The “Missing” Principle: Learning Over Education
The original Nine Principles included one principle that’s missing from the Whiplash table of contents — Learning Over Education. It isn’t missing from the book, though. In some ways, it’s the meta-principle that makes all of the other principles possible.
Where education privileges traditional, one-way, top-down models of knowledge transmission, learning relies on systems that value students’ interests and give them the tools they need to discover and pursue them. As Joi likes to say, “Education is something that is done to you. Learning is something you do for yourself.” Putting learning over education means building active, connected systems that teach people how to learn, rather than focusing on specific bodies of knowledge.
“Education is something that is done to you. Learning is something you do for yourself.” —Joi Ito
More than a decade of research by Dr. Mizuko “Mimi” Ito (Joi’s sister, and chair of the MacArthur Foundation’s Connected Learning Research Network) and others shows that people learn best when they can connect the things they’re learning to their interests, their personal relationships, and the opportunities they’d like to pursue. Unfortunately, the traditional educational system in the United States (and many other countries) continues to employ a standardized, metrics-driven model of education that hasn’t changed dramatically since 1837, when Horace Mann, inspired by Prussian school reform, created the first public educational system in Massachusetts—a model which quickly spread throughout the country.
This model assumes that 12 years focusing on a few fundamental skills will provide students with the tools they need to excel in a rapidly changing social and economic environment, whatever their interests, aptitudes, or cultural backgrounds. It also emphasizes rote learning and isolated test-taking — the equivalent of sitting on a mountaintop with a number 2 pencil and no Internet access — even though the people who will be most successful in the coming decades will be those who can tap into their networks to learn the things they need to meet new challenges as they arise. This is where learning over education meets another one of the principles, pull over push — rather than asking students to stockpile knowledge, it empowers them to pull what they need from the network as they need it. It also helps them develop the necessary skills for growing, cultivating, and navigating the social networks that will help them learn throughout their lives.
The social aspects of learning-oriented systems are particularly important for engaging students. John Dewey realized this nearly a century ago, when he called for a seamless integration between students’ lives and their learning. Whatever students are interested in, having a diverse range of connections will provide them with more opportunities to explore their interests more deeply and contribute to meaningful projects and discussions.
While social media and other communications technologies have made it easier to seek out other people with shared interests, many students have not been encouraged to engage with online communities—because their institutions are underfunded, or their schools have been asked to shield them from interactions outside of their approved social circles, or the adults in charge of their educations consider the Internet a distraction. (Which, to be fair, it can be, but it can also provide students with opportunities to learn how to build and draw from professional and social networks in ways that will benefit them in the future. The value of play in learning is a topic for another post, but just as tiger cubs play at stalking and hunting, students should be free to “play” at developing the skills they’ll need throughout their lives.)
Recent changes in American educational policy have attempted to modernize the curriculum by bringing more technology into the classroom, but merely introducing new technology is like providing boats without navigational aides or sails. In too many schools, teachers lack the time to learn new technology, or don’t have the institutional support to fully integrate it into the curriculum.
One way of overcoming these issues — one which Jeff and his colleagues at Northeastern University’s Media Innovation program have introduced into their curriculum — is to invite subject-matter experts to share their knowledge with the students, while the instructor oversees assessment and directs the conversation as necessary. This kind of solution might not have been possible when both the teacher and the subject-matter expert had to be present in the classroom, but social media, streaming video, and other real-time communications technologies allow students and their teachers to connect with inspiring mentors worldwide.
Dr. Mizuko Ito refers to this as the “unbundling” of functions that have historically resided in the same person: subject-matter expertise, pedagogical mastery, and assessment. Unbundling can allow teachers to focus on their areas of expertise — pedagogy and assessment — while outside experts fuel students’ enthusiasm and help them discover their interests. In formal educational institutions, these systems can still be guided by evidence-based approaches to pedagogy and sequencing, while allowing students room to construct their own curricula, seek out mentors, and share their knowledge with their peers.
While not all of the students in every classroom will become interested in the same things, allowing them to engage in interest-driven learning often helps them grapple with tedious, but necessary, aspects of the curriculum, and leads them to a fully rounded educational experience. For example, Joi, who famously ran away from both kindergarten and university, loves diving and tropical fish. Fully exploring those interests meant learning to teach diving students, learning the mathematics underlying Boyle’s Law, and learning about water chemistry, marine ecosystems, and scientific naming conventions. More recently, he revisited linear algebra and learned Markov models because he wanted to understand what one of the students at the Media Lab was trying to teach him about machine learning. None of these things were directly related to his formal academic career, which began with computer science and ended with physics, but they were important to his continual quest for knowledge.
This leads us to another reason to focus on active, connected learning — in traditional educational systems, curriculum changes and students’ academic choices are often driven by the current and anticipated needs of the marketplace. As the pace of technological and social change continues to accelerate, students who merely absorb the education offered to them will be at a perpetual disadvantage. Students whose curiosity has been cultivated by mentors and peers, however—those who have been allowed to develop the capacity for interest-driven, self-directed, lifelong learning—will become not just passionate, but highly adept, learners; the kinds of learners who can teach themselves the things they need to know to adapt to a rapidly changing world.
Forward-thinking, innovative companies can help schools shift their focus (and, not incidentally, improve their own diversity) by developing hiring criteria that emphasize creativity and skills, rather than privileging certain degrees, certain universities, or certain programs. A flexible approach to this problem might combine technical and social tools to cast the widest possible net without sacrificing scalability. For example, a company seeking programmers could invite applicants to an open competition, then analyze their entries algorithmically or using a blind review process. From there, it could ask the best candidates who else it should talk to, potentially expanding its networks well beyond the few schools where it holds on-campus interviews, and providing opportunities to non-traditional candidates whom they might otherwise have missed.
There are already organizations working on these kinds of solutions. For example, platforms like Topcoder provide access to a wide range of designers and engineers, with a variety of different backgrounds. A 2016 feature in The New York Times Magazine included a number of different companies working to improve blind hiring techniques or alert organizations to biased language in their job listings.
As with the other principles, it will take a certain amount of courage and flexibility to elevate learning over education, but doing so will make the other nine principles easier to adopt.
Note: Portions of this essay have been adapted from Whiplash, by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe.
