Tags
Christensen, Disruption, future, Higher Education, Knowledge, Online Learning, Resilience, Robustness, Technology, wisdom
Futurists, scholars and entrepreneurs seem to agree: the higher education establishment will be disrupted in the near future. Thomas Frey foretells the collapse of over 50% of colleges by 2030 while Clay Christensen proposes higher education to be just on the edge of the crevasse. The culprit responsible for the disruption in their view? Technology, or more precisely the increasing availability of online learning to which Michael Saylor would add the proliferation of mobile devices.
My view? There is more to the story than technological disruption. To understand such subtleties, one has to look at the underlying philosophy of education.
As knowledge is fast becoming a commodity, the very business model of traditional education, that of conveying knowledge, will be disrupted. Let me elaborate. I would argue that the traditional model of education was predicated on a robust philosophy. Knowledge was conveyed to the student in the form of recipes applicable to a variety of possible scenarios or situations likely to be encountered in the real world. At the end of the learning experience the student would be in the possession of a catalog of playbooks if you will. And so, at this time, our colleges and universities are still churning out a workforce capable of robustly adressing typical challenges. But what about Nassim Taleb’s Black Swans?
As the world is moving from the knowledge to what Daniel Pink calls the “conceptual economy”, the traditional model of education is at risk. Knowledge is not only becoming abundant and easily accessible, but the “standard” scenarios and situations required by recipes are an endangered species. There are no repeatable scenarios in a complex, causality-blurred world, so why would one invest in recipe solutions? Assuming you agree with me so far, the pragmatist in you might ask about the alternative.
I believe there is such an alternative predicated on a radically different educational philosophy: resilience. If the robust model focused on knowledge itself, an educational model predicated on a resilience mindset would focus on building the capacity or wisdom if you like for evaluating knowledge. Since knowledge is becoming a commodity and since the abundance of recipes guarantees there are conceptual inconsistencies and overlaps, I believe tomorrow’s professionals will pay to learn ways to navigate the fluid knowledge landscape. Skills for making sense of problem ontologies will be more valuable to tomorrow’s student than understanding the specifics of a particular case study. And so, I think we need to teach our future leaders the art of situated knowledge, or knowledge about knowledge, or meta-knowledge.
The mental shift required for accepting this new paradigm will be difficult for educators and students alike. After all, it’s easier for educators to test the accumulation of knowledge than wisdom, and students get that warm, fuzzy, confidence reassuring feeling that comes with the ability to repeat a freshly assimilated trick – recipes are finite while sense-making is a never-ending work in progress. The resilience model is much fuzzier when it comes to both validation and satisfaction. But resilience works in the face of complexity, while robustness and recipes don’t – remember, scenarios don’t repeat! As the Godfather character in the movie with the same name might say, this isn’t personal, it’s just where the future is going. Higher education can either keep up or erode itself. And what about technology? I believe it can have an accelerating effect, but I don’t believe it will be the decisive factor. The establishment could cede the robustness model to technology and successfully make the transition to the resilience model.
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The art and science of the possible 
No repeatable scenarios??? No scenario has EVER been repeatable…we can mimic, but thus far not repeat.
That said, we live in a universe that is constantly seeking balance as entropy threatens to shred it apart. As our world becomes ever more complex, we utilize increasing repetition in order to compensate for the chaos created by that complexity…i.e…balance. It’s our improving ability at accurate repetition that allows for and balances the increased complexity. We repeat more, not less. We now have 100s of majors and 1000s of “concentrations” created to educate a world full of highly specialized individuals, each doing their specific, extremely repetive task.
If you are in essence saying that the task of our higher education system in the future should be to distribute the knowledge to gain knowledge (or perhaps wisdom or a foundation for learning), then perhaps you should be looking backwards instead of forwards. Several generations ago, that is exactly what our ENTIRE educational system sought. Even higher education had a cirriculum that was far more general, simple and well-rounded. Unfortunately, the more our society learns, the more we feel we must cram into our skulls.
The problems experienced by our educational system may be that we are trying to incorporate an overwhelming number of specialties into a system built for a generalized education. Its design is too inefficient for that. I believe, much like you do, that technology is a key factor, but not as a stimulous so much as the only sustainable method for managing the abundance of specialized requirements and information.
I believe the “higher education” system as we know it is on the verge of near obsolesence, not simply change. For future generations to be successful, we need to create a “lower” education system (K-12) that is focused on teaching people how to gain knowledge. It should be based on the different ways individuals’ minds function as opposed to simply disseminating specific information about specific topics…i.e…recipes. I also believe it would take less time to effectively create this foundation than our current system requires to input “recipes”, thus reducing the strain on our limited public resources. With a solid foundation for learning and gathering knowledge, continued education could be flexible and relative to the specialized abilities of the individual and needs of society.
Jeanne, thanks for your comment and apologize for the delayed response. So in essence, we agree?
Same conclusion…different journey perhaps???
But I do think there is a viable way to make this type of change palatable to students, parents and educators. Testing the accumulation of knowledge gives legitimacy to our efforts and that feeling of legitimacy is essential in keeping us focused and motivated. If you look at the ultimate goal of education as a “strong foundation of skills for creating a satisfied, productive employee or member of society”, then logic would have it that educational test results should coincide very closely with the performance of the “student” throughout their lifetime. Unfortunately (to my knowledge at least) that comparison is rarely, if ever, made. But as evident by the controversy that surrounds our standardized tests and the indifference of many employers regarding test scores and college GPAs, it is becoming increasingly apparent that we as a society, feel those test results are not very indicative of future success.
All of that said, perhaps the most effectively way to start the process of change is by creating legitimate means of continued testing throughout our lives and making comparisons against an individual’s past test results. This should also include the economic & social well-being of our society as a whole and include generational breakdowns to monitor changes over time. A comparison of this type would reveal whether or not we are actually achieving the ultimate goal of education as a “strong foundation of skills” required to improve our society. My guess is that this comparison is avoided because the answer would highlight the illegitimacy of our current system. And who is most likely to run this comparison but the very educational facilities that would suffer from that discovery. But as of this moment, that is only my speculation. From a bird’s eye view, there would probably be a general correlation of higher test scores with better employee performance reviews, but it would be loose and start to deteriorate as you focused in on individuals and added factors such as emotional well-being and community involvement.
For example, for our current method of testing to be considered a legitimate reflection of performance, the above mentioned comparison would show that a consistently “Straight A” student consistently scores 5.0/5.0 on employee performance reviews, habitually votes based on a superior knowledge of the political environment and takes part in other community activities as well as enjoys an overall sense of emotional well-being…after all, tests show they’ve mastered the necessary skills to the highest level possible. The opposite would be true for the “D” student. So, how often is this the case? I’d venture a guess of rarely, but once again…that’s a guess based on my experience.
Now imagine how telling it would be to demonstrate without a doubt that the very thing many cling to as evidence of the effectiveness of our current system (i.e…standardized testing) is no more accurate than last month’s horoscope? I believe humans are stubborn towards change because change takes effort and a reduction of ego, not because humans are innately ignorant. We want to know our efforts are worthwhile. If you believe change is necessary (or possibly inevitable), don’t start by telling them how successful an alternative could be, start by showing them how UNSUCCESSFUL the status quo is. Ego is removed and change then becomes their choice. The next thought on everyone’s mind will be, “So show us who is “successful” and what makes them that way.” We already know the answer is, “The ones that know how to learn and have had the opportunity to choose what they learn.” Proving that is the easy part…there’s examples of it everywhere.
Just came across this quote from Einstein which I think pretty much summarizes my post: “education is not the learning of facts, but the training of the mind to think”. As to your point about the ineffectiveness of test scores, it seems we are testing the accumulation of facts which are must more volatile in a complex society than the ability to think. But as of yet it seems our systems cannot test for the “thinking” criteria. We simple can’t measure imagination, passion and purpose. We know it when we see it but that’s pretty much it.