The current crisis in education

I have been a teacher for twenty years now and I have seen many trends come and go. It is difficult not to get the feeling that there is a crisis in education, with more and more students going on to higher education, deflation of the “value” of an education and increasing anxiety, depression and apathy among students.

One of the most worrying trends is the worldwide focus on achievement and standardized testing, which turns education more into something like a rat race than a humanistic endeavour. I have come to see trends in education as a tug of war between “farmer” and “hunter-gatherer” values:

farmer values	hunter-gatherer values
objective is the integration of the learner into society	objective is the independence of the learner
fosters conformity	forsters independence
standardization	individualization
Extrinsic motivation (grades, “stars”, praise)	Intrinsic motivation (passion)
Learning is “work” attitude	Learning is “growth” attitude
Sequential learning	Big picture, integrated learning
Teacher-centred	Student-centred
Rule-based learning	Explorative learning
Mastery of sets of skills	Lifelong learning and flexibility

Ironically education has become too much of a good thing, both for types: curricula are overblown,  education systems are becoming more and more expensive and student debt is mounting while at the same time highly skilled people are increasingly hard to find for companies. No surprise that constant reforms of the education system are experimented with. The farmer way of reforming is by incremental improvements whereas hunter-gatherer types increasingly find that the education system is broken and needs radical reforms.

Apart from the fact that most students lose motivation and interest in the subject matters themselves and study for grades and credits instead of developing a passion for learning, this trend seriously hurts the “hunter-gatherer” kids, in particular, the highly creative ones. These kids get filtered out by our school system, because have difficulties with the sequential learning, rote memorization and are often considered disorganized and lazy by their teachers.

Decades of filtering out creative HG kids has lead to a paradoxical situation in which graded have been deflated and lot of straight-A students do poorly at university level because they lack the required abstract and creative skills do come up with original ideas themselves. Consequently, high skilled job vacancies often can’t be filled with domestic employees.


Perhaps the time has come to rethink education more radically before more damage is done to students as well as the economy.  A good read is Peter Gray’s book Free to Learn, which examines education from a hunter-gatherer point of view. In his book Peter Gray argues convincingly IMHO that we have to hand more control over to the students themselves to make education more effective.