Prediction: education will be disrupted from without before it is reformed from within.

Bureaucracy and legacy will keep existing institutions from exploiting new distribution models fully. There are things that teachers can’t say or do. Their hands are tied for a multitude of reasons, in a multitude of ways. School is bloated and heavy and can’t ‘move fast and break things’. There’s too much to lose.

Attempting reform is a noble idea and an attempt to save kids from drudgery and suffering in the glorified day-care centers that they’re stifled and sedated in. But it strikes me as a losing game, pushing against a PULL door. Is that the best use of our energy?

Great teachers inspire their students IN SPITE of the structures around them, noy because of them.

Schools were never designed to maximize a love of learning, and they can’t be repurposed because the use-factory-lines-to-assemble-factory-workers model is deep in the DNA of public schools. Ken Robinson speaks about this, and he speaks about how it ought to be instead (which I completely agree with). I think it’s pretty telling that he doesn’t share his personal take on how we’re going to get from A to B. My guess is that it’s disruptive and might make people uncomfortable.

Trying to repurpose a school (a factory for making factory workers) is like trying to repurpose a ship into a car. Not just a tiny boat, mind you, but a massive aircraft carrier with crew and officers that have depended on those systems for over a century.

The ship has run aground and we’re trying to put wheels on it. It’s sad.

“If I had asked people what they wanted,” Henry Ford said, “They’d have wanted better horses.”

That’s the frustrating problem at the heart of education, and my theory as to why Elon Musk stammered when trying to give Salman Khan an answer to “How can we do things better?” (Answer is disruption. It’s painful and uncomfortable to suggest.)

We have an old problem: There’s a lack of imagination and a clinging to the familiar past. This won’t change in ten or twenty years- rerouting human psychology is a far more ambitious issue than fixing education and I won’t even try. (Well okay- the answer to that is to send people to Space. More on that later.)

But education. We’re trying to put wheels on ships. We need to build cars instead. This will not receive support from the shipbuilders. This cannot and will not be endorsed or supported by the public or by governments until it first demonstrates greater utility.

So here’s my roadmap for how I think this will play out, and I think it’s happening already. What kids do outside of school is going to matter much, much more than their grades- and I’m not taking about tuition.

If we haven’t already, we’re going to start seeing more success stories of people who avoided the beaten path- and then parents will start demanding that their kids spend less time in school so that they can build businesses and make art and create youtube channels and start blogs.

School will ultimately be less of an artificial “beginner zone” that kids spend 15 years in and more of a guided layer overlaying real life.

“Here’s what’s exciting about the world. Here’s what’s horrible. What would you like to do about it? Let’s help you find out, and let’s help you learn how to find or build the tools and skills you’ll need to survive, to succeed.”

This won’t be for everybody of course. The problem that public schools solved was fucking incredible- literacy for the masses. That was unthinkable in the past. Now it’s a given. Once it was provided for a select few, now we take it for granted (except in certain horrible places).

Self-empowerment will be the new literacy. The ability to learn and unlearn, to make decisions, take responsibility, to lead, to take risks- a few people will demand it. And they will be what the rest aspire to emulate.

So far, these people have been the outliers. What happens when 10 or 20% of people are new-literate, instead of 1%? (There are many university graduates who are new-illiterate, by the way.)

It seems almost self-evident to me that this is the future. The question is- how do we accelerate that? We begin by demonstrating that our shabbily built cars work better on land than your aircraft carrier with training wheels.

PS: I get frustrated and amused when I see smart people working on building wheels for aircraft carriers instead of cars. But I suppose there’s more money to be made, and you’ll need resources before you can start building those cars without support or funding.

What I ask is that you don’t get comfortable being a wheel-supplier. The future awaits.