies that children will be finished with that basic learning at around what is now the 10th grade. But if you end high school in 10th grade (15-year-olds), what do you do next? Use those last two years of high school to fill the general education requirements for college or enroll in an apprenticeship program to learn a trade.

What happens then to the traditional 4-year college?  It collapses to finishing the last two years of college and two years of graduate school. The coronavirus is constantly teaching us that we need big solutions. I think that includes education reform at all levels.

Ce Cole Dillon
May 8, 2020