Mental Mutilation, Part 2: Innovation Imprisoned

The force that has allowed our educational system to deteriorate to its current condition is simple: incentive.

Books like Freakonomics share the obvious revelation that humans do nothing without incentive. Incentive is the fuel that drives all human activity, from our careers to our diets to our sexuality. Incentive is the motive power behind every human system at every level of complexity.

In the case of American education, this motive force isn’t hitched to anything that might benefit our children. Because the overwhelming bulk of our schools are funded through government taxation that has no chance of disappearing, no incentive exists for schools to innovate and improve. Want proof? Examine literally every other industry’s history since 1907. Small grocers have given way to Wal-Mart super centers and distribution hubs wired together by incredibly complex computer software programs that manage logistics without human intervention. Automobiles have gone from slow, rickety buggies to blazing hulks of shiny, sexy metal. Entertainment has quantum leaped from live performance to motion pictures to home televisions to interactive games.

Literally any industry you can conceive of has reinvented itself hundreds of times in a hundred years and barely resembles its atavistic forms.

Yet, in 1907 education consisted of crowding a group of young children into a room. They all learned the same things together. They all enjoyed a yearly progression from one stage to the next.

Does this sound nauseatingly familiar?

Yet how does this stasis occur? What factors allowed its creation and conspired to preserve its existence?

In the other examples I cited, incentives existed for pioneers to do things differently. Fortunes were won on the backs of good ideas. Filo T. Farnsworth, Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, Henry Ford, to barely begin a list, these men had the vision for a new world unshackled from the constraints that they knew were unnecessary. Part of what drove them was the power of their ability to imagine big solutions to big problems. The rest was incentive — the knowledge that they would be rewarded for their insights.

Because K-12 education is jailed within the constraints of all levels of bureaucracy, no such rewards exist for its innovators. Moreover, even the most altruistic of innovators will find no toehold in the mirror-smooth, impermeable surface of the government monolith that stands between themselves and the future of education.

Mental Mutilation: The Mediocrity of K-12

I think a lot about education. This is probably to be expected, as I’ve made the beginnings of my career in higher ed. I’m surrounded by colleagues who are passionately dedicated to making learning better and the discussions I overhear can get pretty heated.

Yet, this isn’t anything new. I’ve spent a lifetime thinking about education.

When I was a boy, I hated school. Not because I didn’t respect the power of learning. I hated it because I desperately wanted to absorb every piece of human knowledge and schools were designed for some dull purpose entirely unrelated to that pursuit.

Sure, there was a bit of learning that happened occasionally. But the greater purpose of public education, as I view it in retrospect, seems to be more focused on the homogenization of young minds than in equipping them for a lifetime of growth.

In the United States, education forces our children along rigid, non-customized paths for at least six years of early life. Regardless of your talents or interests, you spend all of your time learning the exact same things as your peers.  Think of this — six formative years, a tremendous span of opportunity, and it is squandered on one-size-fits-all busywork and enforcement of “color within the lines” thinking.

It misses the point that out-of-school activity gives these students the opportunity to diversify their lives in the few scraps of hours between their daily internment and dinner at home. The trouble is that school is a significant chunk of their waking lives and it is very likely to be time mostly wasted.

Would-be reformers of education share my fury at this reality . Yet I don’t hear much conversation surrounding the overall cause. That’s what I’ll talk about next.