Evolution of Education

Background

Innovation in credentialing is a normal, periodic, even predictable event. Higher education follows changes in the nation. The more profound the changes of the nation, the more dramatic the changes in higher education that occur in its wake. Today, all of our social institutions lag behind those changes in society. Whether it’s government or media or healthcare or finance. Imagine a time before the industrial revolution, it’s a time when the world was making a transition from a local agrarian economy to a national industrial economy. America’s colleges offered an education designed for a sectarian agricultural society. The curriculum is rooted in the Trivium Quadrivium of the middle ages. Students studied the Bible, the languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic, Rhetoric, Grammar, Arithmetic, Geometry, Astronomy, History, and the Nature of Plants. There were no courses, students studied one subject a day. The methods of instruction were recitation and disputation, which formulate debates using Aristotelian syllogisms on themes such as “we sin while we sleep.”

The Revolution and its aftermath

Then came the Industrial Revolution. In the decades before the Civil War, we saw the rise of canals, steamboats, water-powered factories. The first factory opened in 1790, by 1860, there are 140,000. Railroads, mechanized farms, and the telegraph: what these changes in transportation and communication and production cause are this mass productions of population. People move from the east to the west. People coming in from different places knit this country of localities into regions, and from regions into a fledgling nation. For the most part, while this is going on, dramatic change. Most colleges in the face of this dramatic change hold tight to their classroom curriculum and reject the calls for reform.

In fact, after years, years of criticizing Yale for the irrelevance of its curriculum, the state of Connecticut cut off funding. In 1828 Yale issued a report which surprisingly has come to be called the “Yale Report of 1828.” It defended the classical curriculum for providing students with discipline and furniture of the mind. That is, how to think and what to think about. It dismissed vocational, abbreviated courses of study, and practical education as lessor forms of education, mere training. Nonetheless, there were experiments in reform.

In the years after the Civil War, the pace and scope of the industrial revolution accelerated. And this time, it’s driven by oil and steel and booming railroads and cities the invention of the electric lines, the telephone, higher education changed dramatically — powered to a great extent by new institutions.

Instead of those colonial colleges, radical things were created. One of them was universities. John’s Hopkins brought the first graduate school to America. Cornell promised any person any study. Chicago stole all of these ideas and created its university. What these places offered was advanced studies, professional education in industrial fields like engineering and business. They engaged in research on real problems and they organized universities by specialization. We also developed some schools that focused on industrial technologies, like MIT. The curriculum changed to reflect both. Changes to reflect the times and it changed to reflect the new institutions. This new era brought courses, specialized majors, advanced studies beyond the baccalaureate, academic departments, and electives. There was also a need to change the assessment. You need mechanisms for assessments that are tied to courses that didn’t exist before.

Education would entail 12 years of schooling, 180 days a year, 4 to 5 major courses, for periods prescribed. College graduation would be tied to the accumulation of the required number of courses for credits. The modern industrial era system of higher education was established.

Coming back to the present once again, the world is undergoing an economic transformation. This time the shift is from a national analog industrial economy to a global digital information economy. The difference between the two is this. Industrial economies focus on common processes. Time and process are fixed, outcomes are variable. In contrast, information economies focus on outcomes. Process and time are variables. In terms of education, what that means is the industrial system focuses on teaching. The information economy’s system focused on learning. Times are variable, mastery is the key. That’s a revolutionary change. Of all the reforms going on in education right now, and there is a gazillion, none is larger than that or has greater implications.

What it means is that the current degrees, assessments, and accounting systems don’t work anymore. Despite their extraordinary success for more than a century, they’ve become obsolete.

We can expect the process we’re going to go through to resemble the process we’ve been through in the past. It’s not going to be different. What we’re going to see first, is the continued embrace of the current model by most colleges and universities, and reject the need to reform. Why should they? This has worked in the past. Why shouldn’t it continue to work into the future? What we will see is experimentation, first small, then increasingly wide-spread — both inside and outside of higher education. We’ll see the establishment of new models and those institutions are going to grow stronger and stronger through successful approximations or be replaced by institutions, which have taken what they’ve done to the next step.

Where do we stand today?

We have continued to embrace the current practice. Rejection leads to change for many institutions. Experimentation is ongoing. This room is full of experimenters. New models are being created. Debate and discussion are everywhere. And we are also witnessing something unfortunate. We are witnessing the simultaneous imposition of both models on our schools. What we’re asking them to do is take a fixed time and fixed process from the industrial model and combine that with fixed outcomes from the information model. So, as we move to an information economy model of credentialing, here’s what I think we need to do. We need to go beyond words like competencies and outcomes which are learning-based units comparable to industrial courses and credits. We have to develop assessments that measure student progress and attainment of the standards, or the outcomes, and help us prescribe to students what it is they need to do to achieve those competencies. Now, this is the question. Over time, we need to build those assessments on analytics and student learning, which are growing so big. We need to embed them in the assessment of curriculum — to function a lot like a GPS — discovering student misunderstandings in real-time and getting them back on track.

We need to create common credentials, micro-credentials, and badges to recognize student mastery and competencies, and learning outcomes. Degrees are insufficient for this purpose. They’re macro-credentials. They’re rooted in the package of diverse, disconnected programs and courses. They’re rooted in the philosophy of just-in-case learning — we’re going to give you these 4 years, just in case you need them.

Conclusion

One closing thought, shifting education from teaching to learning doesn’t mean vocationalizing, diluting, or diminishing it. And that was true too of the industrial universities. They did not diminish the quality of agrarian colleges. What they did was that they revitalized them and enriched them. Higher education succeeds best when it has one foot in the library, our heritage, and one foot in the street — the realities of the world in which we live.

For more information on the same, visit https://uni.xyz/competitions/learn-better

---

Sources

[i] Evolution of Education - https://medium.com/learning-machine-blog/the-evolution-of-education-eebd828b2b29