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We know how people learn. We simply don’t do it. We are told the cost of everything only goes up, and that government policy and inflation make it worse. But three essential parts of our lives—education, healthcare and national defense—could be much better for much less money. Today I want to focus on education. People learn by trying, making mistakes, working with others, explaining what they understand and trying again until they get it. They learn at different speeds. They learn more when they care about the problem in front of them. We do none of that in school. We sort children by age, put them on the same schedule, give them the same lesson and move the class forward when the calendar says it is time. A student can miss part of the lesson, receive a grade and carry the gap into the next year. That is a system for managing institutions. It is not a system designed around learning. When I researched education for Greedy Bastards, the clearest alternative was group-based problem-solving. Give students a real problem and bring together people with different skills. Let them compare what they know, ask questions, test ideas and work toward an answer. The learning comes from doing the work together, not just hearing someone describe it. That is how people solve problems outside school. It is how a factory adapts when demand changes, how a medical team works through a patient’s needs and how a newsroom decides what its audience needs to know. Education should prepare people for that world. Frank Moss, then director of the MIT Media Lab, warned me that a system that does not encourage people to take risks will eventually beat creativity out of them. Nicholas Negroponte, the Media Lab’s founder, described learning as something driven by passion. Memorizing an answer can get a student through a test. It does not guarantee that the student understands the subject or wants to keep learning. The classroom can be organized around that difference. Salman Khan began recording math lessons for his cousins so they could watch them when he was away. They could pause the lesson, replay it and return to a difficult idea without feeling embarrassed about asking him to repeat himself. Other students found the videos and used them to understand things that had eluded them in class. Teachers then turned the model around. Students watched the lesson at home. In class, the teacher helped with problems, questions and the parts students had not understood. The recorded lesson carried the explanation. The teacher’s time went to the student. Technology did not replace the teacher. It made more of the teacher’s attention available for learning. Mastery learning takes the same idea further. In the model described in the chapter, a student does not receive an 85, leave the material behind and discover the missing pieces later. The student keeps working until they can answer ten questions correctly in a row. Mistakes are part of the process. The expectation is mastery. The difference a teacher can make is measurable. One Dallas comparison cited in the chapter followed students who started with similar reading scores. Students assigned three highly effective teachers rose from the 59th percentile in fourth grade to the 76th percentile by the end of sixth grade. A similar group assigned three ineffective teachers fell from the 60th percentile to the 42nd. Those results point to what matters most: the quality of the learning, not the prestige of the building around it. But we keep spending as if the building, the schedule and the institution are the education. We spend on facilities, administration and the competition for status, then tell families that every rising price is unavoidable. In Michigan, from 1997 to 1999, total education spending rose nearly 7 percent while central-administration spending rose about 18 percent. The numbers are old. The question they raise is not: when education spending grows, how much more learning does the student receive? The design itself can lower the cost of learning. A recorded lesson can be reused. Students can help each other understand a problem. Teachers can spend class time with the students who need help most. Students do not have to advance with gaps in their knowledge and pay for those gaps later. That does not mean education works without skilled teachers, or that every building and administrator is waste. It means we should stop treating those things as the purpose of school. The purpose is for a human being to learn. The people who benefit from the existing system will say this is too simple. They will say education is complicated, that every school is different and that costs can only go up. But the essential question is simple: are we organizing education around what helps people learn, or around what keeps the institution running? We know how people learn. They work together on problems that matter. They learn at their own pace. They make mistakes, get help and keep going until they understand. We know how to build that kind of education. We have examples in classrooms and communities already. We simply don’t do it at scale. We keep paying for the old model and calling the bill the cost of education. It is the cost of a system that has stopped asking whether people are learning. Subscribe: dylanratigan.substack.com

TOMA EL CONTROL Por qué las familias mexicanas deben asumir su educación, y la de sus hijos, en la era de la inteligencia artificial. qroo.pocketcomputer.net/209-…

Remember when using the wrong pronoun got people canceled? That was dumb.