Evolution vs. Revolution

It seems like almost everybody, in almost every country, thinks education in their country is not quite what it should be. People often disagree about what needs to be different, but they do agree that something needs to be different. Governments, and ministries of education are also affected by this need for "something different", so they continually make plans for change. They - and through them, we - try to get the existing system to evolve into a different system, with the help of change plans. We often call it "reform" rather than "evolution", but the idea is the same: Incremental changes, not rocking the boat too much, will get us from here to there. But will they?

It depends on the extent and type of difference between what we have and where we need to have. If the difference is that we need to move from 36 students per class to 28 students per class, and that will solve our problems - it can be done incrementally. If we need to give the teachers a 20% raise - it can be done incrementally. If we decide we need to have half the teachers be computer literate - not experts, just literate... Getting tougher. It's possible to send even all the teachers to computer training, having appeased the ministry of finance, teachers unions, the lawyers of those training firms who lost the tender, etc. But getting the training doesn't necessarily mean many of the trainee really acquire the skill... Ok, let's be optimistic, and assume that this type of a difference can be dealt with in the context of the existing system, and bridged by an incremental reform. Just. Not much more.

Even with small changes, we need to be careful with fitting the change into the system - domesticating it. For example, putting computers into a school has great potential. In some places, one can see these computers being used by pupils to write their homework in a word-processor, and that's it. These computers were domesticated to fit the existing methodology of the school. Now they are just glorified typewriters, which itself is a glorified pen-and-paper. As such, these computers don't contribute much to the learning. If they were put into the school as an experiment, the natural conclusion would be that there is no advantage in putting computers at the disposal of the students. But the experiment did not really test what computers can do for the teaching and learning, since their ability to compute, to communicate and to visualize were not used. The experiment only tested domesticated computers, and these indeed are useless. When we decide we need to introduce a new tool or method, we should give it a chance. Putting it into the Procrustean bed of current knowledge and methodology is likely to prevent us from getting the potential benefit. This is a general problem, alluded to by Karel Čapek some 70 years ago in his story about "The man who knew how to fly", who had the misfortune of being domesticated into a guy who can jump pretty well. At the expense of zoological accuracy, we can say that a domesticated wolf is not a wolf - it's a dog, and sometimes we need a wolf, and not another dog.

There is likely to be a big difference between the existing and the desired system. We may decide we need a different way of teaching. What if we need the teachers to move from a position of all-knowing providers of knowledge, to a position of humble enablers of self-learning? How would we change the skills, attitudes, habits, beliefs and sense of self-worth of teachers who have been working the same way for 10, 20 or 30 years? We can't. On solution would be to start educating new teachers differently. If we do a great job and create the right skills and attitudes in these new teachers, after a few years, they will start graduating, and we will start having young teachers with the profile we need. Then we will face the problem of integrating very different teaching concepts into a single system, teaching the same students. Even if we succeed in that (I don't know how), it will take a few decades of just waiting until we have the new system. By then we are likely to have learned a few new changes we need, and we will have to start another sweep. We will have a chronically inconsistent education system, spending a lot of management attention just on keeping it together through the changes.

If we decide we need to expand part of the education system twofold - that would be easy. Every organization loves to expand. But what if we realize that any part of the system should be 50% smaller? Good luck convincing a government organization to shrink. Alternatively, good luck trying to retrain 30,000 employees with tenure, to do a different job.

As long as we want small changes, or expanding changes, we can easily introduce these changes to an existing establishment. As soon as we want a significant change, or a reduction in any part of an organization - we are in trouble. This is quite a limitation: If we can't make certain types of changes, we are not free to design the education system we need. One option - taken by most countries - is to settle for what we can push through the system, and forget about the rest. The price we pay for that is very high - pushing our children through the wrong education system. I don't want to pay that price. Do you?

Then we are out of the field of evolution, and in the field of revolution. Not in terms of bloodiness, but in terms of setting out to design a new system, without referring back to the old system as a starting point. Once we know what we want from the new design, we would have to think how we build it - again, not taking the existing system as a starting point, but building our design from scratch. If, by a happy coincidence, some parts of the existing system can be used in the new system without compromising the new system in any way - that would be great, because it would save time and effort. The existing system, having been there for centuries, can teach us a lot from its experience. We can benefit from historical knowledge, and from the living knowledge of people currently active in the existing system. But we mustn't let our emotional attachment to the old system, or our fear of political difficulty, to affect our thinking of what we need tomorrow.