"I am, at the Fed level, libertarian; at the state level, Republican; at the local level, Democrat; at the family/friends level, socialist."
- Geoffrey D Graham
I've believed for most of my life that big government was a good thing. The government's job is to take care of the people, and the world becomes a better place when more people are taken care of. Higher taxes meant better education, better health care, better transportation, and better lives for all. We became the dominant species because of our unparalleled ability to cooperate. We are only as good as our weakest links.
While I certainly still think that public goods and the institutions that maintain them are important, I've slowly begun to understand the distortionary effect that scale has on how effective institutions can be. Systems that operate at a national scale produce all sort of externalities. And more importantly, they are especially weak because they can only try one thing at a time. Iteration and experimentation can only happen on a much larger time scale. And when you don't have iteration and experimentation, innovation suffers. When you don't have all the answers, you need innovation.
There won't be many decisive conclusions in this post, but one thing I am absolutely sure about is that we really don't know what the best systems are for society - whether that's education, healthcare, or the economy. How best to govern society is not a science. Theories in the realm of social science are not falsifiable. It seems absolutely absurd to me that there are a few people sitting around a table that decide what every child in the country should learn, precisely because we have very little idea on how best to educate them. With the number of suicides increasing at an exponential rate, it seems ridiculous that these people still mandate that children be taught the capital of Rwanda instead of what we as a society know about happiness. Especially when the people that sit at that table fluctuate according to the political cycle. Education will be the main topic of this post.
In the Rational Optimist, Matt Ridley argues that the most important tool of humanity was not weapons, fire, or our opposable thumbs, but our capacity for non-reciprocal based value exchanges. The ability to have exchanges of objects of different value from which both parties benefit is one unique to homo sapiens. Trade encouraged specialization, which caused technological innovation, which encouraged more specialization, which caused even more technological innovation. We evolved from our lives as hunter-gatherers and transcended the food chain because we understood from our earliest days that different people are good at different things, and we would all benefit if we did what we were good at.
Specialization is in our nature because of specific knowledge. Every human being on this planet has specific knowledge because they have different genes, live in different environments, and accumulate different experiences, all of which inform their understanding of the world. Our intrinsic understanding of this, since our earliest days, is what has driven the success of our civilization to greater and greater heights. One could argue that a generalized education system suppresses specific knowledge, reducing specialization, which discourages technological innovation, which reduces specialization even further in an endless cycle until we return to the Dark Ages. While that reality is difficult to imagine given our current one, over a long-enough time scale, it is certainly possible. Technology keeps us moving forward.
The Internet revolutionized the way we communicate and organize by improving matchmaking by orders of magnitude. eBay matches buyers with sellers at massive scale. Twitter matches people with mutual interests. Google matches questions with answers. Technology improves efficiency and productivity.
The goal of education should be to facilitate the discovery and development of specific knowledge. Education needs better matchmaking. Technology can help match children who display aptitude in fields with the opportunity to develop that aptitude into useful skills. Technology can help match children who learn in a specific way with teachers that teach in that specific way. Technology can help match children that learn better from practical experience with opportunities to do just that.
But technology is only a tool. As Peter Thiel argues in Zero to One, "as computers become more and more powerful, they won't be substitutes for humans: they'll be complements." We still have to figure out how best to apply the technology we have and what the technology is that we still need in order to continue moving the feedback loop of human advancement in the positive direction. The only way we'll figure that out is by replacing our homogeneous system with one that is heterogenous. We need to iterate and experiment at a much faster pace than we currently are, which means we need to play with smaller-scale systems. When we don't iterate and experiment, we won't innovate. And when we don't innovate, life doesn't get better. Not for us, and not for our children.
We are all different. Why shouldn't we be educated differently?