If you visit any college campus in the country and find a sign on a classroom door that says “Classes cancelled for today”, the almost universal reaction by the students reading the sign will be pleasure, not frustration or anger. Let’s go through that again. The customer (the student who is paying for an education, at least in theory) finds a note that the business (in the form of his professor) has announced that student is getting less of what was paid for, and reacts with pleasure. See how that works out at a restaurant, hardware store, or just about any other business. The customer would be irate and angry! Why is education different?
When I was a student in law school, which I attended a decade later in life than most my fellow students, I intended to be self-employed after law school. So, as my own future employer, the degree I was working towards, while necessary, was not a mostly blind indicator of an education for some future employer. I knew what I was learning and cared a lot, at least in some of my classes. In those, I asked more questions that any of my classmates, trying to squeeze out every bit of knowledge and nuance I could get. I was that rare customer in education who was trying to get as much as he could for his money. Why only some of my classes? Well, I had some idea (mostly wrong as it turned out) about what area of law I wanted to practice, and some very clearly defined ideas about areas where I never wanted to practice (mostly right there, so far at least). In the less relevant classes, I was just trying to get through with a decent grade, and learning was mostly incidental. In those where I was interested, it was education as it is idealized to be: a student working hard to learn as much as possible from the instructor. I probably don’t have to tell you I was in the minority. To see why, let’s take it back to a more primitive setting.
After becoming an attorney like myself, my wife found her calling in life as a high school teacher. I don’t pretend to understand it at all, and it is certainly not my calling, though I admire her for it. Thanks to her sharing her life with me, I don’t have to dredge quite so far back in memory to think about high school. The role of customer and service provider are even more distorted here, since the students don’t have a choice about attending and their payment is so indirect and such as it is, compulsory, in the form of property taxes and other taxes paid by their parents, that any customer-business relationship doesn’t enter the mind.
Since very few teenagers have a clue about what they want in life, and since even for a lot of those, they can’t see any link between many of their classes and what they want to do, the education just seems like a forced servitude that doesn’t have any value. For the lucky ones, they have a family culture and involved parents that help them see the value, or at least, push them to try and excel even when they don’t. Still, one of the most common questions students ask is “Why do I need to know this?” Frankly, it is often a hard question for teachers to answer, not least because quite often, the answer may be that they really don’t and the information being taught may never be relevant to their lives. My wife used to teach British literature and among other things, they read Beowulf. For whatever reasons, and I do remember this from my own high school education, the version in most textbooks is in Middle English. Beowulf was actually written in Old English, so this is a translation from completely incomprehensible to just mostly incomprehensible. This still makes no sense to me. My wife worked very hard to make her subject relevant, timely and interesting, but Beowulf was a real challenge, even for her.
For a great many students, a lot of their education is perceived as not relevant, and the reality is that a lot of it is not ever going to be relevant. I am not going to argue that a good, solid, well rounded education doesn’t make for a better citizen. I think it is critical, but I am not sure we are achieving it with our current educational institutions. How do we move forward towards something better?
First, it doesn’t work well to put learning and evaluation in the same institution. The IT industry, and some of the trade industries have figured it out. The demand for programmers was so high that the industry cared more about ability than about credentials. This evolved into various certifications, by several institutions which offer very rigorous tests to demonstrate competence. Some people study on their own and some people take courses to learn what they need before taking the tests. Some of these courses are independent and some are in traditional institutions. The students in these courses care about learning because they need to pass the certification and if they are getting the certification, they probably have a focus on that area, which means they are trying to learn for a reason. Separating the evaluation, the testing, from the education allows for flexibility in how people learn and makes the students true customers in their education choices.
Second, degrees are too overarching. Most people do better with discrete staged goals. The IT industry does this very well by having certification levels from basic to very advanced, with the advanced ones being very specific. Notably, these go hand in hand with work experience. Most people who are getting the advanced certifications are already working in the industry and are looking to up their game or be able to work in a higher paying specialty area. Probably no one in these classes is asking “Why do I need to know this?”
Third, as a society, even as many more people have gotten advanced education, and people live longer than ever before, we have continued to front-load almost all of our education to the period of our lives before our careers. As humans, we are wired to learn because we need to. For the vast majority of people, learning in the abstract, for an undefined future where it might be relevant, is not very successful. That means our educational institutions are inefficient. We are taking years to teach what motivated interested students could learn in a much shorter time. We are also wasting a lot of student’s time with things they don’t care about and may never use. We would be better off, as a society, if we allowed our young people a place in the workforce earlier, and also encouraged focused educational opportunities all through life.
We do have educational institutions, even at the high school level, who are moving in this direction, with high schools offering focused vocational classes in all sorts of areas. We also have a host of certifications that can be obtained in all sorts of areas.
