Optimization of education
This text is part of: "I would never send my kids to school" by Piotr Wozniak (2017)
Introduction
We believe that education is the domain of experts. It should be designed perfectly by expert teams. It should be executed perfectly by expert administrators. It should be delivered by expert teachers with a wide knowledge. After a hundred years of trying, why is this quest for perfection driving us backwards? Why do we complain more and more about the education system?
Perfect model of education
Over long years of schooling, we slowly develop an imaginary model of a perfect academic learning process in which we set long-term goals, follow the curriculum, add important pieces of knowledge, and get to the point when we receive a college degree with rock solid knowledge in a given area supported by extensive general knowledge needed for an efficient function in society. The longer we stay in the school system, the harder it is to step away and have an objective view of that model. Paradoxically, verification of that model comes hardest to those minds who do well at school and start believing they have succeeded thanks to that perfect model of academic learning. Smart people suffer less pain at school, and, as a result, think less of the problem of the school system. Successful students internalize the model and perpetuate it by providing the same fixed path for future generations.
The model in which we design student's knowledge via curriculum is wrong! The model of a perfect school gives credit to the system and the teachers, while all actual learning should be credited to the student. When kids fail school in droves, we tend to blame the kids, or their parents, while a small fraction of successful students will continue dreaming of the perfect school model for their own kids, and keep pushing the model on the less fortunate ones.
Optimization based on the learn drive
Unlike the curriculum, the optimization mechanism behind the learn drive has been perfected in the course of human evolution. It is capable of driving individual knowledge to the level needed to disentangle all complexities of science or engineering. Before the arrival of compulsory schooling, mankind has achieved all imaginable breakthroughs needed to start Enlightenment or Industrial Revolution. Compulsory schooling has originally helped to lift the "unenlightened" masses to a new level, however, it is increasingly driving itself into the optimization corner in which enlightenment is replaced by suppression of creative minds.
Designing a child's mind
I hear this all the time from highly educated and very smart people that education is too important to let it rely on self-learning or on the blindness of the learn drive. Apparently, education is so important that we should plan it and design it globally with the best tools of science and using the best experts. While I was preoccupied with efficient learning, and before I really started thinking about the education system, I lived with the same conviction. It is quite natural to default to expert opinion.
Highly educated people often utter the following claims:
- children are incapable of long-term planning, therefore a curriculum is needed
- learn drive is a type of local optimization, while we need to plan education globally
- following student interests is a recipe for disaster: they will all end up immersed in mind-numbing videogames
The problem is that global optimization of education sets performance targets that keep getting tighter. Global optimization keeps employing the same inefficient learning tools in an attempt to transfer more "necessary" knowledge to student minds. The outcome is misery for millions of students. While Stalin optimized globally for massive achievements of the Soviet Union, it was the market economics with its simple optimization algorithms that lifted the western world to new heights. See: Modern schooling is like Soviet economy
Currently employed optimization of education uses knowledge tests as the measure of performance, but relies on cramming and short-term memory to achieve more in a shorter period of time. As a result, it keeps losing its grip on the learn drive. Competition between nations also employs performance tests. Instead of optimizing for actual long-term knowledge, we optimize for the speed of knowledge turnover in student heads. The result is unhappy students with knowledge that is tiny relative to the time invested and to the actual human potential.
Reliance on emergence
Optimization of education can employ the concept of emergence. The learn drive is a mechanism by which knowledge is self-organizing with no effort from teachers, and no pain from a child. Natural learning may take long hours, but it is pleasurable, and healthy kids don't mind learning all day long as long as this is learning of their own choosing.
There are two vital facts we should hold in mind in reference to the local optimization of learning based on the learn drive:
- without a reliance on the learn drive, there is no good learning. All attempts at override will be massively rejected by human memory
- learn drive brings amazingly efficient long-term optimization of the learning process. Nearly all human achievement before the 1850s has been accomplished with the guidance of the learn drive
A skeptic would notice that human progress has accelerated since the introduction of compulsory schooling. He would be right. However, we have been on an accelerating ascent of progress ever since the emergence of the first forms of life 4 billion years ago. I see Guttenberg and Tim Berners-Lee as more significant contributors to that acceleration than that of the respectable Johann Julius Hecker.
Local optimization based on the learn drive is highly unintuitive. Creation science comes from a similar unintuitive feelings about the mechanism of natural selection. How can a local evolutionary optimization based on random mutations lead to a marvel of a human being? Global design/optimization/guidance by the hand of God seems unavoidable. Fewer people subscribe to the creation science today, however, a vast majority of the population has no idea what mechanism underlies the learn drive, and why ignoring it is the chief problem of the Prussian education system.
The tree metaphor
Given enough time and access to knowledge-rich environments, without the need for an education system, the knowledge of an individual grows into a large, comprehensive, and coherent body. This is true of all free, and healthy individuals. The size and the quality of the tree may depend on one's personality, interests, and the starting point of the intellectual development. However, one of the chief myths of education is that the organic growth of knowledge leads to multiple biases and areas of ignorance. Those blank spots are allegedly larger than those that remain after years of schooling. Due to the computational power of the learn drive, and the phenomenon of emergence, the opposite is true. The metaphor I like to use to explain the power of the learn drive is that of a tree growth.
Another metaphor that can help explain the emergence in building up coherent knowledge is the Knowledge crystallization metaphor:
Figure: In perfect schooling we create a perfect crystal of knowledge. In college, we add an extra crystal of specialization. In reality though, learning looks a bit less perfect. For most kids, knowledge never builds sufficient coherence and falls apart due to interference (i.e. fast forgetting). As a result, in real schooling, knowledge asymptotically reaches a certain volume and keeps churning around from that point on with little progress in stability or coherence. In contrast, in free learning, the acquisition of knowledge is chaotic and uneven. However, as long as it is based on the learn drive, the volume of knowledge is very large. Individual crystals of knowledge collide, and build consistency and coherence. This in turn helps stability and further integration of knowledge. By the time of college, in terms of volume, free learners should know far more than ordinary students. Free knowledge has multiple areas of strength, and multiple areas of weakness. However, it is superior in coherence. This is why it is more applicable in problem solving
Local optimization
Local optimization of the learn drive leads to a perfect match between human ability and individual's environment and goals (see: Optimality of the learn drive). Global optimization of schooling suppresses the learn drive, defers to the suppressed learn drive when matching individuals with their jobs, and results in an unhappy society where most individuals crave 9-5 jobs for their comfort where the leadership, learning, and responsibility are delegated to someone else. The opposite happens in democratic schools which rely on self-learning to produce self-determined, self-fulfilled and self-reliant individuals ready to accept any challenge in their chosen area of interest.
In his historic commencement speech, Steve Jobs joked that before he was diagnosed with cancer, he did not know what the pancreas was. Apparently, his blind learn drive left a gap in his extensive knowledge. Even if this was true, I would never trade Steve Jobs and his opus vitae for a few failures of the local optimization of learning. One of the main points of his inspiring speech was to follow one's learn drive. In his words "the only way to do great work is to love what you do". This truth has been repeated by all wise people for millennia.
Is global optimization possible?
Global optimization finds an optimum for all input values. Global optimization of learning is done at the level of the department of education, e.g. by means of tools such as common core and standardized testing. Global optimization is based on the flawed reasoning that we can design a child's mind. Global optimization can also be done by parents who attempt to predict a child's future.
Can we determine a child's future in advance? If parents were to choose future globally and optimally, we would have a surplus of lawyers and doctors. We would also have a major increase in frustrated college dropouts. If governments were to help a bit and redistribute the jobs for kids optimally at early age, we would end up with a variant of 1984. Few kids would love to find out at the age of 6 they are set for a life as a book-keeper or a carpenter. Job selection should obviously be based on love and passion, not a government decree.
Perhaps kids should then be allowed to optimize globally? That would not work either, we would end up with a surplus of rock musicians, professional videogamers, and football players.
Contrast this with optimization via the learn drive that has delivered the best of human achievement for centuries.
Is then a curriculum an attempt to find an intermediary optimum on the way to a global optimum. Curriculum as a guide to what is worth knowing seems like a good idea. When a kid or a teacher runs out of enthusiasm for learning, they might consult the curriculum. If the learn drive is in overdrive though, why slow down? Is there a risk the kid will never learn the dangers of alcohol? This isn't too likely. On the other hand, I am not aware of a curriculum that teaches kids how to employ incremental reading. I might be biased, but I would definitely put that skill ahead of the need to cram Kawalec or Battle of Cedynia (examples taken from my own curriculum). I can appreciate late Julian Kawalec today. However, mandatory reading of his novels imposed by the communist authorities was a source of school torture for me. You probably wonder who Kawalec was. I would love to tell you but Wikipedia has an article on his achievements in Polish only.
If you test student knowledge against the curriculum, it is easy to see they master a tiny subset of that globally optimized plan. They add to this a great deal of their own knowledge about the world obtained via self-learning. This leads to the illusion of good schooling. If curriculum was not obligatory, and teachers had more room to adapt, the volume of knowledge and its coherence would increase. Coherence and speed are two hallmarks of self-learning. Fewer kids might choose to solve quadratic equations, but they would fill up that space many times over with other skills they consider important to them. All those who plan careers in STEM would get to quadratic equations anyway, sooner or later. The rest would fall back on current default, which is to learn the equations and forget them fast. Most people do not know how to tackle quadratic equations. Few know of their purpose. Equations in the curriculum add distress and the cost of knowledge that might have been opportunistically acquired efficiently in a happy state of mind.
If the global long-term optimization is not possible, intermediate steps in the form of a curriculum plan are only less complex. They are still a departure from the optimum determined by the learn drive.
The only way to optimize efficiently is to let the learn drive determine the trajectory with gentle nudges from parents, mentors, peers, strangers, social media, wikipedia, Google, and more.