Homework Wars Revisited: Thoughts on LUMA’s System of Innovation and the Future of Education

Recently, in the midst of trying to get my middle-school aged son to do his homework, Owen tossed his pencil aside, got a seriously inquisitive look on his face, and asked me, “Daddy, why do I spend my whole life in school learning answers to things I can easily find on Google?” Both because of how he asked the question and because of the way he generally thinks, I quickly determined that we had likely transitioned from a fight about homework to the beginning of a much more interesting project. No longer merely completing a school assignment, we were suddenly enmeshed in a conversation about the point of homework and, even more fundamentally, the point of learning itself.

To be fair, the question was at least partially a stalling tactic. My son knows me well enough to realize that I am hard pressed to walk away from such a goading question. He had knowingly set the trap, and was eagerly waiting for me to take the bait, all the while hoping for a more interesting reprieve from the task at hand. Partly because I am a sucker for this kind of question and partly because I was also sick of his homework assignment, I made a calculated decision to indulge this potentially teachable moment and waded into the abyss with Owen.

Into the Abyss

I knew that I was wading into the abyss for two reasons. First, having lived with Owen for nearly a decade and a half, I know him to be unusually skilled at quickly poking holes in answers that others might consider unassailable. Owen’s longstanding penchant for such questioning was highlighted during a recent conversation I held with someone from his elementary school. During that conversation I was told that Owen’s first question to this school official was, “Mr. So-and-So, have you ever read Plato?” Owen was in third grade at the time. And, yes, Owen had read more than a handful of Plato’s dialogues by this point. So, both intuitively and through practice, my son understands the art of dialectic and much prefers it to almost any homework assignment.

The second reason I knew we were wading into an abyss was because I was all too aware that just below the surface of Owen’s initial question was a series of other more insidious concerns about the nature of education itself. I strongly suspected (and quickly confirmed) that part of what Owen was asking was why the content and form of his education often seemed so different from many of the more exciting and progressive aspects of the world around him. I knew that part of Owen’s struggle centered around frustrations about the fact that education often felt increasingly out of step with his broader experience. And, based on previous conversations surrounding the same topic, I knew that Owen was trying to understand why education often seemed so ill-suited to address practical questions and problems, even as his world was teeming with innovation and creativity. Knowing that such matters were part of what was animating Owen’s initial frustrated inquiry, and aware that I shared similar questions, I clearly saw the abyss ahead, even as we boldly trudged forward. 

Education Matters

I began by reminding Owen that he needed to understand what he was learning so that he could continue to master more advanced skills that would eventually help him contribute to a complex exchange of goods and services. We also considered a variant of this argument, talking about the fact that we need to be able to learn so we can control the world around us. Coming at the issue from another angle, we spent time talking about the value inherent in developing dispositions and ways of seeing the world—things that are acquired particularly well by engaging in the process of learning. For some time Owen and I rehearsed each of these options, probing their relative strengths and weaknesses, trying to see what we could build upon and what should be discarded.

After spending some time considering these arguments in turn, we got to the place where we often arrive after such a conversation. “Daddy,” Owen asked, “So what do you think about all of this?” Hesitant to deliver an answer that would give the appearance of settling the matter, I instead explained to Owen that he was born into a peculiar and wonderful time of tremendous transition where lots of really smart people are no longer entirely sure how to answer questions that, for a long time, we thought we knew the answers to. We talked about Jean-Fran?ois Lyotard and changing views of what kind of knowledge is considered valuable. We discussed John Dewey and the democratization function of education. And we kicked around Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and the important role that education can play in creating more just societies. Each of these, in their own way, helped to explain why education is important and how it can shape the world in which we live. And, at least to some degree, this line of inquiry helped Owen to appreciate why it was important to move beyond the mere acquisition of facts via a Google search, coming instead to a place of more circumspect deliberation and reflection.

Satisfied but also Troubled

As I left the conversation with Owen, I found myself simultaneously satisfied by what we had accomplished and yet also a bit troubled by the way the conversation proceeded. On the one hand, I was satisfied that we had interrogated the virtues of education from various vantage points. On the other hand, I was a bit troubled because in the process of addressing Owen’s initial question I ended up ignoring some of the more fundamental concerns at the heart of his inquiry. Whereas Owen’s primary concern was to consider why education often seems out of touch with the rest of his experience, we instead ended up talking mostly about the broader matter of why education was important. Now, to be fair, by interrogating education’s importance, Owen and I actually were developing a tacit argument about the relevance of education for his life and experience, even in those instances where the form of such education feels at odds with real life.

Part of what I was trying to get Owen to realize is that education is intrinsically valuable and is therefore also intrinsically relevant even if that relevance is not immediately recognizable. I believe this to be true and certainly want Owen to internalize the understanding that education has intrinsic value for humankind. Even so, I still left the conversation knowing that I had failed to offer the kind of rich answer I would have liked to have provided for Owen. For all the merits of our conversation, I was nevertheless unsuccessful in addressing Owen’s question head on, and instead enacted a subtle form of violence against his line of inquiry in order to ensure that we were talking about a question that I felt better prepared to answer. Ironically, when making the translation from Owen’s version of the question to my own, I was, in essence, rehearsing the kind of abstraction and artificializing of education that Owen so clearly and often sensed as a student.

Discovering LUMA's System of Innovation

In my experience, life has a way of circling back on itself, providing ongoing opportunities to refine and reframe one’s views and the answers that accompany such views. So, perhaps it should not be surprising that a couple weeks later I found myself taking part in a workshop that, in its own way, was concerned to answer some of the very same questions that were of such interest to Owen. The workshop was called Fundamentals of Innovation through Human-Centered Design and was offered by LUMA Institute, a company founded with the purpose of teaching people and organizations to become more innovative creators of solutions to real-world problems. As the title of the workshop suggests, The LUMA System of Innovation grows out of a school of thought known as Human-Centered Design. Although I had not been previously exposed to this mode of inquiry, fundamental tenets of Design Thinking are prevalent throughout much of contemporary academic discourse. At the heart of Design Thinking is an assumption that innovation can and should be a powerful tool for addressing the needs of people. Added to this is the conviction that innovation can be both taught and encouraged among individuals willing to adopt and practice such skills. Perhaps most of all, Design Thinking proceeds from the belief that the most powerful innovations and the most useful solutions arise when innovation is accomplished in conversation with those who are most in need of change.

In offering a system that encourages human innovation, LUMA looks to historic thought patterns and practices that they have strategically cast in a new light. The result is a three-pronged approach to innovation that LUMA captures under the headings of “Looking, Understanding, and Making.” As an academic trained widely in the humanities, it was easy enough to see that what LUMA called “Looking” was what scholars have generally understood as the domain of observational research. What LUMA calls “Understanding” is roughly equivalent to those areas of academic inquiry concerned with meaning making such as hermeneutics, interpretation, or analysis. And “Making,” as one might suspect, concerns the process whereby one moves from ideation to creation, from concept to prototype. At first glance, one might think that LUMA has simply given new names to existing practices in an attempt to make them more approachable to the layperson. While they have certainly accomplished this throughout their system, they have done so in a manner that simultaneously highlights how and why such practices should be appreciated and embraced by anyone seeking to develop innovative solutions to complex problems. Rather than merely talking differently about the same old thing, the LUMA System of Innovation speaks in a more direct and motivated way to a specific audience, reframing tired and antiquated ways of speaking about really important things in a way that self-consciously demonstrates their relevance for the present.

During the two days I spent learning afresh about innovation, it became very apparent that LUMA has figured out an elegant and modular way of packaging and teaching time-tested thought patterns in a fashion that is serviceable and attractive for creating innovation in numerous professional contexts. To put the matter just a bit differently, it became increasingly obvious to me that LUMA Institute takes Owen’s concerns about education seriously, recognizing that a form of education that cannot rise to the level of our most intractable problems is not much of a solution. And yet, LUMA Institute also recognizes what I was struggling to articulate, namely that the answers to many of our most substantial design challenges will emerge only if and as we contend carefully with time-honored patterns of observing, interpreting, and creating. In this way, LUMA had accomplished what I was not able to do very well in my conversation with Owen—honoring the past and its rich heritage while simultaneously contending in substantive ways with the challenges of the present.

Owen's Question: Take Two

As I walked away from LUMA Institute’s workshop on the Fundamentals of Innovation through Human-Centered Design, I found that I was able to articulate my response to Owen’s question in a way that felt more responsible, honest, and satisfying to me. What LUMA helped me to see is a relatively simple but profoundly powerful truth: the problem facing contemporary education is not primarily a content problem; it is primarily a packaging problem. In all its diverse forms, throughout history and in varied contexts, the substance of excellent education remains relatively constant. Excellent education, in whatever form or context, is always a process that guides others in learning new ways of seeing, in creating understanding, and in developing facility in designing things that contribute meaningfully to the world around them. LUMA Institute clearly understands the need to recapture the richness of our intellectual past while deftly repackaging such richness in a way that aligns with the interests and needs of the present. And this, of course, is what excellent education should always strive to accomplish, regardless of the context.

Far too often, contemporary critiques of education confuse legitimate concerns about the implementation of educational practices with unfounded criticism of the historic substance of education itself. By doing so, when thinking about a question like Owen proposed to me, it becomes easy to buy into alarmist narratives suggesting that we need a radical reformulation of most every aspect of teaching and learning. Persuaded by this line of thinking, many of today’s students often assume that education is (or should be) radically different than it was in the past, that our interconnected and technological world necessitates a paradigmatic shift in both the form and content of what it means to become educated. While there is undoubtedly some measure of truth at the heart of this way of thinking, I am convinced that an uncritical adoption of such reasoning is generating significant harm to the very institutions that such insight sets out to rehabilitate. In its most insidious form, this kind of thinking has produced a capitulation to a market driven popularization of curriculum that, while temporarily attracting students, all too often fails to produce meaningful and enduring results. What starts out as an exercise in legitimate criticism and self-reflection quickly generates conditions that rob education of its most precious and beneficial resources.

Don’t get me wrong. I agree that there are lots of legitimate criticisms that can be offered about the current state of education at nearly every level. We live in a time of rapid and disruptive change and many of our historic institutions are straining under the weight of such forces. As a society, it is not only important but absolutely necessary that we ask hard and honest questions about how we educate our citizenry. This is, I would argue, both a deeply practical and a profoundly moral matter. Failure to be introspective, principled, and strategic places nothing less than the future vitality of society at risk. And so we must be critical and deliberate to scrutinize anemic educational practices that limit one’s ability to observe, interpret, and create outcomes that benefit society. But, in the process we must be careful not to dismiss too quickly the rich resources that are at our disposal, all the while responsibly repackaging such resources appropriately for our present context. What my time at LUMA Institute helped make clear is that what will ultimately satisfy Owen is an honest and creative appropriation of the past in a way that is both useful and responsive to the present.

“Everything old is new again!” This sentiment must be at the heart of creating any truly innovative and relevant approach to education. It was this truth that Owen and LUMA Institute helped me to see afresh. And it is with this understanding that I trudge onward, as a parent, an educator and as an engaged citizen, seeking to move forward by continually honoring the past, all the while hoping to pave the way for a better and brighter future. ______________________________________________________________________

Suggested Reading and Viewing

Innovating for People: Handbook of Human-Centered Design Methods

The LUMA System of Innovation

A Taxonomy of Innovation