Education: Richness and Reach

Producing results ‘on scale’ is a challenge. Large-scale problems that need urgent solutions are defined in the Sustainable Development Goals. Such problems have been solved locally, here and there, in India too, which is often described as a graveyard of successful pilots. The challenge is to increase the reach of these solutions everywhere. The internet and digital communication technologies are providing enormous reach, hitherto not available. 

Three areas that can benefit from the speed and vast reach of digital communications are finance, the media, and education because the principal content of these activities is information. Information can be digitized and transported over the internet, whereas products that have material substance cannot. Digital technologies have already disrupted financial industries and the media. Digital technologies’ potential to improve the reach of education is being exploited too in MOOCs (massively open online courses) and other ways. 

There is an important difference between information that is transported in financial transactions, and the content of communications that the media and education are supposed to convey. Money is simple: you have it or you don’t. And how much you have is easily quantified. Whereas what the media and education must convey over the internet cannot be simply be put into black-and-white, yes or no, digital terms, simply—nor should be. Communications in the media and education must be much richer in content to bring out nuances in ideas. 

The difference in the complexity of transactions between the financial sector and communications amongst people was highlighted by the economist Albert O. Hirschman in his book Exit, Voice and Loyalty, way back in 1970, when Chicago economist Milton Friedman’s ideas about ‘the business of business being only business’ were becoming the new currency in politics. Hirschman pointed out that Friedman had expressed his difficulty in accepting the notion that people should desire to express their views to make them prevail. Friedman described people’s desires to be heard as a resort to ‘cumbrous political channels’. He would much rather they would resort to ‘efficient market mechanisms’ and use their money rather than their mouths to make their opinions known. Because money is easily digitisable: whereas ideas are not. 

Journalism and education must contend with the trade-off between ‘richness’ and ‘reach’ in communication. Online content has great reach, which it achieves by stripping off richness, and ‘dumbing down’ the discourse. In The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brains, Nicholas Carr cites recent scientific studies proving that increasing reliance on the internet for information and entertainment is changing users’ cognitive abilities. They are able to respond faster to data, but they are losing their abilities to reflect and ‘make sense’ of the barrage of data they can instantly access. 

The media is pandering to citizens’ demands for easy-to-have, entertaining, and shallow communication. Giving customers what they want is good for business. However, it can have long term effects on their health, which businesses will be held accountable for, as the tobacco, drugs, foods and beverages industries have realized. Education and journalism are given privileged roles in society because they are expected to make citizens’ minds, and society, healthy and keep them healthy. These professions cannot become mere businesses giving customers what is easy to produce and sell. 

A vocational education has greater economic value, for individuals and for societies, than does a liberal education in history, philosophy, or the arts. It is not surprising that vocational education is preferred by citizens and policy makers when the size and the rate of growth of a country’s economy are paramount measures of a country’s success. Business management education has become the most lucrative education for young people everywhere. Business graduates command high salaries. Management institutions are rated according to the salaries their students earn. It is understandable, therefore, that the teachers of business applying business principles to the designs of their institutions, narrow the content of education to subjects that command the highest premiums in the market—more finance and marketing, for example, and less social studies and humanities. 

Jeffrey Pfeiffer of Stanford University has compared the curriculums of various educational institutions and showed that, whereas students broaden their thinking in most educational programs, the MBA curriculum was the only one that produced graduates that were narrower in their thinking when they left than when they entered the program.  

Education must not atrophy into a process of putting information into students’ heads, or just skills into their hands, as it has. The proper role of education is to cultivate minds. Educators must create conditions for human minds to reflect and develop their reflection muscles with constant use. Therefore, more education online, in spite of the reach it provides cannot be the solution. The ease with which it provides shallow information has to be compensated by other education formats to deepen the richness of learning.

Rapid development of technologies and new business models, and also disruption of economies, has reduced the shelf-life of the knowledge that efficiently run business schools and other vocational institutions provide. They must now figure out what education they can give their students that will be useful for them throughout their lives.

In Transforming Systems, I describe three ‘disciplines of thinking’ to nourish the transformation of systems for ecologically sustainable and socially just growth. These are essential components also of a curriculum for life-long learning. They are: ethical reasoning, systems thinking, and deep listening. These are not the ways in which we usually think. 

We are taught to speak well, to state our point-of view effectively in efficient bursts, to be noticed amidst the din. The most articulate speakers win prizes and gather more followers. There are no prizes for the best listeners, who are listening, reflecting, and learning, and who may not speak at all. We don’t even notice them.

Our minds are trained, in the scientific method, to break apart systems into their components, to put things and people into categorical boxes, and then to examine each part separately, scientifically. Education is divided into separate subjects. Students must make choices, to begin with, between pursuing the liberal arts or the sciences. Thereafter, choosing which field in liberal arts or which subject in science they will pursue as they advance further upwards towards ‘higher education’. What they are learning to do is to examine the trees separately. Their minds are not trained to rise higher to see the pattern of the whole forest, with the variety of flora and fauna in it.

An erroneous assumption about human nature has been driving economics, and management education too. It is the belief that human beings are rational and self-interested beings. Whereas selfishness is unethical according to all religions and according to secular systems of ethics also. When the aim of education and training has become focused on providing learners the best means to make the most for themselves—to earn the highest salaries and to acquire the most fame—it has veered away from the ethical orientation that society needs to be put back into education. 

It is not easy to switch off embedded ways of thinking and switch on new ways. Thinking habits are instinctual. New habits cannot be learned merely be delivering information to the reasoning mind. They are learned tacitly by trying them out and becoming comfortable with them. 

You cannot teach someone to ride a bicycle by teaching the anatomy of the human body and the engineering of the bicycle in a classroom. The learner must get onto a bicycle and allow her body to learn the skills and habits it needs to ride. Some theory will help, but theoretical instruction cannot train a new habit. 

Ethical reasoning, systems thinking, and deep listening, are the roots for systems’ transformation. These subjects are difficult to teach in classrooms. Learning them requires a new pedagogy, and life-long learning too. 

The questions are:

• What should be the architecture of this new pedagogy: and what roles should technology, books, teachers, and dialogues (between teachers and students and amongst students) play in it?
• How can the reach of this pedagogy be expanded without losing richness in education?
• Is it possible for an enterprise in education running on business principles to stay true to its public purpose?