Education Porn
I’m working on a book based on a essay I wrote a while back called Achievement Porn. A section of that book is devoted to the state of our education system, and so I jumped at the opportunity for a short presentation at an Education Technology conference here in Austin. I recorded the talk, and provided the transcript below. What do you think?
Education Porn Transcript
Let’s talk about porn. Not the kinky teacher fantasy, but more like the pathetic, emotionally vacant reality of porn.
Porn is a gratuitously detailed, hyper focused simulation of whatever it represents. It’s been distilled and refined, taken out of its natural context and fed into your brain as an industrial grade replacement for the real thing.
Potent, but meaningless.
Ok, Education. Here’s my point: our education system is porn.
“Wait a minute, I learned things in school!” Yeah, so did I, and I bet you learned a thing or two from Playboy or Romance Novels as well. But it’s still porn. It’s still exaggerated, unrealistic, and gratuitous. It’s still totally devoid of context.
Our education system is a simulation of learning.
We don’t waste time on things like financial skills for high schoolers. We use drill and kill to teach math that no one remembers after the exam, hell most students don’t remember for the exam.
How many people here took biology in high school or college? How many people can explain what adenosine triphosphate is and how it works? Of course not, ATP is fundamental to our biology, but it was taught in an artificial way, stripped of context.
Let me ask you this: why is it that when a student takes years of a foreign language in high school, everyone immediately understands that they don’t really speak the language, but when I tell people I spent 2 years in Mexico, they immediately assume I must be fluent in Spanish? It’s because no one who takes a language in high school can actually speak it, and it’s because the vast majority of people who spend more than a couple months immersed in a foreign culture CAN speak the language. Why? Because they care about it, it’s relevant, useful, it has context.
Instead, we are going through the motions, crudely simulating learning, intensifying it by isolating it, shoveling it into our brains, and then speeding ahead only to forget everything once the test is over. This is not education. It’s masturbation.
You might think that the solution to this issue depends on your point of view. There are those who believe a liberal arts education edifies us on a human level that transcends economic utility, and those who believe education is an investment of time and liquid capital that damn well better show returns. I don’t care about that debate because I think they are both right. I think there’s value in both points of view, but it doesn’t matter, because we as a society have failed on both fronts.
Just like any destructive addiction, education has a rock bottom. For education, rock bottom is a starbucks barista with a master’s degree in bullshit. She’s not leading a life of mind, nor is she employable beyond her basic social and cappuccino making skills. And she is legion.
This is a problem, and as technology plucks away more and more low hanging employment fruit, our education system is going to have to step up and produce students that are more brilliant, more creative, more engaged than ever before.
The good news is that the same technology that’s plucking jobs, can also be used to create them, and to create the people who will fill them.
Like many tech people, I am self taught. Geeks like me are lucky because the tools to learn are readily available for us. I wanted to build a complicated web site when I was a kid, and all I had to do was start, with a push in the right direction, and all the world’s information at my fingertips. I want to live in a world where a girl who loves building things outside, or a boy who loves making money has the same kinds of opportunities I had as a young geek. I want them to have mentorship and a world of information available to them, so they can learn on their own, what it takes to make their vision a reality.
And listen, I’m not going to presume to know the answers are. My goal is to get everyone asking the right questions. How do we use internet technology and internet culture to bring context back to what our children learn? How do we harness the natural power of unlimited information and instruction at a massive scale to inspire our children and young adults to be curious, informed, productive, and complete human beings. That’s the question our society needs to answer, and that’s the question I leave you with tonight.