To Disrupt Inequity, Disrupt Education

If everyone the world over emerged from their teens with the creativity, critical thinking ability, and emotional intelligence of a graduate from a top private school, how quickly would economies boom, inequity fade away, and the world change for the better? It can be done, rapidly and inexpensively, but the system of education stands in the way.

We cannot solve 21st century problems using 19th century processes. Yet, too often, solutions to secondary education try to do just that, especially in disadvantaged communities. They focus on trying to increase access to traditional schools where traditional subjects are taught in the traditional way by traditional teachers.?

It's a narrow perspective which can never break free into visionary disruptive strategies. The oil industry would never have invented solar power. Nor would candle makers have invented the electricity grid, nor retailers e-commerce. Traditional schooling is no longer up to the task of educating the world’s masses for tomorrow’s reality. Are there better ways to provide high quality education rapidly and economically to everyone irrespective of their location or economic status? Yes. It can be done digitally, remotely, via personal smartphones, using dynamically personalized virtual learning experiences.?

The supply chain of learning is long, inflexible, and inefficient. It is a complex collaboration among major textbook publishers, curriculum and testing providers, government bureaucrats, educational administrators, school infrastructure developers, suppliers of everything from furniture to stationery, institutions which teach teachers, schools, boards, and the teacher hierarchy itself. It is heroic to expect this machine to alter direction, let alone re-engineer itself to fit the learning needs of teenagers in a rapidly changing world.?

There are many experiences which capture the imagination and attention of teens today. The school experience is rarely one of them. Classes and textbooks are so much less compelling than streaming, social media, fantasy, music, art, sports, causes, gaming, movies, or series. We can harness the most compelling elements of some of these to make learning part of living, instead of a distraction from it. Imagine the educational impact of enlightened mobile pedagogies driven by intelligent performance management systems, combined with the stories and characters in virtual universes, gaming studios, and credible analytics processes.?

What if we could uncouple education from schools, and liberate learning content from textbooks; make learning an adventurous journey of exploration; give teens the power to influence learning processes and themes independently of teachers; replace general parochial qualifications determined by examinations, with specific global competencies defined by real-time performance analytics; let the future, not the past, determine the structure and content of curricula; evolve continuously; and use mobile digital platforms to make learning compelling, personal, affordable, and accessible to all??

Yesterday's World Is Gone Forever

Disruptive leaps require letting go of the schooling structures and dogma of the past. The arguments against disruption in education are loud and powerful, but, as in other sectors, we may not have a choice.

While we must learn from the past, we must also learn to thrive in the future. For some, particularly the elite in developed nations, tomorrow seems bright with the prospect of tech-enabled utopian lifestyles. For most, the immediate future is less comfortable. And for all of us the decades beyond are darker, with the prospect of climate change domino effects bringing flood, famine, the dislocation of potentially billions of people, and with it the probable failure of the fundamental institutions of civil society.?

In worst-case scenarios, we’re going to see many cities experience sudden population collapse, while others experience exponential population growth without a corresponding economic boom. Today’s developing world problems will mushroom tomorrow throughout the developed world. The formal, fixed-location schooling system may never be able to function again, and the negative consequences for learners may make the Covid interruptions seem trivial in comparison.?

In best-case circumstances, increasingly intelligent low-cost technology will proliferate, remote working will become the norm, and a broad-based demand for tech-enabled, personally scheduled learning will leave unenlightened schools behind.

From Status Quo To Quo Vadis?

Wherever we live and whatever the future, education will be a more vital prosperity multiplier than ever before. Yet we are content with the Model-T Ford version of it which has sustained us for more than a century. When it works, it’s a batch-process production line outputting intellectual clones to feed an employment machine which existed sixty years ago but is now gone forever. When it fails, as it often does, it’s government funded day-care with a little knowledge dissemination thrown in.

Are their exceptions? Yes – in private schools and the better public schools, education can be superb. In underfunded institutions or in poorer areas, exceptional teachers rise above the circumstances. But for the masses, the impact of the school system can never compare with what is normal for the elites.?

In much of the world, socio-economic realities cause teenagers to drop out of middle-school and high-school. That’s if they even have a school to drop out of. Or they quit vital subjects like math. Increasingly, their teachers are quitting on them. Underprivileged populations are growing faster than schools can be built or teachers trained. The resulting disadvantage keeps inequity expanding, with opportunities for affluence becoming more concentrated in the hands of a few.

Areas which have built their economies on labor-intensive industries exploiting an inexpensive low-skilled workforce are reluctant to rapidly change that dynamic. Initiatives which introduce automation, AI, or sector disruption are politically disadvantageous – unpopular with labor movements and incumbent oligopolies alike. Education policies become crystallized around maintaining the status quo.?

A senior director at the African Center for Economic Transformation was quoted as saying “With the right education and training, Africa’s youth population will provide the region with an unparalleled comparative advantage in labor.” Surely this type of framing lives in the past?

It is time to stop using education to create labor pools and employees, and to start cultivating intellect pools and entrepreneurs. This can be done almost immediately, at little cost. But it requires disrupting the traditional school-based education system. It requires letting go of the idea that education must be a batch-processing serial operation conducted face-to-face in a specific physical venue to which learners and teachers must commute.?

It also requires challenging the idea that without personally interfacing an adult teacher with a teenage learner, meaningful learning cannot occur. And it requires accepting that enjoyable learning experiences rich in fantasy and adventure can make teens fall in love with learning in a way linear textbooks cannot.

Motivation Is Everything

With adults, vastly more learning takes place outside of formal classrooms than in them. We learn mostly from peer modeling, hands-on experience, personal research, and self-study. Self-education via e-learning has been the norm for adults for more than a two decades. An adult mind is no more able to learn than a teenage mind, but adults have a major learning advantage over teens – they have the motivation to succeed in the workplace.?

In the design of most school-level e-learning experiences, leveraging everything we know about maximizing motivation and sustaining engagement is singularly lacking. Take the teacher out of the process, and you’re left with a dull, confusing, online textbook and an intimidating distant examination. For e-learning to retain engagement, its architecture must not simply replicate the teacher’s guidance, but exceed it – delivering motivation second-by-second with personal challenges and rewards.

Governments and NGO’s have a sense of urgency to provide vocational skills training to the unemployed. They want to get someone off the streets and functioning as a paid bricklayer in a matter of weeks, and they’ll invest in the training required to achieve this. They don’t feel the same urgency about teenage school-goers. They could do everything possible to turn a barely educated exam-crammer into a smart problem-solving intellect, with all the brilliant fractal career opportunities that this can spawn. Instead, they’ll let the system fail, pick up that lost learner years later, and thrust a brick into one hand and a trowel into the other.

While it is important to help find employment for the victims of a struggling education system, it is far more important to fix the problem which is the root cause of so much inequity – the education system itself.??

Reframe Education As A Prosperity Multiplier?

The framing of educational strategy must be adjusted. We should not expect national economic growth to create employment for the youth; we should expect the youth to create economic growth for the nation. And we should foster the culture and systems which empower them to do so.

To achieve this, we need massively scalable, low-cost, high-quality education to be deployed universally - within months, not within generations. Education should provide learning experiences which develop intellect, conceptual thinking, emotional intelligence, and creativity. Subjects like math are important drivers of this intellectual development when well taught, but sadly they are often taught to be remembered and regurgitated, not to be understood. And they are not used as a vehicle for stimulating a love of complex problem solving or a capacity for abstract reasoning in the world outside of the classroom.

Traditional education focuses on filling a hard drive, not on engineering a more powerful CPU. With far too many teachers believing that the brain is already fully developed by adolescence, teaching becomes about simply filling the head with facts and techniques. Yet the prefrontal cortex – the seat of emotional intelligence, creativity, problem solving and abstract reasoning – is evolving at a tremendous speed from early- to late-teens.?

Education should provide the challenges, stimulation and rewards which drive the “wiring architecture” of the prefrontal cortex to maximize its processing capacity. Failing to do so by emphasizing rote learning and test-passing is a gross dereliction of an educator’s duty, creating generations of young people who default to fight-or-flight reactions to the problems they encounter in their evolving world.??

In focusing on passing exams traditional mainstream education prioritizes memory and mimicry over raw thinking ability. This ultimately handicaps the economy, depriving it of a solution-focused young population that is bursting with innovation and entrepreneurial ambition, delivering instead a barely employable workforce schooled in yesterday's knowledge. By not gaining the capacity for critical thinking, they become vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation, which further amplifies their inequality in the world.

The subjects traditionally taught at school are not irrelevant, of course. But a siloed approach to teaching them and a rote approach to testing are unhelpful in a world which rewards broad, breakthrough thinking, not linear conformity. Elite private schools achieve this, through integrated curricula and extra-curricular activities designed to “build character” and stimulate joined-up thinking and attitudes. But it’s an expensive process available to only a few, and it is still driven by a need to excel in examinations.

Given the entrenched obstacles to transformation, how do we get enlightened, quality education to the masses at a pace and intensity which can impact economic growth almost immediately?

Self-led Learning Is A Key To The Future

The solution to education in the underprivileged world is self-led digital learning, delivered inexpensively to the learner's own mobile phone, with learning experiences designed to maintain engagement, focus, and motivation. Typical first reactions to this concept list reasons why it can't work: phones have not penetrated deeply enough; self-paced learning is not as personalized as teacher guided learning; learners don't have the discipline or passion to focus unsupervised; remote testing is fraught with opportunities to cheat.?

With rare exceptions, education authorities and NGOs reject mobile solutions which would help millions of young people because smartphones and mobile internet have not yet reached the absolute poorest of the population. Instead, they opt for traditional approaches, slowly building a few more expensive schools to help a few more lucky learners pass their exams. A new classroom and a dozen smiling learners make a great photo for an annual report. But, relative to the swelling millions of uneducated teens, it is a tragically inefficient use of funds.?

Typically, those initiatives focus on benefiting early learners, not secondary education learners. There are good foundational reasons to work on providing basic early education in the developing world. Most of those kids will never make it to high school, so a sound early education will at least prepare them a little better for life and could help the few who do get into secondary education. But just as trickle-down economics never benefited the poor, educating the few never trickles down to benefit the disadvantaged. In fact, it increases inequity.?

We do not solve the digital divide by backing away from digital advances. We solve it by building momentum, challenging the status quo, continuously improving, achieving economies of scale, and breaking through the barriers. We must make education the killer app which drives mobile penetration into even the most disadvantaged in the population and assist that penetration with policy.?

Objections Are Challenges, Not Obstacles

What of the other objections to mobile learning? The perceptions that self-paced learning is not as personalized as teacher-guided learning or that it is not captivating enough to hold learner attention, are understandable. But these perceptions come from the limited exposure teachers have had to early-generation e-learning. Most such attempts at e-learning have been created by textbook publishers or by teachers, intent on replicating their content online, rather than crafting better experiences which leverage technology's power and accommodate online attention spans.?

Covid-era online education has largely been about teachers simply porting a school timetable of classes to Zoom. There was neither the time nor the will to seize the opportunity to do it all differently. Despite amazing teachers putting huge energy into trying to make these remote classes captivating, they are still trying to fit a square peg into a newly rounded hole.?

Broadcast TV lost out to Netflix because it couldn’t get away from its framework which forced viewers to adjust their lives to TV’s schedule. Netflix allowed people to adjust their entertainment schedule to their individual lives. What if education did something similar?

Wouldn’t it be great if a learner could binge one subject for a day or two then catch up with other subjects at will? Or learn in five-minute chunks, irrespective of time or location? An individual teacher could not accomplish this live in class, or with Zoom. But with more talent and less dogma, learning experiences can be crafted which are powerful and captivating enough to hold learners’ attention and leave them wanting more.?

The objection that remote testing may be subject to cheating has no real merit, given professional security protocols. Education should not be about testing anyway, and with well-crafted data-driven e-learning, continuous real-time analytics can reveal testing for what it is - simplistic, unhelpful, unreliable, and irrelevant.

Most rejections of the mobile learning concept stem from false perceptions, bad early experiences, or limited vision. Other objections can be overcome with smart learning architecture and a fresh approach to attention retention. Investments in access infrastructure, if any, are tiny compared with the cost of building and staffing schools to keep pace with population growth.??

The biggest barriers to universal quality education tomorrow are today’s entrenched structures and systems. And the dogma which asserts that education cannot be improved or disrupted – that, unlike every other sector in the economy, education achieved its pinnacle of effectiveness, relevance, and efficiency more than a century ago. In other sectors, that kind of hubris has allowed digital disruptions to replace incumbent industries almost overnight.?

Education Policies Must Embrace New Realities

Educators who really care about the future – however brilliant or dystopian it may be – will embrace emergent opportunities for radical improvements, or risk falling victim to them.?

Understandably, there is fear among teachers (and schools) that they may be replaced by technology. This fear is usually voiced as criticism of the effectiveness of e-learning, and assertions that the human interface is an indispensable element in creating a rounded young person. This is fair comment where a teacher’s job is not just to teach, but to take on the character-building and socialization role of a parent.?

Digital learning experiences can substitute for teachers and will do so where teachers are not available. But they should not make teachers universally redundant. In fact, well architected, digital tools can provide opportunities for caring teachers to touch the lives of many more learners in more profound ways. The recent explosive growth of simple online tutoring platforms clearly shows the value of one-on-one remote teaching, and has helped millions of learners around the world, while supplementing the incomes of teachers everywhere.

Still, teachers are leaving the profession in unprecedented numbers, driven away by growing political and social interference and by unattractive working conditions or poor pay. Home-schooling is booming. Education costs have spiraled upward. Corporations are no longer requiring recruits to have degrees. College and university registrations are declining.?

The cracks in the ice of education are growing, even at the privileged end of the spectrum. Yet policy makers still think of education as being about educators, not learners. Even the recent publication by the UK Department for Education (Future Opportunities for Education Technologies in England, June 2022) barely mentions learners’ needs, defining e-learning in terms of systems for schools and tools for teachers. Not a single learner was surveyed in the study.?

The ‘customers’ of education are not schools, teachers, parents, or even employers – they are the learners who must thrive in their own future. A continued failure to care about customer experience is what led to the digital disruption of companies, institutions, and entire sectors elsewhere in the world economy. It can and will happen in education.

Strategies for the future of education should not be focused on educators or institutions, or how they might be modernized. The 21st century strategy should focus instead on learners, and how – in an exponentially changing environment – they can best master the competencies and independent thinking required to create a world in which prosperity proliferates.

Godfrey Parkin is a co-founder of MindZu, which aims to become the Disney of education. Their first product, accessed via a learner’s phone, makes learning middle- and high-school math an adventurous mission in a virtual world.