Nothing in our education system prepared us for a pandemic
Nothing in our education system prepared society for a pandemic. The education system teaches that there are right answers — if you get them, you’re smart, if you don’t you’re stupid. We purport to assess ability by the frequency with which the right answer is achieved — so learning has become a way of thinking as others do, not thinking for oneself.
So binary a view of the world flies in the face of the complexity and ambiguity that characterizes epidemics. What is right one day — walk outside and shake hands with a colleague — is wrong the next. The answers to most questions — is debt good? Should companies strive for responsibility and, if so, what does that mean? Is Dickens a great writer than George Eliot? — can’t be answered with simple yes/no replies. But that’s what testing demands. Even essay questions (at least up to university entrance) are graded according the number of correct insights they collate.
Technology exacerbates this mindset. There is a right or wrong way to use apps and software. Many of the right ways are reinforced by auto-correction. Similarly the fashion for ‘nudge’ — designing systems that nudge us to make the right choices — presupposes that there is but one good behavior (designed behind the scenes by those mostly smart boys (96% of the world’s code is written by men) and a few girls who learned to repeat, or second-guess the right answer.
Much of this so-called education is really workforce training, whereby obedience and conformity are conferred at the high cost of creativity and independent thinking. In the strictly organized, hierarchical, bureaucratic organizations of the past, this was at least efficient, even if not exactly joyous or fulfilling of human capacity. In world that was fairly predictable, this kind of learning was serviceable.
But in an age of complexity, this kind of education serves us poorly. In all the discussions of COVID-19, everyone keeps asking ‘wht does the science say?’ But science didn’t attend high school; it doesn’t say just one, unequivocal thing and it can take years, decades, centuries to understand where the balance of evidence lies. We may now expect to spend a lot of time working in conditions that are ambiguous, where total information is impossible, where there may be multiple solutions — or none. This is an age of experiments and trade offs, one that absolutely demands creativity in looking (what is important but might not be in obvious places) and in thinking (with what I have now, what could I do?) Huge leaps can be made by asking different questions — the kinds that elicit multiple answers, not binary choices. The first obvious ideas might not work. If you think this makes you stupid, you won’t persevere. If you understand that the world is just ambiguous, you will.
In our search for ways to find vaccines, invent exit strategies for pandemics, ways to keep companies alive and employers and employees committed to one another and to the society we serve, simple, pat or ideological answers will not get us anywhere at the speed we need right now. Individual super stars will struggle because it’s impossible to know enough, fast enough — even for self-proclaimed polymaths.
Most people will have only pieces of the puzzle. An effective vaccine is useless without cunning manufacturing processes which are useless without a strong distribution network which is useless without healthcare professionals that patients have reason to trust. Not one of these alone can achieve anything. Answers on a test? That’s baby stuff these days. The education system that prepares citizens capable of handling this kind of complexity — that’s the one truly fit for the future.
