Eduardo Angel Visuals

How to fix a broken education system. My thoughts.

For sev­eral weeks I’ve been seri­ously think­ing about our edu­ca­tion sys­tem, and today I’d like to share my ideas on the subject.

The cur­rent edu­ca­tion sys­tem is bro­ken, out­dated, and, dare I say it—dangerous. How did we arrive at this point, and what can we do to rem­edy the sit­u­a­tion? Let’s start by answer­ing this ques­tion: why are things such a mess? I believe the sys­tem we have today is struc­turally the same exact sys­tem that our par­ents, and in some instances, even our grand­par­ents experienced.

The egal­i­tar­ian arrange­ment of the sys­tem is chiefly designed to mass pro­duce fac­tory work­ers. Uni­forms, bells, 2B pen­cils, stan­dard­ized tests and text­books, and strict sched­ules pre­pare kids to fol­low the same rules after graduation—memorize what’s impor­tant, don’t think deeply, obey the rules, don’t ques­tion author­ity, work hard, and fol­low the clear and des­ig­nated path, in order to be rewarded with a raise, a pro­mo­tion, and, finally, a decent retirement.

You may be inclined to ask “What’s wrong with this set up?” I believe that the edu­ca­tional model no longer takes into account the real­ity of post-educational life. How many stu­dents fin­ish­ing col­lege right now will have a job wait­ing for them? And, of the lucky ones land­ing a pay­ing job, how many have a clear and rel­a­tively safe career path until retire­ment? We are told a degree is a must. Why? Most of us will work for small busi­ness or as free­lancers from now on. Did you know that 15% of park­ing lot atten­dants have B.A. degrees?

I can remem­ber my father buy­ing IBM shares for a fairly con­sis­tent annual return. If today the price keeps going up, but the return is uncer­tain until the end of the year, would you buy IBM? I cer­tainly would not. Now replace IBM shares for “col­lege edu­ca­tion” and annual return for “jobs” and this is exactly the sit­u­a­tion we are fac­ing today. Only 49% of grad­u­ates from the classes of 2009 to 2011 had found a full-time job within a year of fin­ish­ing school, com­pared with 73% for stu­dents who grad­u­ated in the three years prior.

How can the prob­lem be solved? I don’t know. But the solu­tion requires a new way of eval­u­at­ing stu­dent per­for­mance, and a new way of edu­cat­ing future edu­ca­tors. An improved sys­tem should also reduce the costs while increas­ing the avail­abil­ity of qual­ity learn­ing. Colom­bia, with a pop­u­la­tion of 44 mil­lion, has 120 archi­tec­ture schools. The UK, with 60 mil­lion peo­ple, has only 12 schools. Do we need to guess who will have a greater rate of suc­cess after fin­ish­ing school, be able to pay her stu­dent loans, and con­cen­trate her efforts on becom­ing a bet­ter pro­fes­sional (and not only to sur­vive)? Did you know that two-thirds of stu­dents from the class of 2010, the lat­est fig­ures avail­able, grad­u­ated with stu­dent loans, with an aver­age tab of $25,250.

A friend told me recently that “we are still dealing with the ‘Protestant Work Ethic’ [work hard and you will succeed individually] instead of implementing a more ‘Social Ethic’ [we all do better working as a group].” I could not agree more with this assessment.

Game strategy, social media, and video tutorials are incredible tools that are readily available to create hands-on, project-based, interdisciplinary courses. But these tools are often ignored, and when implemented they are forced into the traditional system. No wonder the results are far from ideal in most cases.

This beautiful video by Tobias Precht and Jonas Kimmelmann shows an intriguing way to combine the current system with some of the current, and future, learning tools. The video is 6 minutes long, but absolutely worth the extra 270 seconds…

During my architectural photography workshops, I obviously talk about aperture, lights, lenses and other photo-specific topics. But I also show what I consider the best parts of Julius Shulman’s documentary “Visual Acoustics” (streaming it directly from Netflix), I demo tools like Google Earth and several smart phone applications that I use on location, I talk about architectural renderings, show students the most beautiful examples of CGI animations, deliver my handouts as downloadable PDFs from my website, and often share large images and documents via Dropbox with them. I can’t see why we could not teach history or literature in a similar way. Problems can never be fully understood in the context of a single academic discipline.

I believe that flexibility, teamwork, accounting, time management, project management, languages (especially Spanish and Chinese), are more important job-targeted skills to have now than ever.

As en educator, and proud uncle of two boys, I am especially worried with the amount of legal medications administered to kids. Are we really facing an ADHD epidemic nationwide? Why should children pay the price for an outdated system that is incapable of grabbing the interest of people bombarded with non-stop electronic stimuli? And not only the students are bored. According to another research, only 44 percent of American teachers are satisfied with their jobs. That’s the lowest number in two decades and an 18-point drop since 2008.

And the issue doesn’t only concern kids. Just a little more than two years ago, the standard attention span of a YouTube video used to be three minutes. Now most people will not finish watching something that is more than two minutes long. A professional video editor told me last week that we needed to edit an upcoming project to less than 90 seconds to ensure that we grab viewers’ attention!

Do we need to think outside the box or is the box the thing that needs to be fixed? To succeed in the twenty-first century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks and learn from failure. Can we achieve this by having our kids watch Barney DVDs by themselves all day long? I seriously doubt it.

A few weeks ago, a school administrator tried to block Google’s chat feature, but his seventh grade students simply shared a new Google Document amongst themselves and used the sidebar chat to talk with each other. I am sure the administrator wasn’t happy, but I hope he understood that the answer is not preventing access, but using the current tools in more efficient ways. Imagine, for example, if that “workaround” Google Doc was this article and the seventh grade students could offer their feedback, and tell us how would they like to learn what we are trying to teach them.

Learning in most conventional education settings is a passive experience: The instructor talks, the students listen. But at the most innovative schools, classes are “hands-on,” and students are creators, not mere information consumers.

One of my consulting clients recently mentioned that his architecture magazine, which has been around for 30-plus years, was coming to an end due to poor sales. I suggested switching to a digital version, which could dramatically lower costs and potentially reach a lot more people. His answer? “I don’t know how to do that.” My reply: “Ask your students! You have face to face contact with hundreds of architecture students every year, simply ask them what kind of content they would like to consume, what kind of articles, videos, and photos they prefer. Once you understand what they want, hire someone else to do it under your expert supervision.”

By analyzing the way we respond to news, movies, images, and TV shows, Facebook, Google, and other data-mining companies will be able to forecast fashion trends, box office hits, and viral sensations. Why can’t we apply the same principles to education?

My five cents. What’s your take? Please share it below.

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UPDATE: 0512 “Har­vard Busi­ness School For The Face­book Age.” Stu­dents are work­ing in “hives,” new cir­cu­lar, col­lab­o­ra­tive work­spaces, which are part of a rad­i­cal rethink of the sto­ried school’s estab­lished cur­ricu­lum, its ped­a­gogy, stu­dent pro­files, and out­comes, to its brand iden­tity and phys­i­cal spaces.

UPDATE: 0520 The Fed­er­a­tion of Amer­i­can Sci­en­tists reported that stu­dents only recall 10% of what they read and 20% of what they hear. If visual accom­pany an oral pre­sen­ta­tion, reten­tion rises to 30%. But if they do the job them­selves, even if only as a sim­u­la­tion, stu­dents can remem­ber 90%.

UPDATE: 0521 NMC Hori­zon Project 2012 K-12 Edi­tion. “The abun­dance of resources and rela­tion­ships made eas­ily acces­si­ble via the Inter­net is increas­ingly chal­leng­ing us to revisit our roles as edu­ca­tors. Insti­tu­tions must con­sider the unique value that each adds to a world in which infor­ma­tion is every­where. In such a world, sense-making and the abil­ity to assess the cred­i­bil­ity of infor­ma­tion are para­mount. Men­tor­ing and prepar­ing stu­dents for the world in which they will live is again at the fore­front. K-12 insti­tu­tions have always been seen as crit­i­cal paths to edu­ca­tional cre­den­tial­ing, but chal­lenges from com­pet­ing sources are
redefin­ing what these paths can look like.” The report is avail­able here.

6 Emerg­ing Tech­nolo­gies from the 2012 K-12 Hori­zon Report

UPDATE: 0522 I had no idea Bill Gates was such a great speaker! Here he talks about state bud­gets which are “rid­dled with account­ing tricks that dis­guise the true cost of health care and pen­sions and weighted with wors­en­ing deficits — with the financ­ing of edu­ca­tion at the los­ing end.” Fantastic.

UPDATE: 0527 Explor­ing the poten­tial of book pub­lish­ing in dig­i­tal for­mats by IDEO. “What hap­pens when the read­ing expe­ri­ence catches up with new tech­nolo­gies?”