What will it take to revitalize education?
Some ideas on how we could experiment our way forward in education
Eleven of us crowded around the child sized laminate table. We all fidgeted in seats designed for an eight year old.
“We all know how he’s doing in class,” I said to no one in particular. My patience wore thin from the last half hour of talking around the issue at hand, and my voice showed it. “But my son is only seven and already he hates learning.”
His teacher, a young blond girl only a few years into the job, looked hurt. “I don’t see that,” she said. “He’s just as engaged as most of the other boys. No one comes in to second grade loving to learn these days. He doesn’t complete his work, but he’s doing just fine.”
As she spoke, I stole glances around the room. Everyone looked at the ceiling, or the floor, or the projector, or out the window. No one showed any reaction. No one looked me in the eyes.
“But I know my boy. I know how his brown eyes light up when he makes a new connection or finds some new pattern. I know the boy who told me every SuperKids story for days on end because he loved learning the letters. That was only a year and a half ago. This can’t be normal. What can we do to re-engage him?”
“From what I know of him,” his therapist interjected, trying to ease the tension.
“Please don’t,” I cut her off. “I’d like to talk about the heart of the issue.”
No one spoke. For one second, two, five,
Then the principal, staring a hole through the white laminate table, spoke up. “The children who are going to be successful in school are often the ones who learn to do things they don’t want to do. He’ll need to figure that out sooner than later.”
Ten minutes later, I walked out of the building with my head hung low. A tear rolled down my cheek. As we got into the car, I quietly told my wife, “I’m done.”
It turns out, I wasn’t done yet.
We used to believe in education. We believed education would pull people out of poverty, free them from ignorance, and help them flourish. We believed education was more than simply training for a job; it was the moral and ethical development that our children deserved. At one time, we even thought education was the foundation for our republic.
I want to believe in these goals again. I want to believe that it’s possible to “nurture the growth of human talent in the service of human freedom.” I can’t help believing the pursuit is still worthwhile. If only our education system still believed it.
In a world where AGI may or may not be quickly approaching, where schools no longer prepare our children to pursue meaningful lives, and where mental health issues like depression and anxiety are at all time highs, traditional schooling no longer meets our needs.
What will jobs look like in the future? What skills will our children need to successfully navigate the world? How can we help our children to not just survive, but flourish in a world of constant technological change?
These are the questions that keep me up at night. If you’re a parent, I’ll bet they keep you up at night too.
Education can be the answer once again. But not as it exists today. It’s going to take new ideas, new approaches, new goals. It’s going to take a hell of a lot of ambition, and the dedication to figuring this out.
We need 1000 new experiments in education. Nothing less than a Cambrian explosion will do.
“We are the citizens of a Republic, [and] the proper training of the rising generation [is our] highest earthly duty.” — Horace Mann in The Necessity of Education in a Republican Government
Our education system exists because ambitious women and men believed education was fundamental to our future.
In 1837, Horace Mann was appointed the first Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Education, after previous careers as a librarian, tutor, lawyer, and state senator. As secretary, he published his own journal, founded the Common School movement1 to create a professional teaching class, and argued successfully for taxpayer funded elementary schools. In arguing for universal public education as a means to “equalize the conditions of man” and bring social mobility to the states, he became one of America’s first education philosophers and one of our most powerful reformers. Today he’s remembered as The Father of American Education. It’s because of his ambition that we’re able to argue about the state of education today. If not for him, it’s possible we would not have had the last 187 years of educational advancements in the US.
Around the same time, Friedreich Froebel was inventing kindergarten at his Kielhau School in modern Germany. After serving in Napoleon's army, Froebel set out “ to train courage, manliness, and self-sacrifice for a greater cause.” His school, in direct opposition to the Prussian national system at the time, sought to balance academics with practical skills and physical work, with a strong focus on agriculture (the term kindergarten is inspired by the garden he created). His system included morning lessons with afternoons of practical work, sports, handicrafts, art, and free play. Evenings were relaxed, with storytelling, singing, and hobbies. In all of this, his school was self-sustaining and taught his students to embody the highest ideals of their own individual lives.
Nearly 100 years after Froebels and Mann, we once again believed education was worth fixing. This time the leading proponents were John Dewey, Maria Montessori, Rudolf Stiener, and Jean Piaget. By reacting to the classical model of schooling, with its long lectures, focus on memorization, and harsh treatment of students, they brought us new ideas, new ideals, and new understandings of childhood. From early childhood education to the university system, they saw education as an avenue to “nurture the growth of human talent in the service of human freedom.2”
All of these women and men were highly educated, highly capable, and even more ambitious. They believed education was a worthwhile outlet.
Contrast that with today.
Today’s educational system feels a bit like we’ve given up. The results seem to indicate the same. The US ranks 24th in the world in math according to the Program For International Student Assessment (PISA), below the OECD average. We are 16th in Science and 9th in reading, above the OECD average but still embarrassing for a country that spends over $17,000 per student, the second highest in the world behind only Luxembourg.
It’s not simply world rankings that tell a declining story. 75% of high school students are unhappy at school; 66% are not engaged in learning. 60% of students report feeling completely alone at school. Students spend more time with their peers and more time with the latest educational technology, yet they experience unprecedented levels of isolation, anxiety, and depression.
When you look at who goes into education as a profession, the picture doesn’t look much better. According to research by the Brookings Institute and others, our educators tend to come from less selective colleges and universities. The average SAT score for early education majors was below the national average by 10 percentile points. Many of our top universities don’t even have education departments. While teaching, and especially tenure track teaching jobs, used to be a guaranteed position of service, today’s educators are often fighting simply to find a job that respects them.3 It seems like no one is winning.
Our most ambitious members of society have no desire to go into education. Nor can I blame them. But it’s students who are suffering from our lack of ambition in education.
It shouldn’t be a surprise then that homeschooling is the fastest growing sector of American education. Since 2019, it has grown by 51%. Today 6% of American children are homeschooled (~3 million children). Compare that with public schools, which decreased enrollment by 4% over the same time.
Some of that change can be attributed to COVID, but a year into our homeschool experience I will never send my children back to public school.
Ambitious men and women (like myself) likely won’t return to the education system. We still need their ambition and their ideas if we’re going to pull education forward. We need the best of them. And we need them now.
Our children’s future depends on it.
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That’s not to say that experiments aren’t happening. Mackenzie Price’s Alpha Schools provide one model.
’s The Socratic Experience is another. There are online tools like Synthesis Tutor and Brilliant that are bringing education in line with our understanding of how learning works. They’re ditching the classroom learning model and looking to talent development4 to nurture children to achieve their potential. Their students have been accepted to Ivy league universities, started million dollar businesses, and won scientific awards all before they can legally vote.There are also a myriad of homeschooling opportunities. From co-ops to homeschool academic clubs, private tutors and cognitive apprenticeships, parents are teaching and learning and trying new approaches for their own children.
All of which is great. But it’s not enough.
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.” — Robert A. Heinlein
In 1990, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was researching happiness when he found that “the happiest people on earth, the ones who felt their lives had the most meaning, were those who had the most peak experiences.” Yet 34 years later, we don’t have any pedagogy for how to teach peak experiences. It’s easy to find a curriculum for math, science, reading, and history. But want to teach metacognition? You’re largely on your own. I know. I’ve been trying to piece it together for a year now. The 21st century skills movement identified creativity as the most important skill for success. Yet good luck finding a program to directly teach the skills of creativity.
Which is to say school could teach much more than we ask it to. But until we get the most ambitious minds focused on these opportunities, we’re largely on our own.
These experiments will never happen in our public schools; home education and micro-schools will be the incubator for the next generation of educational philosophies. But they’re not guaranteed. Like any good idea, they need encouragement, support, and scaffolding.
Take my home school as an example. Four hours of that homeschool is devoted to teaching. That’s the time my son and I work together on his learning. Those four hours are maybe half the time I spend on his education. After we’re done, I begin my research. I read academic preprints on the development of metacognition. I read biographies like John Stuart Mills’ autobiography and books like The Science of Tutoring. I try having a weekly conversation with other parents who work in education. And I reach out to people whose work I admire. Sometimes I even get a response, although normally I don’t. Finally, I write this newsletter to work out what I’m learning.
It’s a lot of work. And that doesn’t include all the times I fail when I try to integrate those into a lesson plan.
The problem has nothing to do with research. Bloom’s two sigma problem5 was published in 1984, and over the last 40 years researchers have made regular leaps in our understanding of the science of learning. Yet virtually none of has had much influence on how our classrooms are run. We now know more about the psychology and neuroscience of peak experiences than at any time before.
What we don’t know is how to integrate it into an education. Want to figure out how to use embodied understanding to help your child learn how they learn? What about how to integrate training for peak performance with learning math? In any other field, economics would bring thousands of innovators in to drive change. In education, we rely on the generosity of underpaid teachers. And those that do innovate are required to focus on state defined curriculum, hamstring by bureaucracy rather than free to truly innovate.
Imagine if we could learn from 1,000 other people who have explored developing agency, metacognition, peak performance, and any other learning possible. Imagine integrating those learnings directly into school. Imagine if even 100,000 students were able to benefit from the same.
It’s going to take bringing the best minds and the most excited, talented, passionate people back into education.
One way to do this would be to model a version of the Ansari-X Prize. Created in 1996 (nearly 30 years after the moon landing), the X Prize was an award of $10,000,000 for the first non-government organization to launch a reusable crewed spacecraft into space twice within two weeks. When the Tier One project won the award in 2004, it helped re-ignite an aviation industry that had long passed its golden age. The format has been spun off to spur innovation in fields such as anti-aging, genomics, and clean energy.
What would a similar prize look like in education?
The difficulties are immense. There is no single metric that we all agree is equally important for our future children. The feedback loops are long, as education is built over years and results wouldn't really be seen until the student reaches adulthood. Lastly, we’d need strong moral guidelines if we’re going to experiment on children. It would take real courage to try and solve these challenges.
But such a model could help spur innovative ideas in education. In an industry that will never offer the same financial rewards as technology or finance, a large award could help bring the kind of talent into education that we saw in the past. It could help ignite the kind of research and experiments that we need in order to rethink education for our children.
Once we have the innovators working in education, we need to disseminate the information. Homeschools and micro-schools have the advantage of being able to integrate new ideas and change course quickly. But they often lack a community to learn with.
Much like the open science movement, education needs a set of principles that allow us to learn from one another in real time. We need a culture of trying out ideas, sharing our learning, and helping others. And we need to include as many different children in as many different philosophies as possible. Imagine a single destination where parents could go learn from the experiments of other home educators. Something like a pre-print service6 might work. So might something as simple as a community forum or mastermind. Whatever the format, we will need to create a cultural destination to support those educators pursuing our most ambitious ideas.
Lastly, we’ll need to rethink our incentives around education. Right now, schools don’t make money unless they have a certain number of students. The way to earn recognition and research funding is by finding solutions that work for every child. We try making all students fit one mold so we can teach them economically. Yet our students aren’t all the same, and the approaches that work for them are largely individualized. If we’re going to encourage more experiments, we need to find a way of supporting an individualized approach to education.
Most of what I’ve written here is selfish. These are the supports I want in my own homeschooling journey. This is the community I feel my children would benefit from. Hell, I’d benefit from it. This educational endeavor can be lonely, and the isolation takes a toll. I’m at the limits of what I can learn and what I can share. There’s so much more I’d like to see done.
That’s not to say I’m going to stop. I believe this is a worthwhile pursuit. It’s given me more purpose than anything else I’ve ever done. And I hope others will join me on the journey.
Imagine what we could do.
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the common school movement was one of the first experiments in training a professional teaching class through professional teaching universities. While nearly 200 years later I think we’ve seen the downsides of this idea come to fruition, I admire the ambition to try it. There are ideas we could take from the original movement that would help parents and educators.
This quote is a beautiful ideal for a liberal education, borrowed from William Cronon in Only Connect.
The classroom learning model decides what to teach based on the class as a whole, and accepts that some students will be farther ahead or fall behind the average. The talent development model is more like a sports coach, viewing the original student and deciding what should be learned next.
Bloom discovered that the average student taught through one-on-one tutoring performed two standard deviations better than the average student taught through a classroom. Later experiments dropped the difference from two standard deviations but the effect still holds.
think arxiv.org but for parents rather than scientists, in a way that is both rigorous and readable.
I haven't read all the comments yet, so please forgive any redundancy, but a few points to add.
Theodore Sizer and others have pointed out that public education was largely built to prepare students for labor while keeping them out of the labor force. To some extent, the idea of child care with preparation to be corporate drones hasn't changed a great deal over the years (this is partly what that principal is talking about). The revolt that you feel against public education is largely the revolt that I've felt against pivoting to industry after leaving higher ed. I don't want to be convincing myself all day every day to do things I actually hate and then brightsiding that as productivity or growth. No way.
You mention the generosity of underpaid teachers. The golden age of public education relied quite heavily on extremely competent women during a time when they could not -- for arbitrary reasons -- be CEOs, founders, lawyers, or physicians. This is not kind, but anyone teaching in higher ed knows it is true: the cream does not rise toward the Education major. So the people teaching our kids, when we're lucky, are spouses who have decided not to maximize their earning potential (as in the old days) or students who honestly could not hack it in Engineering, Biochem, or even in the traditional English degree. That is partly because of the standardization you describe, which truly innovative and competent people abhor. Finally that culture caught up with higher ed, which is what compelled me to leave.
So there's a real compensation problem in education that has never really changed. There's an innovation problem, which you highlight, an embodiment problem, and lots else.
The thing that really troubles me is that homeschooling is not really an option for someone like me (divorced, a single dad, would need the cooperation of my ex, which isn't happening). The schools here are quite good, on average. And so I'm at peace more or less with that. But in places where the schools are abysmal and not meeting kids' needs, the peer group keeps getting whittled down to those with the fewest means. That doesn't bode well for all kinds of things.
Latham: such an understatement: “If only our education system still believed it.”
Much like Elon Musk (like him or not) catalyzed the big auto manufacturers into the electric car market, so to may you catalyze education reforms - in the long run - while giving your kids a top notch one in the short run.
And for that $17,000 per student, it pains me when I hear that since we actually spend $ per teacher+admin. Maybe if we quoted the burdened labor cost of a teacher at $300,000 - $400,000 year, we’d put more of a spotlight on the issue.
Keep up the good, and profound, work!