Everyone agrees that our current education system is flawed. The surprising thing is that everyone says this no matter which country they’re from. This means that the very way our schooling systems were designed are wrong and the flaws have been passed down from country to country, generation to generation.

But… “what” exactly is flawed?

You will have people point to the exam-centric system, with others pointing to the scarcity of good teachers. Others point out that we don’t even know even know for sure what makes a good teacher, so how can we expect to have a lot of them?

The truth is that there are probably multiple things wrong. But there are some things that we can easily improve: We can stop creating memory banks and instead create students that can adapt to the digital world. Students that can filter information.

The 2 components of knowledge and how schools got them wrong

To know something, you need 2 different components:

  • You need the raw information and

  • You need to understand it (and analyze it)

Schools therefore, are naturally designed around these 2 concepts and ensuring that students have them. This is where things started going wrong.

Actually it went wrong in 2 ways.

A) Still making us memorize raw information.

At one point in our history, what limited our knowledge was access to information. It was hard to find certain books and read them. It was also hard to find back the exact page the information was on if you suddenly needed it in the future. It was even harder to own all of these books.

In fact, this period in our history was only about 30 years ago. My dad still tells me of how it was extremely hard to find information about universities overseas, having to rely on silly brochures or people sometimes having to go to the country blindly, hoping to be able to apply once they got there.

Access to information was tough. This was why the Encyclopaedia Britannica was so popular.

And this meant that schools felt an obligation to download as much data as possible into the brains of students. To have an encyclopaedia of knowledge in your brains. In a world where information was hard to find, it only made sense that people should memorize that information, especially when they didn’t know when they would be able to access it again. Or if they ever would be able to again.

But the internet has changed this now.

The digital revolution means that we can search for something and have that information at our fingertips in under 2 seconds. I don’t have to memorize the names of every bone in my body or the resistor colour-code table.

Education is what remains after one has forgotten what one has learned in school.  ~Albert Einstein

This means that the focus in school should now be less on memorizing. But the education system hasn’t caught up yet. It needs to have open book exams for everything (except maybe art, hahaha).

Rather than having too little information, we now have the opposite problem. We have too much information.

And now the new problem is that we don’t know how to filter it. There’s an overload of emails, tweets, facebook notifications and websites. How do you know what to read? How do you know what’s worth reading? How do you know how to filter your information?

This is the new skill that schools should be teaching. Yes, some basic knowledge should be in everyone’s brains. But after that, they MUST be taught how to search for information and how to filter it.

B) Measuring information instead of analysis

Let me first say that I support having exams. I have to say this because there are so many who I’ve met who say “exams are evil” without ever telling me what the alternative is. But I don’t support what it has become. It doesn’t test analysis and instead tests for information.

Here’s what happened. We needed to measure how well the students were doing so that we could tell if they were improving and if the education system was working. To measure how well the students perform, we needed exams (by the way, this is why I support having exams. To measure performance).

However, numbers by themselves don’t mean anything. We needed the relevant numbers. And what these exams were measuring wasn’t how smart the students were, but how much they had memorized.

You get what you measure. Measure the wrong thing and you get the wrong behaviors. ~John H. Lingle

This is what happens when people who fail at mathematics try to use numbers. If you look at any proper maths problem, they’ll give you useful information and some irrelevant information. To solve the problem, you don’t use the irrelevant information. You don’t need to know the speed of the car to know how heavy it is.

When those who don’t understand maths play at using numbers, they don’t measure what matters. They measure the wrong things.

They measure how many questions are answered rather than the quality of those questions, they measure how many subjects we score A’s in rather than the importance of those subjects, they measure how many co-curricular events we join rather than if those events were even useful in the first place.

They say that we are better educated than our parents’ generation.  What they mean is that we go to school longer.  It is not the same thing.  ~Richard Yates

After all, for them the idea was that they needed exams to measure performance. Full stop. There was no extra criteria of what the exams were supposed to actually measure. Under those conditions, the easiest questions to design were questions that tested memory and raw information, not subjective analysis and critical thinking. And so, because those kind of questions were simply easier to make, exams gravitated toward those questions.

So history exams become tests of memorizing dates, names and the words and speeches of some significant historical moment. Instead, it could have been about how historical moments affected the politics or economics of the nation or analysis on how one particular event laid the groundwork for another event to happen in the future. Deep, analytical questions.

What to do now that information is extremely easy to access

It takes skill to survive when you’re poor. Everyone knows that. What most people don’t know is that it also takes skill to be rich. Because when you’re past a certain point where you have enough money to live, you don’t know what the best use of your extra money is. You just start wasting it.

It’s the same thing with information. Handling too much information takes a different skill compared to having too little information. For centuries we’ve fought for enlightenment and access to education and finally, we’re starting to get it. And now that we have it, we don’t know what to do. We’re stuck with information overload and we don’t know how to filter the billions of books, emails, articles and twitter notifications that we get.

And our education systems are partly to blame. It’s a carryover from an older age of scarce information where books were scarce and expensive, and you might only be able to see the book once in your lifetime, or worse, never at all. In that situation, the focus became memorizing things, because only with having things in your head could you think about them. It was an age where very few had books, so it only made sense that the teacher would write it down and all the students would copy it. This way, when thoughts came they would have their books and their minds to refer to, to fill in the blanks of information.

When you had too little information, you had to store it up, in case you needed to use it at some point in the future.

But the world is so different now! Information is there at your fingertips. Literally. You have amazing inventions that offer to bring information to your eyeballs! Watch Google’s Project Glass (2 mins 30 secs). The whole internet, resting on your eyeballs.

When you have too much information, the skill that you need is how to filter it.

And this is the new skill that school isn’t adapting to. There should be classes on regular expressions, on keyword search, and on being able to evaluate a website’s credibility. You can’t just stuff it all into one class called I.T. (information technology) because the field of I.T. has grown so much, in the same way you can’t stuff science and maths into one class called philosophy anymore.

Filtering information

One of the biggest challenges of this generation is to present data better, simply because there’s too much of it. It’s become a generation of powerpoint slides and charts that try to compress information as much as possible. Again, a carryover from the old mentality. We shouldn’t be trying to give as much information as possible, we should be trying to remove information. We should be learning to filter.

We now have search suggestions, context aware ads, and predictive typing. What are these things? They’re all about artificial intelligence computers learning your patterns so that they can help you with information. It’s called data-mining. How do they help you? They filter out information and try to find the most relevant search results for you.

When there is too much information, the challenge then becomes: How do I filter it?

And this is a very tricky question because to filter it you would need to understand the core concepts of that subject/field of interest. Schools wouldn’t be able to get away with just teaching you facts but rather would have to dive straight into the core issues and problems. They would have to go back to the very first people who studied it and look at what problem they needed to solve and how these new ideas they invented allowed them to solve it.

You would need a core understanding of the subject. And this means that schools can’t get away with just repeating what the textbook says and asking you to pay up for something you could do at home.

You would need to be able to skim through long passages and get a rough idea of its value, to see if it’s worth reading properly.

You would need to pick and choose what you pay your attention to, because what you’re paying is expensive time and mental energy. And this is something that we have forgotten how to do.

In short, you would be a person who knows exactly what he wants and would never settle for anything with quality less than that.

Conclusion

A person who can find any information he needs in under a minute, can adapt himself to any situation.

Schools need to adapt to the digital age and teach us how to filter the myriad of information that showers us every day so that we can:

  • Search and find the information that we want when we need it.

  • Filter out the bad search results.

  • Choose what we pay attention to.

We don’t have to memorize everything. We just have to know how to find it in under a minute.