Here’s something that bothers and confuses me: a lot of the thinking and discussion about the future of education is, in my opinion, overly fixated on the student/teacher/school model. People claim to talk about the gamification of education or innovation in education but often they’re talking about the gamification of schooling, innovation in schooling.

“Great new things come from the margins” -pg

Public schools are a recent phenonena in the context of human civilization. Literacy used to be coupled to monarchy, clergy, aristocracy. Schools as we see them today were revolutionary when they were introduced- meant to keep children from stealing laborers jobs, meant to train them to be cogs in the machine. Mind you, this was a good thing then. The machine had a shortage of cogs, and rewarded cogs handsomely. Today, there is an oversupply of cogs. Kids understand this.

There’s a general phenomena of migrant children working harder in schools than cushy, comfy kids. There are kids in China and India who’ll whoop everybody’s asses with their incredible work ethic. I’m tempted to see this more as a consequence of their circumstances rather than any intrinsic quality- they work harder because it is rational for them to do so, the payoffs, etc favor that. Maybe it’s dependence on parents and a need to prove themselves. A greater sense of responsibility, burden, purpose. Maybe it’s a clearer sense of “I can improve my station in life by working hard.” I don’t know. It’s complex.

The point is we have an oversupply of cogs now- and for a lot of the newer cogs, it’s rational to work hard to be the best, because the improvement in quality of life is tremendous. For the middle class cogs, its just misery- a lifetime of shitty work for a not-much-less-shittier life. Who wants that? It’s really more rational to seek the simpler, more inmediate and dependable pleasures- cigarettes, tv, reddit, porn, etc. There are hundreds of thousands of young people like this in the world and I see them on reddit and tumblr everyday. School, in its current incarnation, is just a shitty deal for them. They suffer from learned helplessness- something the migrant kids don’t have, because the relationship between efforr and payoff is clearer for the latter group. (This is just armchair analysis- I could be wrong. I invite your criticism. Specifically, I’m eager to hear your alternate theories to the general malaise and ennui of today’s young students in the developed world. Why are so many of them so miserable?)

On to disruption. We’re starting to develop a clearer picture of how disruption happens. Self-disruption almost never happens. Industry leaders are invested in their built-up solution, and are unable to take the risks necessary to try a primitive, childish, untested new industry… until it wipes them out. Kodak would never have invested in digital cameras. Railway companies did not get into air travel. Nokia’s dominance in phones got crushed when smartphones came about. None of the traditional media companies were particularly involved in social media initially.

Similarly, schools will get disrupted by something outside of the existing school paradigm. How will that play out? I can’t be sure, because disruption is never clearly obvious until it’s too late. But here’s how I see it happening. Some small group of people is going to have remarkable results. It’s members are going to be more creative, more skilled, and most importantly, more valued in the marketplace. Maybe a bunch of musicians are going to become marketing maestros, creating a ton of value. Maybe a bunch of after-school coders are going to build startups and get acquired, bypassing the entire degree-resume industrial complex. Degrees and resumes communicate pathetically little information in a search-savvy world. I’m not saying they’re entirely useless- being skilled with a sword is an indicator of physical strength, discipline, practice and a bunch of other virtues. But you’re still probably going to get screwed in a gunfight. Thing is, in this metaphor, guns are still toys- little entertaining oddities. The airplane was initially thought to have no military value.

All that matters for survival in this massive human farm is your ability to create value. Schools don’t really teach you that, they teach you to follow instructions and to be interchangeable. To be a cog. In the past, being a good cog was synonymous with being a value creator. Today, I’m not so sure.

What is the value you create in the world, which you ultimately exchange for goods and services, security? How did school help you do that?

There will always be room in the world for institutions of learning and skill acquisition. Doctors will need to go to medical school. Until, maybe, we have machines and robots render large quantities of them irrelevant. Lawyers will need to go to law school. Until we develop superior means of resolving disputes. Neither of those things is going to happen overnight, of course, but we have to remember that professions, jobs don’t last forever. They didn’t always exist- they were a recent human invention- and their golden era may be up, or at least waning.

If I could go back in time, I’d have spent more time writing. I’d have spent more time playing music, practicing. I’d have read more books. I’d have taught myself enough programming to do some data mining. I’d have taught myself enough design skills to make simple infographics.

Consider the convergence of academia and business. As things get more data driven- consider how Facebook and Twitter and OKCupid have access to social data that social scientists can only dream of- it will be clear that the best place to study such social phenomena will be within those organizations. Musicians no longer need to depend on record labels, writers can now self-publish, and a lot of learning- both for pleasure and personal economic gain- can and will happen outside of school.

I hated school as a kid. I much prefer the “real world”, even with bills, because I am much closer to the value I create in the world. Increasingly, education will move away from the artificially cloistered tutorial/training zones of schools. I imagine it’ll look more like a general layer over the world. I’ve noticed students from UNT on multiple tweet chats, learning about marketing and social media from people actually working in the field. This is going to be a more widespread thing, I think.