Education Has an Alignment Problem Too
Outdated Learning Goals Are Failing Students
When I was a child, cursive writing was still a thing. Adults did it, including in their jobs.
Fast forward half a century, and twenty-four U.S. states still require cursive instruction in school. My daughters got cursive instruction in elementary school. Now, in their early 20s, that can’t write it at all, not even for their signature.
Adults don’t write in cursive; many rarely use pen and paper. The world doesn’t require it much. It’s no longer as crucial a thing.
“That’s OK,” say the cursive proponents. “It’s still valuable because it improves fine motor coordination, or to read historical documents.” Small studies that link cursive to improved reading skills become cherry-picked rationale. The logic for keeping it becomes increasingly disconnected from the specific intent of the skill, without any consideration that the transferable skills—if they really exist—could be developed using more useful tasks.
In the AI world, alignment is a major challenge. Alignment is when an AI advances the objectives you intend. Often though, the AI doesn’t understand what you want precisely enough, must use a proxy to measure progress instead of the precise attribute, has built in biases you don’t wish, and can’t ‘think’ through the ramifications of an approach or decision. In various ways, we are usually working with misaligned AI.
School curriculum is misaligned with the world and with work. Cursive is only one example. I previously picked on math. Just as with AI misalignment, the school alignment problem is a serious issue, perhaps the biggest of all issues.
Brains are Use It or Lose It
What do you remember from your schooling? I mean really remember, enough to use the principle or skill, not just recall that you once learned about it.
You remember what you use. At the most fundamental level of the brain—down to neurons—connections and networks strengthen with use, and atrophy with disuse. When we retrieve memories often enough, then they become easier to use the next time. The memories are even updated to fit better into your world understanding.
I remember the weirdest stuff from school. There was a song of prepositions (“about, above, across, after, against, among, around, at, before, beside…”) that I learned to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Decades later, I still know the whole thing, precisely because it is a stupid human trick I still occasionally use. Which European leader did what in which war? I have no clue. It didn’t interest me then, so I may never have absorbed it, and my life hasn’t required it.
The school fascination with detailed knowledge inherently ignores this brain fundamental. In the associative networks that organize our knowledge and experience, those are the metaphorical leaves of the tree. Oh sure, there are staggered repetition approaches to improve memory, but the leaves don’t get revisited as often as the branches, trunks, and roots. Detailed knowledge is the most likely to be lost. Meta-knowledge, processes, heuristics, and abstract, domain-transcendent concepts are inherently revisited more often, and are thus more memorable.
Use-it-or-lose-it is affecting students at much more fundamental levels of the education system. Adults don’t read books anymore; about half of U.S. adults didn’t read a single book over the past year. Educators can decry this new world, but that will not change the outcome. Their students won’t likely read books as adults either. They may not read much at all. People are changing how they consume information, opting for more audio and video (e.g., I listen to podcasts as often as I read). They will be worse readers as a result, or at least will learn the reading skill more slowly.
Reading is less important in life than it used to be. When students get less practice and adult modeling outside of school, then it’s harder to teach. I don’t know what that means for reading instruction; I’m no literacy expert. I am not saying reading instruction should be deemphasized, but educators have to think hard about how the new world reality affects what they do.
Perhaps it means thinking not of reading and writing as the fundamentals, but of communication and expression.
It surely means meeting children where they are rather than trying to turn back the clock. That is what schools have been trying to do, and it isn’t working.
The education system can stick to some idealized notion of learning, of critical knowledge and skills. But if it’s not aligned with the world, it’s tilting at windmills.
Remember, the appropriate question isn’t whether an aspect of the curriculum is still useful. Knowledge is always useful in some way. It’s whether that information is most useful compared to alternative uses of that educational energy.
Evidence for Transferability is Usually Weak to Nonexistent
“Sure,” say some educators, “I don’t expect them to remember the details, but they will be “learning how to think” or improving indirectly a cross-disciplinary skill. Math isn’t important because of the detailed method you’re using, but because it’s improving logical thinking, goes the argument.
Except measuring transferability often fails; the correlations are very low, partly because they’re hard experiments to plan and conduct. As far as researchers can tell, being better at math, as taught in schools, doesn’t make you a dramatically more logical being. If it does, it may be only for problems framed in mathematical ways. Having nuanced and multi-perspective conversations at the dinner table is likely a better route, as is rhetoric in school. The modality (language rather than math) is at least matching.
If the skill you’re most interested in is something that requires transfer, then don’t keep it invisible. Teach it directly. That requires multidisciplinary approaches that are discouraged in subject-based courses.
Students Notice the Misalignment
As with most children, I had only a vague idea what people did in the workplace, or what adult life required. I did see my mom reading, and my dad doing math (he was an accountant, but also paying bills).
What do children see now? What do they experience? Increasingly, what they see life requiring of them is a completely different reality from what schools present.
I have an unprovable theory that this is the biggest issue of all in modern schooling. What is taught, and how it’s taught, just doesn’t fit the world anymore. I didn’t like school a ton; most children don’t now either. In both eras, students would rather be doing something else. I did think what I was being taught was mostly relevant, though I had strong doubts with Shakespeare! Kids today don’t think that. They seem to be more about getting through it.
Moreover, the content is largely being taught for a different era, still with students in seats listening to a teacher. Even with activity- and project-based learning, the exercise is usually to produce a single answer. The activity is formulaic. That might have been fine in a world where children were taught from birth to be dutiful and defer to authority, but our children are taught to have voices. Parents want them to be independent thinkers, and so do workplaces. Putting independently inclined minds into a duty-oriented learning environment is bound to go badly.
I think this misalignment is devastating to engagement and mental health. I hear a lot, especially from college professors, about how the students seem increasingly all about the grade rather than the learning. That should be expected if they no longer believe what they are learning is useful (though surely there are other reasons).
Aligning School Requires Understanding and Predicting the Most Prevalent Adult Tasks
I sometimes get asked how I would organize school if the proverbial magic wand appeared. A bunch of the Wisdom Factories book I put out last year addresses aspects of this question. It’s a difficult question because it doesn’t have a simple answer. As with organizing a business, there are advantages and disadvantages to each paradigm. The business organized around skill areas might not be good at product development that requires multiple skills, whereas the company organized around product teams might not better the team skills if those with similar skills aren’t learning from one another. Larger businesses tend to have a bit of both.
Similarly, I don’t think school should be just one approach. Some knowledge-specific realms will still need focused courses. Largely though, I think multidisciplinary courses that are organized around types of challenges that are common for adults and children should be the main organizing principle. Essentially that’s saying the focus should now be on transference rather than domain knowledge.
There are lots of ways to slice it, but the key is that every course in K-12 has obvious use to every child, supplemented by interest-driven excursions. That means the knowledge-laden courses are more about meta-knowledge, and the cross-cutting courses are about approaches to problems. Not science, but innovation and discovery. Not engineering, but problem solving. Not reading and writing but communicating. Not history but learning through experience.
Consider one of the most common tasks – scheduling. It can be taught at every age, at difficulty levels ranging from simple resource allocation to sophisticated, incredibly difficult logistics and schedule operations that occupy some of the world’s brightest minds. It is impossible to teach scheduling without talking about optimization principles (maybe that’s the overarching banner), values, balancing work, health, and umpteen obligations, psychosocial considerations, etc. Scheduling, or perhaps optimization, is a gateway challenge to lots of knowledge domains. Except in this different framing, it’s learning that every student can see relevance in.
I have laid out a pretty depressing story. My bet is educational outcomes on the existing measures aren’t going to get better in the future. They will probably get worse. This article says curricular and pedagogical mismatch with the outside world is a big reason. Students, and increasingly educators themselves, don’t see the relevance of what’s being taught.
The misalignment is worse than I’m saying, because that new kindergarten student won’t hit adulthood for more than a decade. The world will change a ton in that time. That means curriculum must think ahead, to what tasks people will need to do. I learned cursive, but by the time I hit college I already wasn’t using it.
The attitude I get often from educators, sometimes explicitly stated, is that the fundamentals don’t change. I am usually flabbergasted. They’re just plain wrong. Schools need to be aligned with reality, or they lose credibility.