Opinion

I just finished up Bruce Sterling’s latest (non-fiction) book, Tomorrow Now, a vision of the future yet to come. The book is fashioned to follow the phases of life, as recounted by Jaques in Shakespeare’s “As You Like It“: The Infant, The Student, The Lover, The Soldier, The Justice, The Pantaloon, and Oblivion. While waiting for class, I overheard one of my fellow classmates complaining about their recent accounting exam: “It must have looked horrible; my paper was a mess! I knew what I had to do, but I kept wishing for Excel, so I could just ‘Insert Row'”. The comment jived with one particular section of Sterling’s chapter on “The Student” (and further reinforced the feelings reflected in one of my recent blog entries).

In “The Student”, Sterling comments on the difference between his own career’s responsibilities and the preparations currently being provided by the high school education system to his teenage daughter:

My older daughter, by contrast, is a student in high school. Compared to her lackadaisical father, she lives in harsh paramilitary conditions. She has a dress code. She fills out permission forms and tardy slips, stands in lines, eats in a vast barracks mess room.

. . .

Today’s schoolchildren are held to grueling nineteenth century standards. Today’s successful adults learn constantly, endlessly developing skills and moving from temporary phase to phase, much like preschoolers. Children are in training for stable roles in large paternalistic bureaucracies. These enterprises no longer exist for their parents. Once they were everywhere, these classic gold-watch institutions: railroads; post offices; the old-school military; telephone, gas, and electrical utilities. Places where the competitive landscape was sluggish, where roles were well defined. The educated child became the loyal employee who could sit still, read, write, and add correctly – for thirty years.

I find examinations a prime example of this obsolescence in current teaching methodologies. After all, when’s the last time a manager asked you to perform a task without access to a computer, the Internet, or other reference materials?

To make matters worse, some topics are inherently un-examinable, at least on paper. For example, in the MBA I took a course on Organization Behaviour – and a short essay answer exam. Does my ability to write a considered essay about how I’d resolve an interpersonal conflict accurately reflect my ability when faced with real people and forced to think (and talk) on my feet? Probably not.

The scary thing is this: despite the existence of university education systems for hundreds of years, we still haven’t come up with anything better. In fact, I’m not even sure anyone’s even working on the problem.