On Black Friday, instead of joining millions of Americans on the hunt for good deals, I had a few friends over. It was the first time I had hosted such an event and it was a good time. Delicious food, good conversation, a game of Catan, fun times.
One of the topics that came up towards the end was Education. Now education is often the source of much contention, and it’s not surprising. We, and our children, and our kids’ kids, are all going to spend approximately 12 years (actual range: 10-24) of our lives in education. In theory, this indoctrinates us and prepares us for the society we are going to be entering. You can stop laughing now. No?
Ok, so you’ve caught your breath and are ready to discuss the matter at hand? Good
So education is futures trading at a societal level. We’re literally investing in the outcomes of our society by training the next generation. This affects everyone, both on an individual outcome and on a societal direction. This is why Republicans care about CRT, Democrats care about LGBT and sex ed, why everyone cares about college attendance and who can go. But most of those who are discussing the behemoth of US Education grew up within it, which means they often lack imagination for how to change it in a new direction that might better prepare society for the future.
A while ago, I looked back on my life, when I was growing up, and wondered why I seemed to be better prepared than my peers. Now I did not grow up in the US Education system. Barring sixth and most of seventh grade, I was homeschooled. At 15 I was going to community college. Now you might think that I am about to write about how to make it so that everyone could learn how I did and focus on how to accelerate the learning for brilliant kids. And you’d be wrong.
I have a proposal for a radical shift in how we do education in order to help bring the worst off up above a minimum threshold. The gifted will succeed regardless of the education system, but the bottom won’t. Now I am not going to be citing justifications for all the claims I make in here, but Scott Alexander has a bunch of articles that inform some of the claims I’m making.
So let’s get to it: my Radical Proposal.
K-8: Exposure Education
Many students who went through public schools recall that the same things got taught year after year, incrementally adding to what came before year by year. This is because most of what they learned was forgotten by the end of summer break. As such, I say ditch the textbooks and let’s get some exposure to the real world. How many kids have no idea what they really want to be? In my personal experience, most of them. They have notions, maybe, of something they’d like to do, but no clue what that actually looks like. Well screw that.
Let’s take classes to interact with professionals. Book learning can wait, let’s get them to see what work is like. Spend a week following plumbers, a week with carpenters. Get students into workplaces, around chemists, engineers, garbage workers, construction workers, lawyers, and politicians. There are no tests, no exams, no evaluations of the students; the goal is to watch, ask questions, and get exposed to what various jobs look like and what they do.
Now you may be asking yourself: Why? Why would we want kids to see all this stuff? The answer is quite simple: Because we live in the era of youtube and google. I no longer need to hire an expert to see how something is done, I just need to know what I’m looking for and there are two dozen videos for doing exactly what I’m talking about. Even a vague “Oh yeah, I need something called a plumb line for this” can be enough to find the exact video I need to accomplish what I’m trying to do.
Ah yes, but what about the basics: math, history, language skills, science, etc? Nuke em. Sure, practice some reading, maybe a little spelling, for a bit each day (maybe on the bus while going to whichever workplace you’re visiting today), but dedicated lessons? Nah. Remember: kids aren’t going to remember the details of any of this stuff anyway, so why force that? Math can be completely ignored until 9th grade and it will take only a year to catch up. History and Social studies? They can read about it when they want and get the rest later. None of this stuff is urgent.
So the value of this stage of education is two fold: kids get to see what work looks like and kids get to get some exposure to how to do a lot of different things. I mentioned earlier that I had thought about what made me better prepared for life as an adult and this exposure was key. While I didn’t go around watching different professionals, we did renovate my home as a kid and I got to watch that process. My grandfather taught engineering at DeVry for 45 years, and I learned a lot from him in his machine shop. We went on road trips, visited professors, and all around I got to see a lot of different kinds of work first hand. This is paying dividends 20+ years later, and I suspect that will continue for the rest of my life.
9-12: Broad Education and Apprenticeship
Now that we’ve spent ~9 years learning what work looks like in the world, across as many different jobs as possible, in every industry one can find, we begin a more formalized education. It’s still not the education we have today, but it has more of the traditional work. We start training the kids to work in the industry they liked best, which they know because… they just spent 9 years looking at it and learning what the work looks like. They learn from the professionals in that job to do the basic tasks, the stuff that anyone who is just starting out in a profession needs to know. This is paired up with math, writing, some history and other social sciences, and other general knowledge that we expect every citizen to know.
Through this process they gain real world skills: job skills in their chosen focus, basic accounting, home ec, etc. The objective of this is to prepare someone to enter adulthood as one prepared to actually be an adult. Obviously, each apprenticeship is going to vary based upon the industry or field of work, but the focus should be 60% job skills, 40% general skills. That way, upon graduation, they have proven out that any workplace can hire them as a “journeyman level” proficient worker in their field. There will still be job specific skills they need to learn on the job, but those will be just the skills for this particular workplace and not any workplace in this industry.
To pick on my own field (for familiarity’s sake) upon graduating as a electronics apprentice at grade 12 you’d be able to do things like crimp wires, solder components, use standard test equipment (oscilloscopes, multimeters, etc), read technical documents, and troubleshoot problems. You won’t have the skills to do engineering, but you will have the ability to work at any repair shop or factory and build/fix electronics.
At this point the student has a couple choices: get off the education track and enter the workforce or, if deemed capable/promising, continue into a specialization track.
13+: Specialization
This is the part that is least well defined, and that’s for multiple reasons. First: I don’t even pretend to have a notion how much education every specialization requires. I know my own industry best and even then, it’s pretty vague how much training someone needs to be a journeyman level silicon chip designer. Second: It’s going to need to be flexible to the demands of the job market. Specializations which become defunct because nobody needs more horseshoes will need to be shutdown. Third: It’s going to have a lot of offramps, where you can leave education when you’ve hit your limit or no longer desire to continue. Fourth: It’s an up or out system (this piggybacks off the previous point). Either you’re going forward towards a new more focused specialization, jumping tracks to a parallel one, or getting out.
So how do I see this working? Well leaving 12, you have the basic skills required for any job in that industry. Moving forward, you’ll be either adding brand new tools to your metaphorical toolkit, or honing your knowledge with a subset of those tools. To double back to my own profession (again, I know it best, but the principles apply widely), after becoming a journeyman technician, you then are either going to specialize into a higher skilled technician role (such as wafer handling) or move into an engineer track. This keeps on as you complete whatever stages you’re working on (from engineer you might move into computer engineering, then to CPU design). Every year or two, an opportunity to get out of the program and enter into the workforce will be available.
An important aspect of all programs is that you’ll be actually working as you complete them. The theory work you do will be backed up by actually working with those concepts in practice. The objective is that at any point, when you leave, you’ll have real world work experience in the field you’re in. Artists (writers, painters, etc) will have portfolios, Engineers will have projects and (theoretically) prototypes they can demonstrate, lawyers will have cases they’ve worked on, etc. No longer will a recent grad be trying to prove that maybe, perhaps, they might have the knowledge you need. They can demonstrate it with the work they have done.
Conclusion
Now I know that this is essentially destroying liberal arts educations… except that it’s not. There are professional historians and we still need them. It’s just not the education that everyone will be getting anymore. As the college system has grown, the shortcomings of the liberal arts style education is starting to show. Engineers are graduating without understanding wall power is 60Hz and what that looks like on an oscilloscope. Programmers graduate without being able to write fizzbang. Clearly the system is not well designed for the modern job market.
And some will say “what about the gifted? How will they get ahead?” And the answer is “They won’t.” This isn’t a system designed for the gifted. They’ll go farther than everyone else, but they won’t get there faster. But I think this is probably ok in the system I’ve laid out. The goal isn’t to focus on smarts things (that you can do in your own time), but to focus on doing things, things which just take sufficient exposure, and there are very few shortcuts. Maybe someone can suggest some improvements for the gifted, but that’s not what I’m packaging here. I’m looking at the LCDs of society and saying “We’re failing them.” My goal is to bring up the floor to a level where everyone is capable of entering society in a meaningful way which they can contribute to in the way they feel most fulfilled.
By giving children the first hand exposure to things they might want to do, they get the opportunity to find the most fulfilling ways to live the majority of their lives, instead of walking blindly into adulthood without any understanding of the options available to them should they make it far enough. Scott has written about how one of the things successful families do is produce more successful family members. One of the potential causes is seeing their family succeed. Well this wouldn’t be your family, but it’s certainly easier to imagine yourself as a particular occupation when you know they’re just as human as you are.
Aim for the stars such that, even if you miss, you’ll drift forever in the orbit of a local gravity well
-Wo’ah the Wise