#61. My Vision for the Future of Education

What will replace k-12 and college?

Dec 16, 2024

The cat is slowly scratching its way out of the bag. Ever more people are becoming aware of the colossal waste of money, tragic waste of young people’s time, and cruel imposition of stress and anxiety produced by our coercive educational system.

The Failure of Our Current System

Children come into the world biologically designed to educate themselves. Their curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and willfulness were all shaped by natural selection to serve the function of education (here, here, and here). So what do we do? At great expense (roughly $16,000 per child per year on average for public K-12), we send them to schools that deliberately shut off their educative instincts--quashing their curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and willfulness--and then very inefficiently and ineffectively try to educate them through systems of reward and punishment that play on hubris, shame, and fear.

Research shows that for far less expense, and with joy rather than pain, we can facilitate, rather than suppress, children’s and teens’ natural ways of educating themselves with excellent results (see here and here). Ever more families are becoming aware of this and are finding ways of removing their children from imposed schooling in favor of Self-Directed Education or something close to it (here).

Much of my previous writing about education has to do with the years that we unfortunately think of as “the K thru 12 years” (as if education is or ever could be a graded sort of thing in which learning is staged along an assembly line). I have written about how doing away with the whole graded system and letting young people do and learn whatever interests them at any given time, in age-mixed settings, works so well in schools such as Sudbury Valley and the many other settings that have been developed to facilitate Self-Directed Education (here and here).

But what about those years of schooling that we call “higher education,” especially the four years toward a college degree? Many young people, because of family and societal pressure or because it is a requirement for the career they wish to pursue, see that as essentially compulsory, too. For them, college is just a continuation of high school—it’s grades 13, 14, 15, & 16. And those years of schooling are even much more expensive than the earlier ones, which expense must generally be paid by the parents or through loans that can saddle a person for decades. Moreover, there is growing evidence that little is learned in those years. One college professor, Shamus Khan, who is critical of the endeavor he is part of, has described it as a socially sanctioned system of discrimination. He wrote (quoted here): “I am part of a great credentialing mill. … Colleges admit already advantaged Americans. They don’t ask them to do much or learn much. At the end of four years, we give them a certificate. That certificate entitles them to higher earnings. Schools help obscure the aristocratic quality of American life. They do so by converting birthrights (which we all think are unfair) into credentials (which have the appearance of merit).”

Research has documented the paucity of actual learning that occurs during the years of college (here). Because of the way we structure it, education in college is that commodity for which people try to get the least they can for their money. This was true even when I was in college decades ago, and it is even truer today. Research shows that average study time per week for college students has declined from about 25 hours in 1960 to about 12 hours in recent years and that students deliberately avoid classes that call for original writing or considerable amounts of reading (here and here).

College administrators have long argued that the main benefit of a college education is a gain in critical thinking, but systematic studies show that such gains are actually quite small overall, and for approximately 45% of students they are non-existent (here). I’ve so far been unable to find any evidence that critical thinking improves over four years of college any more than it would have, in the same or similar people, if they had spent those four years doing something else. In a survey, by PayScale Inc., 50% of employers complained that the college graduates they hire aren’t ready for the workplace, and the primary reason they gave is lack of critical thinking skills (here). The rote ways of learning endemic to high school, which involve little or no critical thinking, are increasingly the ways of college as well. My own observations suggest that critical thinking grows primarily through pursuing one’s own interests and engaging in serious, self-motivated dialogue with others who share those interests, not from standard classroom practices. (But see my discussion of how critical thinking can be brought into classrooms here.)

A Three-Phase, Rational System of Education

I don’t know just how or how fast the change will happen, but I think the days of K-12 and four years of college are numbered and sanity will begin to prevail in the educational world. I envision a future with something like the following three-phase approach to education:

Phase I. Discovery: Learning about your world, your self, and how the two fit together.

The first fifteen to eighteen years of a person’s life are, in this view, primarily years of self-chosen play and exploration in which young people make sense of the world around them, try out different ways of being in that world, develop and pursue passionate interests, and create at least a tentative plan about how they might support themselves as independent adults. This is what happens already with young people educating themselves in schools or learning centers designed for Self-Directed Education or in home-and-community based Self-Directed Education, commonly called unschooling. In my vision for the future, publicly supported learning-and-recreation centers would provide resources that enable everyone, regardless of family income, to educate themselves well in a community of others (here).

Phase II. Exploring a career path.

One of the many problems with our current educational system is that even after 17 years of schooling (K-12 plus college), students have little understanding of potential careers. The only adult vocation most have witnessed directly is that of classroom teacher. A student may have decided, for some reason (maybe because it sounds prestigious), to be a doctor, or lawyer, or scientist, or business executive, but the student knows little about what it means to be such a thing.

In the rational system of education I have in mind, students would spend time working in real-world settings that help them understand what a career entails before they undertake specialized training for that career. For example, the person interested in becoming a doctor might work in a hospital for a period, maybe as an orderly or a medical assistant of some sort. Maybe it would be an official apprenticeship, with a bit of course work as part of it, or maybe just a regular job. By this means, the person would gain a practical understanding of what it is like to be a doctor and make a realistic assessment of whether or not this would be, for him or her, a good path. Do I like being in hospitals and around sick people? Do I have the kind of compassion and fortitude, as well as thinking skills, required to be a good doctor? If the answer is no, then it is time to try out a different career path.

The same is true for any other career. The person interested in law might work in a law office; the person interested in being a scientist might work as a lab assistant or field assistant; the person interested in becoming an engineer might work as an engineering assistant. In this way they would further their education and gain real world experience while making at least some money rather than spending money. In the process, the person would get to know, and be known by, professionals in the realm of his or her own interests, who could write recommendations that would help in applications for further training or advancement.

Phase III. Becoming credentialed for specialized work.

For some sorts of work, it is crucial to be sure that the people doing it know what they are doing. Those are the jobs for which specialized training, guided by experts and evaluated by rigorous testing, may be essential. Before I hire a surgeon, dentist, lawyer, electrician, or plumber I want to be sure that the person has been credentialed and licensed through means that include proof of competence. This is the only phase of the educational system where testing should be essential. Such credentialing might in some cases be part and parcel of apprenticeships, or in other cases occur in schools for professional training, such as vocational schools, medical schools or law schools. So, the young woman who has explored a medical career by working as a medical assistant might, at some point, apply to medical school. For admission, she would have to present evidence that she knows what she is getting into and has prepared herself adequately to begin such training; and then, at the end, she would have to prove competence in whatever medical specialty she had chosen.

The Future Has Begun

I’ve described this all as a vision for the future, but it is a future that is already emerging, though slowly. Over recent years ever more people, at least in the United States, are leaving conventional K-12 schools for homeschooling or other alternative education. Surveys conducted in 2022 indicated that somewhere between 5 and 7 percent of U.S. children were homeschooled then (here), and more recent reports from individual states indicate that, in most states, homeschooling rates have increased considerably since then (here). Homeschooling families nearly always move in the direction of allowing their children more self-chosen play and exploration than their children were permitted in schools, and as the number of homeschooling families in any given area increases, families have more opportunities to get together to form play and learning centers for their kids.

There is also, in recent years, a decline in the number of young people choosing to attend college. Peak college enrollment in the US occurred in 2011 and has been trending down ever since (here and here). The decline is partly but not entirely because of a decline in number of college-aged people in the US during this period. Other reasons have to do with the growing expense of college and, for some, the realization that there has been an expansion in other routes toward careers. The decline in college enrollment has especially occurred for men (here). By 2023, only 44% of college students were men. This may be at least partly because many of the well-paying, satisfying careers that don’t require college are seen stereotypically as male careers—electrician, plumber, carpenter, mechanic, and the like.

In recent years, many companies that formerly required a college degree for employees have dropped that requirement (here). They are finding that a college education does not equip people with the skills required for the job, so they are better off hiring enthusiastic younger people, who are eager to be trained on the job and willing to start at a lower salary. Toward that end, there has recently been a renewal of apprenticeship programs. According to the US Labor Department, the number of new apprentices in the US increased by 82% between 2008 and 2021 (here) and the types of careers for which apprenticeships have appeared have broadened.

Further Thoughts

What will happen, in this vision, to the educational institutions we currently have in place? The graded K-12 schools will gradually disappear, replaced by age-mixed learning centers supporting Self-Directed Education. Universities will continue on, with public support as centers of science and scholarship. They will not enroll “students,” as we think of them today, but, like other institutions, will bring in assistants and apprentices, some of whom may move on, through experience and desire, to become full-fledged scientists and scholars.

As an afterthought, I feel compelled to note that, for many students, college does serve one quite valuable function in today’s world. It is a sort of half-way house toward adulthood. It is a place to get used to living away from home, to be exposed to a greater diversity of people than they might have previously known, and through that to a greater diversity of points of view about the world. In that sense it can be a broadening experience, shaking one out of parochialism. But the apprenticeships and early work experiences I have described here could serve a similar function. I recognize a need to give more thought about that. Perhaps we could develop something similar to college dormitories, where emerging adults could live in community, if they wish, as they worked on various apprenticeships. They might be a bit like retirement homes for seniors, but at the beginning rather than ending of adult life. I would also love to see an expansion of domestic versions of the Peace Corps, such as AmeriCorps VISTA, where groups of young adults from various walks of life could live and work together to combat poverty and other domestic problems.

And now, what do you think? Do you envision an educational future like, or different from, what I have described here? Am I overly optimistic or completely off track in my projection? What experience or evidence do you have that tends to confirm or refute the suggestions here? This substack is, in part, a forum for discussion. Your questions, thoughts, stories, and opinions are valued and treated respectfully by me and other readers, regardless of the degree to which we agree or disagree. Readers’ comments add to the value of these letters for everyone.

Play Makes Us Human

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