The negative impact of Darwinism and socioeconomic disparity on innovation in education
Let me start with a few questions:
- What are the top 3 problems with the education system, in your opinion?
- How does your perspective and opinion on this differ from 10 other people with 10 different socioeconomic statuses?
- Which of these perspectives and opinions are represented in all the education products out there in the market? From school and universities to online learning tools?
Here are my answers to these questions (email me your views sina@learningloop.org I’m curious to hear them):
The top 3 problems in the education system, in my opinion
1. Weak feedback loop
Every system needs a feedback loop to maintain its quality. Every time you use Uber or airbnb, the app asks you if you had a good experience. Every time you watch something on Netflix, the system learns from what you liked or disliked. That’s how those systems and businesses stay alive and grow.
Schools and universities have had 0 incentives to collect actionable feedback, apart from 1–2 surveys annually (which make no difference to anything whatsoever). Why? Primarily because as long as 20% of their grads overachieve every year, they can get away with whatever else that happens to the other 80% and blame it on “evolution”.
2. Education system is consuming smart people, instead of developing everyone into a great human
Harvard University doesn’t try to 10x its intake size to make their so called great education available to more people, and Computer Science drop-out rates in Germany are 50%, and the MOOC’s average course completion is 5%, and so on. Why? Because our education system, online or offline, is a consumer of existing talent, rather than trying to develop every person into a better version of themselves. The worst part: the institutions and companies get away with this because they can blame it on the learners.
Western societies have been built on the foundation of Darwinism: The belief that the fittest shall survive, and the weak should die.
I disagree with that on so many levels, when it comes to societal problems. I disagree with it because it’s passive. It’s how consumers think about the world. It’s the idea of accepting things as they are, and consuming the natural flow of things, no matter how fucked up, without caring to make a radical positive change to them.
We wouldn’t have products like Uber if we approached transportation that way. “Let’s not make transport 10x easier because I had to wait an hour for taxi growing up.”
Screw that. The best technology products are anti Darwinism because they make a great set of opportunities available to everyone equally, and the best technology products don’t exist in education yet. Why?
3. Socioeconomic disparity and a misalignment between talent, problem definition, empathy and money
The successful graduates of the education system believe the system is fine because by the time they graduate, they’ve worked so hard that they would feel almost victimised to see someone else achieve the same outcome as them with 10x lower effort. That’s also a side-effect of Darwinism and the selfishness and ego-centrism that comes with it. “If I had to go through X, everybody else should, too”.
With my transportation analogy, that’d be the equivalent of saying “Let’s suffer getting from A to B because our grandparents had to cross 3 rivers and 1 volcano everyday to get to school”. How about no.
It’s a strong and mesmerising instance of survivorship bias, where the people who are in the best position to make a radical change to the system, through their talent and eventually capital, don’t believe the system is broken
Side note: Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, the Revisionist History, has a great episode called The Lady Vanishes that in a strange way reminds me of this survivorship bias: https://www.pushkin.fm/episode/the-lady-vanishes/
The people who are affected by how broken the system can rarely acquire the attention, skills and capital to make a change to the system.
It really takes a revolution to break free of that order (actually a disorder), and the revolution needs to come from a segment that understands the problem but can attract the resources from the segment that probably doesn’t complete agree there is a problem to solve.
Which of these perspectives and opinions are represented in all the education products out there in the market?
Very few, in very few companies. Lambda School is one great example a company that cared about a group of people that everybody else didn’t care about. People who wanted to learn programming who didn’t know where to start. The world’s answer to them was “Google it, there are so many tutorials online”, without understanding that there is more to learning than just searching and finding content.
Freecodecamp has done a fabulous job too by creating a step-by-step guide to software development, a self-directed learning experience that actually works!
Khan Academy is definitely inspiring too because it delivers 10x better content than what is available to most kids globally.
When I look at Coursera, Udacity, Udemy, and most edtech companies that have been raising big investment rounds lately, they don’t excite me because they seem to be consuming the existing markets and customers and producrt and business models, as opposed to making some opportunities available to new people.
The edtech industry has been around for over a decade, and the middle 60% of the population completes 0 online courses in a year.
In fact, the people who live pay check to pay check and worry if they’re gonna have enough money to put food on the table this week and this month and next month are hardly ever included in any education product that we see in the world.
These are some of the reasons I’m building a universal basic education, to 10x the middle 60%’s contribution to the GDP, through a step-by-step guide to self-employment. A self-directed learning experience that leads to a lifelong learning experience.
