A young person prepares for exams with classmates, guided by a clear framework and a teacher. This compulsory, class-based education is one of those universal things that virtually no one ever questions. After all, the general belief is that this is precisely how learning happens, and therefore this framework must be appropriate.

But I would argue that, almost without exception, for all of us, a quick look at our own experiences shows that there are many other ways of learning. We humans learn by observing, by reading, by imitating, and especially by actually doing with subsequent iteration. We learn in pairs, in groups, and we learn alone. But, interestingly, exactly this learning is not much understood as education. It’s not the old familiar activity and top-down structure that you just generally know. Well, so here’s the provocative question: is the best classroom really the way for young people to learn? Or has the obsession with formal education crowded out all sorts of other aspirational learning models? What would education look like if it were allowed to evolve?

The school model’s archetype

The economic historian Stephen Davies sees the founding of the modern school form in 1806, which was also the year Napoleon defeated Prussia. Struck by its humiliation, the Prussian state followed the advice of its leading intellectual, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and developed a program of compulsory and rigorous education. Its goal was to raise young men to be obedient soldiers who would not run away in battle. It’s precisely this Prussian school model that brought with it many of the features we now take completely for granted.

The model called for teaching by grades rather than by ability. It made sense that way. After all, the goal was to produce military recruits rather than well-rounded citizens. There was a formal pedagogy in which children sat at rows of tables in front of standing teachers rather than walking around together, as in ancient Greece. There was a school day interrupted by the ringing of bells. There was the habit of teaching several subjects a day rather than limiting oneself to one subject lasting more than an hour. These features are all helpful, Davies argues, in molding people into suitable recruits for a conscript army to fight Napoleon.

This Prussian experiment later found favor, particularly in America. Archibald Murphy, the founder of public schools in North Carolina, said in 1816: “The state must take care of children in the warmth of its affection and concern for their welfare, and place them in schools where their minds may be enlightened and their hearts educated to virtue.” Horace Mann, widely considered one of the fathers of American public education, was an avid student of the Prussian model. In 1843, Mann visited Prussia and returned determined to have the public schools emulate this reference model.

In 1852, Massachusetts explicitly adopted the Prussian system, followed shortly by New York. In Mann’s eyes, the purpose of public education was not primarily to raise standards. After all, the literacy rate in the northern states had already reached 97 percent by 1840. Instead, he understood its purpose to turn unruly children into disciplined citizens. He could not have said more clearly that this was for the country’s good, not the needs of the individual. In the words of the Wikipedia entry on Mann, “Teaching values such as obedience to authority, punctual attendance, and dividing time according to the ringing of bells helped students prepare for future employment.”

It was no accident that American values at the time were seen by many as having been diluted by Catholic immigrants and that this was a significant reason for the state takeover of education. In his book The Rebirth of Education, Lant Pritchett quotes the frank admission of a nineteenth-century Japanese minister of education: “In the management of all schools, it must be remembered that what is done is not for the sake of the pupils, but for the sake of the country.”

Nationalization of education

But state-mandated compulsory education was not, as many believe, the only way to provide education to the poor classes of society. For example, when the British state introduced compulsory education in 1880, the population was already almost entirely literate. Literacy had risen from about 50% of English men and 10% of English women in 1700 to about 90% of both sexes in 1870. Thus, by the time compulsory education was introduced, over 95% of fifteen-year-olds were literate. How did this come about? It was largely due to the increase in voluntary education within families, the church, and the community over the previous half-century. Before 1870, the state took almost no action in this regard. There is no reason why voluntary education could not spread more widely in the years that followed. An entire educational system had developed spontaneously, without direction from the state. A healthy and growing one that then got replaced by the public system.

It was a similar story in India. A survey in the 1820s found that a widespread, privately funded school system reached more boys than in some European countries, long before the British introduced a public education system to the subcontinent. Mahatma Gandhi later complained that the British had “uprooted a beautiful tree” and left India even more uneducated than it already was. All this by replacing the indigenous private school network with a disastrously unsuccessful public, centralized, unaccountable system open to caste exclusion. The British, of course, vehemently denied this, but the evidence suggests they were wrong.

A long-term international study by Andrew Coulson for the Cato Institute on “Markets versus Monopolies in Education” found that both across and within countries, “the overwhelming majority of econometric studies conclude that private provision of education dwarfs public provision.” Lant Pritchett’s devastating survey of public education in India and elsewhere found that standards in many state-supported schools are appallingly low. Usually, these standards are accompanied by centralized control.

At this point, there is one thing in particular to highlight:

The proud statement that children are spending more time in school and more money is being spent on education means nothing if that education does not enable children to learn effectively and efficiently.

Centrally dictated planned education without a drive for innovation

Pritchett noted an excellent analogy with a spider and a starfish. A spider controls everything that happens in its net through the single node of its brain. That is, it is highly centralized. A starfish, on the other hand, has no brain and is a radically decentralized organism with local neural control of its arms. In education, spider systems were developed in the nineteenth century, essentially to build nations and legitimize regimes. These centralized systems are more than useless in addressing today’s educational challenges and driving innovation.

Pritchett’s solution is to encourage the local development of an education system that is open to diversity and experimentation. Education, according to his analogy, should thus be more like a starfish. The big problem with nationalized education is that there has been so little innovation. Although I did not learn Latin in my personal school experience, and despite the fact that I was taught well in, relatively speaking, better schools, it is incredible how stale the system in which I was educated still was. Relatively speaking, the education system simply has not kept up with technology to the same degree it has in other areas of life.

Science is taught as if it were a catalog of facts to be regurgitated, rather than a series of fascinating mysteries to be questioned (by the way, that this is entirely misplaced is also illustrated by this article here). It borders on a miracle, said Albert Einstein, that “modern teaching methods have not yet completely stifled the sacred curiosity of inquiry. For this tender little plant needs, in addition to stimulation, above all freedom.”

Alternative models as emergent phenomena

Nationalization certainly had a lot to do with this failure of innovation. “It’s time to admit that public education operates like a planned economy,” said Albert Shanker, longtime president of the American Federation of Teachers. A bureaucratic system in which everyone’s role is predetermined, and there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It’s no surprise that our school system isn’t getting any better. After all, it more closely resembles a communist economy than our own market economy. James Tooley, professor of education at Newcastle University, has cataloged the fact that there are plenty of low-cost private schools in the poorest slums of cities and the most remote villages in countries like India, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and even China. He began studying this phenomenon in 2000 for the World Bank in Hyderabad, India, and has followed it before some in Africa. In the slums of Hyderabad’s old city, he came across an association of five hundred private schools that cater to the poor. In one of them, Peace High School, he found schoolrooms where children paid sixty to a hundred rupees a month (about 80 cents to $1.30) for their education, depending on their age. The quality of education relative to the price was impressive. In another school, St. Maaz High School, he found a principal with a mathematical flair who in twenty years had built a school with nearly a thousand students taught by a group of largely unqualified but often degreed teachers in three rented locations. And he made a monetary profit with it.

There were government schools with government-certified teachers, but many parents in Hyderabad were angry at the poor quality of education they were receiving, and many teachers in private schools were angry at the poor quality of teacher training. “Government teacher training,” one told Tooley, “is like learning to swim without ever going near a pool.” The World Bank people responded to the findings with the interpretation that Tooley had discovered businessmen ripping off the poor and that these private schools were skimming off the wealthier parents in a given district. But that was demonstrably incorrect. Peace High School in Hyderabad gave concessions or even free tuition to the children of impoverished and uneducated people. One parent was a cleaner in a mosque and earned less than $13 a month. Why would such people send their children to private schools rather than the free government schools that provided uniforms, books, and even free food? Because, Tooley learned from parents, teachers at the government schools didn’t show up or taught poorly when they did come. He visited some public schools and confirmed the truth of these claims. Tooley soon discovered that the existence of these low-cost private schools in poor neighborhoods was not unknown but that it was largely ignored by the establishment, which continued to argue that only an expansion of public education could help the poor.

The inadequate state of public education in low-income countries is widely acknowledged, but the answer that everyone seems to agree on is more money, not a different approach. Amartya Sen, an Indian economist and philosopher, for example, called for more government spending and dismissed private education as a private matter for the elite, while elsewhere in the same paper, he acknowledged that the poor were increasingly sending their children to private schools, “especially in areas where private schools are in poor condition.” This poor condition, the paper argues, is due to the private schools’ siphoning off of the vocal middle class, rather than the fact that teachers are accountable to bureaucrats rather than parents. But the poor were leaving the state sector at least as much as the middle class. The lesson that schooling can be promoted from below was ignored in favor of the theory that it must be imposed from above. India was just the beginning for Tooley. He visited country after country, always being assured that there were no low-cost private schools there, and always found the opposite. In Ghana, Tooley found a teacher who had built a school with four branches, teaching 3,400 children and charging $50 per school year, with scholarships for those who couldn’t afford it. In Somaliland, he found a town with no water supply, paved roads, or street lights, but two private schools for every government school.

In Lagos, where government officials and representatives of Western aid agencies all but denied the existence of low-cost private schools, Tooley found that 75 percent of all school children in poor areas of Lagos State attended private schools, many of which were not registered with the government. In all the places he visited in India and Africa, both urban and rural, Tooley found that low-cost private schools enrolled more students than government schools and that people spent 5-10% of their income on their children’s education. When he asked an official from the UK’s development agency why his agency couldn’t consider supporting these schools with loans instead of putting money into the official education bureaucracy in Ghana, he was told that the money couldn’t go to nonprofits.

Imagine you are the parent of a child in a Lagos slum. The teacher at the school the child attends is often absent, frequently sleeps during class, and provides a poor standard when awake. However, because it is a public school, your child’s deregistration goes unnoticed. Your only option is to complain to the teacher’s boss, who is a distant official in a district you don’t visit often. Alternatively, you wait for the next election and elect a politician who will appoint officials who will better monitor teacher attendance and quality and then do something about it. A World Bank report cited by Tooley says in despair that performance-based pay cannot work in public schools and that “dysfunctional bureaucracies slide into a morass of corruption as payments from lower-level people buy good assignments or evaluations from superiors.” However, if your teacher teaches at a private, for-profit school and you withdraw your child, the owner of the school will quickly feel the effects in his pocket and fire the bad teacher. In a free system, the parents are the consumers, or put another way, are the boss. Tooley found that private school owners constantly monitor their teachers and follow up on parents’ complaints. His team visited classrooms in different parts of India and Africa and found that the government classrooms they visited had fewer teachers teaching than the private classrooms. Sometimes only a little more than half. Although the unaccredited private schools received no public funding or aid, they had better facilities such as toilets, electricity, blackboards, and other relevant infrastructure. Their students also achieved better results, especially in English and math.

New technology and education

The impact of the profit motive in education is not limited to poor countries. In Sweden, for-profit schools have gained a competitive advantage over government schools by raising standards and increasing teacher contact time. But technology is poised to change education even more radically. The group Bridge International Academies now operates two hundred low-cost, for-profit schools in Kenya that use a curriculum written for teachers and delivered via a tablet computer, with the computer also acting as a monitoring device to check whether teachers are teaching. The idea is that students will not be limited by the quality of teachers available in their district but will have access to best practices from around the world through a local teacher. This is similar to Khan Academy, which now offers more than 4,000 short videos of high-quality private instruction that anyone can use on almost any topic. Or with the proliferation of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), where top lecturers at elite universities can now be watched by thousands of eager students taking their classes. And more importantly, also by people who aren’t lucky enough to be able to attend on-site.

In the modern world, you don’t have to be taught by the local teacher. You can choose the best. At the other end of the spectrum is Minerva Academy, a private college founded by tech entrepreneur Ben Nelson in San Francisco that is a small, even minimal, real university where students live together normally, but without all the usual features of such institutions, particularly lectures, which are replaced by interactive online seminars. Lectures, says Stephen Kosslyn of Minerva, are “a great way to teach, but a terrible way to learn.” The traditional university is relatively likely to be gone in fifty years, disrupted by technology. Why pay high fees to spend x number of years on campus and earn the right to make not much more in the real world than non-graduates, instead of putting together your combination of online courses, graded and assessed online, using lectures from the best faculty in the field, wherever they happen to be… What’s in store is illustrated by practical examples like Sebastian Thrun’s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sebastian_Thrun) course, which he made available not just to Stanford students but anyone globally. Tens of thousands participated, and over four hundred of them achieved better grades than the best student at Stanford.

More capital for education = more economic growth - is that so?

A top-down fantasy has too often distorted the real purpose of education. Rarely, if ever, has the purpose of government education been to promote scholarship and create knowledge. Instead, it is to train obedient citizens who will be loyal to the nation, provide economic growth, and be brainwashed in the form of the latest ideology. “The goal of public education is not to spread enlightenment. It is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed standard citizenship to suppress dissent and originality,” said H.L. Mencken. This is partly why the lamentable lack of innovation and progress in education has never mattered much to those in power. In Stephen Davies’ view, schools today are little more than means to signal to employers that a young person has been sufficiently indoctrinated to stick to a task and do as the kid is told, in the spirit of Horace Mann.

Left-wing politicians tend to emphasize spending money, while right-wing politicians emphasize curriculum reform and teaching methods. Both agree, however, that education is a national, not an individual, priority. The impact on individuals is secondary to the impact on the country as a whole. Don’t ask what your country’s schools can do for you. Over the last twenty-five years, governments, aside from instilling fear about the state of the planet in the next generation, have been obsessed with using education for economic competitiveness. Across the political spectrum, it was assumed that better schools, better universities, better vocational training, and better education would lead to a more prosperous society. It is certainly true that people with more extended schooling are more prosperous. That’s because more education tends to lead to higher salaries. And it’s also true that countries with high levels of education are generally wealthier. But does the evidence support this notion that education is the elixir of economic growth? Is there evidence that it was education that led countries to prosperity or vice versa? Alison Wolf has examined the data in-depth in her book Does Education Matter? and concludes that the answer is a surprising “no.” She points to World Bank studies that show a negative relationship between educational attainment and growth. Countries that spent the most on expanding their education systems grew less rapidly than those that spent less. Egypt, for example, made great efforts to improve, lengthen, and spread education but grew slowly. In the thirty years since 1970, the country has more than doubled both the number of pupils and the number of students. Yet it rose only from the forty-seventh to the forty-eighth poorest country in the world during that period. The Philippines had a much higher literacy rate than Taiwan in 1960 but now has one-tenth of the per capita income. Argentina, one of the least successful economies of the last century, had one of the highest literacy rates. The more a country adopted central planning, the better its education system did, but the worse its economic performance. Not least because, like Egypt, it produced many budding bureaucrats trained for central planning.

What always fascinates me: Many jobs today are filled only by college graduates, even though it has been proven that they could be handled well by non-graduates. But be assured. This is in no way to say that higher education is not good for individuals. It is a wonderful thing, but it is one of the rewards of economic growth, not one of the drivers. And, of course, a complete lack of education would be disastrous for a modern economy. But that is not the same as saying that the best way to improve the economy is to spend more on education. Education is not a catch-all for economic policy. It is an evolving phenomenon. Education is dominated by creationist thinking. The curriculum is too prescriptive and slow to change. Teachers are encouraged to teach to the test rather than to students’ strengths or their own strengths. Textbooks are riddled with instructions about what to think rather than how to think. Teaching methods are designed more to instruct than to learn, opportunities for self-organized learning are neglected, government domination of the school system is accepted unquestioningly, and education spending is justified on the basis of what it supposedly does for the country rather than for the individual. This is not to say that education would be possible without schools, that there need not be teachers, that child-centered learning in elementary school is the solution, or that some state education policy is not desirable. Of course, these things are essential. But there is a way not to go, where both politicians and teachers allow best practices to develop and emerge, where the state acts as an enabler rather than a dictator, where students are encouraged to learn rather than told what to think, where the eager learner is the boss rather than the servant of the system. Let education evolve!