I think it's fair to say that most of us take for granted the idea that a good education is the foundation of a good life and a good society. I believe this to be true, but in taking it for granted, I wonder if we fail to define what we mean by a good education. Furthermore, I wonder to what extent we ask ourselves how the shape of our education impacts the shape of our society.
If we want to create a society that works better for more people and that's capable of solving complex social and environmental challenges, then we no doubt need an education system tailored to those goals. If we want to build businesses that contribute to a better future, then we need teams of educated people that are capable of doing so.
So the question is, does our current system of compulsory mass schooling and standardised testing deliver on these requirements? More broadly, is it optimally serving our needs as individuals and as a society? The answer to both questions should be a resounding yes, and yet I don’t think it is.
In my quest to understand the root causes of the challenges we face, I want to take some time this week to dig into the mysteries of the education system and how they relate to sustainable business.
What is education?
One of the anomalies that's intrigued me over the years is that while I believe strongly in the importance of education, and we’re told that school is supposed to help you get a good job, as an employer I barely look at people's academic qualifications. Ask me about the academic background of anyone who works at Wholegrain Digital and unless it’s come up in casual conversation, I’ll struggle to tell you much.
I think this is driven by another anomaly, which is that in my own experience, academic achievement seems to have little correlation with a person's true capability. In fact, some of the most impressive people that I've worked with have not come from particularly strong academic backgrounds. Isn't that strange?
It seems that there's a disconnect between schooling and education. John Taylor Gatto, a retired teacher who resigned in protest when he won New York City’s Teacher of the Year Award, described the differences as follows:
… separate schooling and education into compartments, and useful distinctions jump out at you. Schooling is a matter of habit and attitude training. It takes place from the outside in. Education is a matter of self mastery first; then self enlargement, even self transcendence - as all possibilities of the human spirit open themselves into zones for exploration and understanding.
What he is highlighting is that while schooling and education appear to be the same thing on the surface, they are almost polar opposite in their approaches. The primary mode of schooling is compliance, whereas the primary mode of education is experimentation. School teaches us what to believe and how to behave, whereas education is a process of forming our own feedback loops to learn from our own experiences and form our own evolving model of the world.
The origins of compulsory schooling
How can there be such a big contradiction between the methods of true education and those of the mass school system? To answer this question, we need to look back at why compulsory state education was introduced in the first place, as well as the brief to which it was designed.
As soon as you start to even scratch the surface, things start to become quite uncomfortable. Early compulsory education began in regions of what is now Germany in the 1500’s, with the objective to use the power of the state to force adherence to Lutheranism and suppress religious dissent. It was highly effective and over the next few hundred years it spread to most of Europe in various forms, as well as to America.
Following the industrial revolution and the shift of power from religious to industrial elites, the foundations laid down by Martin Luther in the 1500’s were built upon in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s to create a school system fit for the industrial age.
In 1918, the British evolutionist Benjamin Kidd wrote that the primary objective of the state schooling project was to impose on the young the ideal of subordination. Kidd was not some fringe radical with crazy ideas. His views aligned with all of the key thinkers involved in this huge social project.
The journalist H.L. Mencken wrote in the American Mercury in 1924 that the aim of public education was not to fill the young with knowledge and awaken their intelligence, but to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, putting down dissent.
Ellwood P. Cubberley, a professor at Stanford University in the early 20th Century said that “Our schools are… factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned.”
Adam Smith, the so called Father of Capitalism, was very clear about the role of schooling and it's difference from education, stating that the education of the middling and lower ranks must be put aside and replaced with psychological conditioning in habits and attitudes of deference, envy, appetite, and mistrust of self.
A rational motive
While this might all sound rather sinister, it's also entirely rational. In fact, I'd argue that the architecture of compulsory schooling is a work of genius. The compulsory schooling system was (and still is) central to the solidification of wealth and power in the industrial economy and delivers the following outputs:
A compliant population who mostly lack the imagination or confidence to challenge power, and who are in fact dependent rather than self-sufficient
A large population of compliant workers who are comfortable with and perhaps even aspire to a life of de-humanising employment
A lack of entrepreneurial spirit in the general population, reducing competition and allowing for the growth and preservation of established monopolies and oligopolies
A population who seek fulfillment in consumption rather than in creation, ensuring constant demand for goods and services
A mechanism to justify taxation of the population and the funneling of some of those funds back into wealthy private hands
In review, I think it's fair to say that this project has delivered pretty well on its objectives. The industrialists who provided most of the early funding for this enormous social project, including Andrew Carnegie and John D Rockefeller, must have been very pleased with their return on investment.
Is it sustainable?
The state schooling system might be a brilliant success in terms of its true objectives to create an industrial workforce and consumer market, but we must ask ourselves whether its design is compatible with a sustainable economy - one that works for everyone and is compatible with a long term healthy ecosystem.
While compliant workers, a steady stream of consumers and the opportunity of lucrative government contracts might be ideal outcomes for many business leaders, I think sustainable business might need us to ask for something different.
If we need to challenge the status quo and create a better system, then we need truly educated people who are capable of envisioning and creating positive change. The late Ken Robinson, author and education advisor to the UK government said that “our education system has mined our minds in the way that we’ve strip mined the Earth for a particular commodity, and in the future it won’t serve us.”
We need people who don’t just memorise the dots shown to them, but who join the dots and even create new ones. This requires a complexity of mind that we are all capable of but which our standardised education system stamps out in nearly all of us.
Dr Robert Kegan’s adult developmental theory suggests that our mental development does not cease when we reach adulthood, but continues through the following three stages:
The Socialised Mind - Around 58% of adults are said to fit this model in which perspectives and views are shaped by the people around us and the rules defined for us
The Self-authoring Mind - In this stage of development, for about 35% of adults, the individual has formed their own views of the world and defines their identity and choices by their own model
The Self-transforming Mind - Just 1% of adults reach this final stage of development in which they can move beyond their own fixed views and hold multiple, often conflicting perspectives in mind and loosen their grip of their own identity in the search for true understanding of the world around them
The remaining 6% retain their adolescent mindset into adulthood.
Aristotle said that the development of a complex mind is a basic requirement of being fully human and yet, it seems that 99% of adults fail to develop the most advanced form of mindset, not just before they reach adulthood, but before they die. Put another way, 99% fail to develop the inner tools of true education. This observation has an intriguing parallel with the words of William Torrey Harris, US Commissioner of Education from 1889 to 1906, who stated that:
Ninety-nine [students] out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual.
By education, he of course meant compulsory state schooling.
So how do we challenge this?
I’m aware that this might all be hard to absorb, especially for those of us like myself who have dedicated a huge proportion of their lives to academic study. It’s very hard to even consider that it might not have been the best use of our time, let alone let go of the status that our egos derive from our educational achievement.
The positive side of all this though, is that we all have the opportunity to pursue true education throughout our lives and advance our own understanding of the infinitely complex world around us.
In my own business, I’m always looking to hire people who have a natural curiosity, who believe in self-learning and who seem to be on a journey to ever increasing understanding. Furthermore, I aim (even if not always successfully), to create an environment in which diversity of thought, problem solving and creativity are encouraged. I am aware that this runs counter to the industrial objective of creating a compliant workforce, but I believe that our long term success will be primarily driven by innovation and flexibility. In fact, I believe that in a world where many types of careers seem under threat from robots and AI, that teams who fully embrace their human capability to think and feel will be the most resilient.
When it comes to creating new business models that deliver real solutions and that accelerate the advent of a sustainable economy, we need to be able to make sense of the world we currently live in and visualise an alternative future. I believe that we can only hope to achieve this by throwing off the shackles of the school system that programs us to follow and conform, and instead nurture our own abilities to educate ourselves, from the inside out.
In the words of the young entrepreneur Eddy Zhong,
No one has ever changed the world by doing what the world has told them to do.
That’s it for this week. I hope you’ve found this weeks issue thought provoking and that perhaps it might even inspire you to explore the potential of true education in your own lives and businesses. The process of researching and writing this weeks article has certainly given me a lot to think about, and I guess that’s the point.
Thank you Tom. This strongly aligns with my opinion of our current school system; and our children being so bound to it for their education during their precious time up to adulthood. Seeing my two, both with very different needs and ways of learning, travel through their school years, has really opened my eyes. I really don’t think school in itself is a bad place for them to be, they should be in school, with others, learning academically, physically, creatively and socially - being inspired by the world - but our schools are far from what they should be. From the physical environments through to the curriculum, the lack of flexibility, the constant testing and definition of what success means. For many parents it is now all about damage limitation - how can our children travel through the system with the least amount of damage done. They have such a far reaching impact in the short and also the much longer term, and therefore hold the power to make a big difference - good and bad. For us to create a more sustainable way of living, big changes in our school system needs to happen!
Tom, this newsletter resonated with me in several ways. First was one my father said to me 50 or so years ago which was “the main purpose of acquiring a baccalaureate is to truly learn how to learn.”
Second was the distinction the staff at my children’s school made between advanced placement (AP) courses and International Baccalaureate (IB) courses. The objective of AP is to teach specifics while the objective of IB is to teach deep and independent ways of thinking.
I certainly agree with your main premise that there are adjustments that can be made to our education system to better prepare people for the future. I also think there are pockets (and individuals within), albeit small, where those adjustments are being made.