Should education be a layered cake?

I was having a conversation with my friend Aater Suleman (Twitter, LinkedIn) about how education is missing experimentation and self-guided learning. And he disagreed with me saying that a structured education and training program solves the you don’t know what you don’t know problem. Which got me into thinking and reminded me of the example of a layered cake from Agile software development principles.

For those not familiar with the analogy from Agile circles this article discusses it. But to give a brief description, when designing a software solution you have multiple components, some visible to the customer, some not. Some needed for security, some needed for maintainability. The key is that you need to ensure you are getting features to customer. So you use the lean philosophy of “smaller batch sizes” to partition the work in such a way that you are always delivering complete products to the customer.

Photo by David Holifield on Unsplash

So for example if you need to create an ordering process. You may have a larger vision of you place the order, it starts an automated process to service your order, you have a cancelation button, a repeat order button. The idea is to descope the work so you are able to sell to the customer sooner. Instead of implementing a shopping cart your website may start with a phone call that goes directly to your cell. You take down the order manually. Next you upgrade to simple shopping carts buying one item at a time and phone for larger orders or cancelations until you find yourself as big as Amazon.

This is hard work. The moment the idea comes to you, you start envisioning the possibilities. You need to be very creative to come up with alternate ways of thinking that allow you to come up with a smaller scope. The worst part is that every step of the way that you’re thinking about this you’re going to feel like you’re compromising your vision.

What do we gain by taking this approach:

1. We start making progress on the desired end results (sales done to customer)
2. We start collecting feedback sooner
3. We ensure balanced development of the capabilities needed to run the business
4. We stop procrastinating through over engineering

The last point, hate to break it to you but that is true. Each of us has things that are within our comfort zone. Most likely because we understand these issues better. And so we understand the present and future issues that need to be resolved better. As much as it may feel like you’re doing real work, when you focus on the layer of the cake that you are an expert in, you’re procrastinating about actually doing the work that you need to do.

When I apply this lens to how we educate I don’t see a layered cake. I see a multi-year process before allowing them to exercise basic skills they would need in real life. If I were to think of it in the context of what I’m looking for in a candidate that I’m interviewing:

1. Ability to acquire information: Start making children literate in elementary school.
2. Baseline information: We do need a foundation of information on which new information can be acquired and contextualized and this is probably what education sees as its mission. Help people acquire knowledge.
3. Analyze information: You can argue children get this in math class but if they did you wouldn’t hear people say “when will I ever use this in real-life?”
4. Understand complex information: Technically science class tries to achieve this but it is just as easy to game the system through memorization. But it is something needed by college
5. Developing original ideas: While we were all blessed with some teachers that encouraged this the first rigorous exercise for many is in graduate school
6. Iterating and refining your idea: School actively teaches us iteration is bad. You need to give the correct answer. The first true iteration many do is probably at the PhD level.

This part of classroom lessons and instruction we have covered very well. Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

And isn’t that scary. In one of the most critical skills in life anyone can have, school not only doesn’t teach it but trains you into believing that there is no taking back of mistakes. They do however, manage to teach us about King Robert The Bruce and how he achieved success for his people by living, “try, try, and try again”

We need more of this. The complete scientific method. While what school provides us with the first step. 16 years of researching the topic area. Image courtesy wikipedia article on scientific method

With all of K-12 education and sometimes even a bachelor’s all that we have trusted our children, sorry my bad I mean young adults, is with the first step of the scientific method. Why? Because they can’t handle this? Sorry but they have just graduated from observing their parents make gibberish noises to learning how to modulate their throat and interpret those sounds into a language. That’s something cryptographers do after they usually get their PhD.

I would think most of you not outraged right now would be thinking that they need to have that baseline of information. And that is exactly the point behind my comparison to the layer cake. I agree, they need to have the baseline of information. But every time they try to exercise the other skills that are equally necessary, we procrastinate and over engineer. We discourage them, ask them to wait a bit and keep on giving them a larger baseline of information. And so I am going to assert, yes education should be redone as a layered cake.