Education Is Horked – Part 1

From the Urban Dictionary:
Horked – To be out of whack, to be completely unworkable

I have been planning to write a series on the changing landscape of education for quite some time. It is perhaps the thing I think about more than any other as I raise my kids, as the decisions we make about how to educate them will have multi-generational effects, either positive or negative.

Some of the things I hope to cover in this series are my own observations, and some are certainly the observations of those whom I have spent time reading. There are those that are focused squarely on how technology can help to change the landscape ( see Startl’s Design Boost as a for instance ). I tend to think of the “what” rather than the “how”, as I believe you cannot solve them in reverse order, and I think the “what” is fundamentally broken.

It is my thesis that education as we have known it for the last 100 years is on the precipice of coming to an end. There are several reasons why I believe this:
  • Classes and curriculum have remained largely unchanged in my lifetime, while the world around it has changed at a dizzying pace. High school students today take very much the same classes I did, with the exception of computer classes thrown in here and there. In some cases, the classes are even more limited with the cuts in the arts and other programs.
  • Current curriculum in most every school, public or private, is a product of the industrial revolution. It is geared toward educating someone in order that they can find a “real job.” This is not a new thought or idea, but after reading extensively on the subject, it is certainly true.
  • The definition of a “real job” has changed radically in the last ten years. There are people making a living today doing things that would not have been possible up to now.
  • The need for a college education ( in the traditional sense of going off for four years to find yourself and your career) will be no more within the upcoming ten to twenty years. It will be replaced with continuing education that refines and sharpens particular skills. People will be able to explore their passion more deeply and widely than at any time in history, and will not need the stamp of a traditional four-year degree in order to become “successful.”
  • The definition of success is going to change. Success will be more about living where you want, and doing the thing that matters most to you, rather than living in a suburb and commuting an hour each way to be a cog in a machine, get three weeks off a year, and live for the weekends. You simply will not be able to compete if that is your mindset.
  • The cost of living the way we live today will become too expensive as oil and other natural resources become harder to produce.
  • The ability to adapt and change quickly is not a part of the education establishment. Just as it is important at the individual level, so it is with the major societal institutions. Schools that cling to heavily entrenched ways of operation to protect the status quo will become obsolete.
  • Education has become democratized. We have more power today to decide exactly how to educate our kids than any generation in history. There is virtually no limit to their ability to find and learn about things that interest them.
  • Higher education in particular is undergoing seismic shifts as endowments fall, students opt for more affordable alternatives, and the price of spending four of your most productive years swilling beer and going crazy continues to climb. This cost is measured not only in tuition, but also in the opportunity cost of not getting into what you love sooner rather than later.
In future posts, I will be discussing where I think education is headed at each level, how I have chosen to proceed down the path of educating my kids, and hopefully foster some lively debate about how we change the thinking of what really matters in this most important field.
I also hope to have several influential thought leaders engage in the process as we go.
Is education something you think about? If so, what do you think about my thesis above?