Education for a more perfect future: Intro
A high level system design sketch
Motivation
Education is one of the most important and expensive things we do together— expensive in both dollars and human time.
Present-day schooling, at least in the US but probably elsewhere as well, poorly serves parents, students, and society. It’s too complicated and time-consuming to navigate as a parent on behalf of your kids. There’s too much boring or irrelevant stuff to sit through as a student and too few opportunities to build agency, making it too hard to launch yourself into the kind of adult life you want. And the system as a whole provides too little value for money in terms of effective human capital development, not only per dollar but per person-year spent.
Moreover, all this is happening in the midst of the loneliness crisis rooted in our alienation from supportive local communities. Schools, properly designed and situated, can be powerful tools to push back against that alienation; but they’re rarely designed with that goal in mind.
Education is thus deeply connected to what
calls the “Permanent Problem”. It has become hugely challenging to preserve and extend the immense material gains of the Great Enrichment while overcoming the crises of meaning that modernity has created, because the scale and shape of modern society can overwhelm both our sense of community bonding and our sense of individual agency. The system we have now, in my opinion, does a lot to make the problem harder; a better system could do a lot to make it easier.So in the spirit of Google-style design documents, I’d like to propose a design for something very different, yet feasible to get to, from where we are now. The key design elements can be implemented independently, and are mostly rooted in both historical and contemporary precedent; but taken together, they would make a huge change to a sector that has become sclerotic.
I started out thinking this would be a single post, but it got way too long. Instead, in this introduction I’ll just summarize the five big high-level reform proposals, talk more about what I intend and don’t intend them to help achieve, and say a bit about where I’m coming from. Five subsequent posts will then dive deeper.
Five reform proposals
With that throat clearing out of the way, what would I do if made dictator?
Focus the traditional public education system on providing small PreK-8 primary schools and making them into hubs of mixed-use, walkable community in as many neighborhoods as possible, as well as sites of full-day, year-round childcare.
Introduce an adult competency exam available to students on graduation from primary school, which would test a broad range of “adulting knowledge” including but not limited to literacy and numeracy. Passing would unlock most adult freedoms even before age 16 or 18. Some kids might pass immediately after primary school, others only after years of secondary school, and that’s OK.
Make secondary schooling beyond the competency exam optional though heavily recommended, and administer it on a choice-first, decentralized basis. A large majority of teenagers should be able to find an affordable school that fits them well, but some will pursue alternative life plans and that too is OK.
Focus government support for traditional higher education (e.g. bachelor’s degrees) on students with cognitive ability well above median, via stringent test score thresholds to get into public universities and qualify for financial aid.
Introduce a large menu of optional national service programs heavily recommended and financially incentivized for teens and young adults, in which they can do prosocial things and build responsibility and agency.
Some of these, as you’ll see in the deep dive posts, are much more radical than others. Each could be done on its own, and each, as I’ll argue in the deep dives, would be a big win on its own. But their effects would be complementary: together they would make a more dramatic social change than the sum of their partial impacts. Kids in this reconfigured system would start their educational lives in more nurturing, tighter-knit communities and would acquire agency sooner to forge their own life plans as they ranged outward. And when they grew up and started families of their own, they’d find it less stressful and uncertain to juggle family, work, and friendships.
Goals
Why do these five things? Because a better system could do much more to:
Promote human connection. As per my last post, this is pronatal but we would want to do it even if not concerned about fertility. A reimagined education system could make our built environment more conducive to forming strong parent communities, and help young people get more of the knowledge, experience, and starting capital they need to build the families they want.
Respect parents’ limited time and energy. For humanist and pronatal reasons, we should want to make the job of being a responsible parent of school-age children as simple as possible.
Respect students’ precious days and years of life. In a free society, students ought to acquire control over their own life directions as quickly as possible, recognizing that people can have many different life plans that are valid and productive, some of which are more “conventionally intellectual” than others.
Push against the malign systemic side effects that have worsened in the last few decades: credentialism, wasteful signaling, grade inflation, elite overproduction, delayed maturation.
Provide easy access to effective learning environments for students who want to learn and have the cognitive capacity for it, recognizing that not everyone has the same capacities and that the education system has very limited ability to close achievement gaps.
Again, a better system could at once produce stronger, more autonomous individuals and root them in stronger, more supportive communities, thus helping with both facets of the challenge of modernity.
Non-goals
Here are some education-related things I am deliberately not trying to address:
Infant/toddler childcare. This is a qualitatively different problem because kids that young have very different needs from older kids.
Graduate education or academic research. This is also a qualitatively different problem, and it directly affects a much smaller set of people.
Segregation or achievement gaps. Social and educational segregation is a big problem, but it is fundamentally a housing problem and the education system is not the right tool to address it. More generally: education can be a great tool for providing broadly distributed opportunity, but—a crucial distinction!— it is a terrible tool for reducing inequality.
Teachers’ unions or required teacher credentials. Reforming these may well be a good idea, but the kind of systemic reconfiguration I’m proposing below could work with or without that reform. Also, I want to try and avoid culture-war-loaded topics in this proposal.
Curricular reform. There are actual experts on this and I’m not one of them, and again it’s mostly orthogonal to the question of how to organize schooling at the level I have in mind, and is more culture-war-loaded than I’d like.
My background and bias
I’m an affluent, highly educated parent of a middle school student, with a lot of similarly situated friends. In part, this proposal aims to broadly distribute benefits that I and my wife and son and our friends have enjoyed, but most parents and students today can’t access. In part it seeks to fix problems that bedevil even privileged folks like us, for whom the system overall works very well.
You may recognize here the influence of several sorts of “heterodox” thinkers, including John Taylor Gatto, Bryan Caplan, Tanner Greer, Jonathan Haidt, Kieran Egan, and Freddie deBoer. I don’t fully agree with any of them, but I think they all have insights worth incorporating.
Next up…
Stay tuned for deep dive #1 in the coming weeks: how we could design and situate primary schools as more effective community hubs that would make life vastly easier for parents and help kids start building real-world agency.