Nick Kind, UK

So many companies seem to be selling themselves as the “Netflix for Education” — perhaps most notably, Pearson in a recent article. It’s an idea I find depressing.

It’s easy to see why, on first glance, this is such an appealing elevator pitch.

For the learner and teacher, education as:

• personalised;
• drawing on a huge range of materials which are often of very high production values;
• allowing you to go at your own pace;
• hugely enjoyable.

For the investor, a business which is:

• clearly scaleable across the world;
• reusing content with light localisation;
• using AI to reinforce its network effect;
• deploying a subscription business model with recurring revenues.

What’s not to like?

Well…

Unlike Netflix, the complicated business of teaching and learning is:

• collaborative (between teachers and students, students and students, teachers and teachers, and more, in multiple complex ways…) — whether this is just learning algebra in a classroom or practising key twenty-first century skills such as working in teams, empathy or critical thinking;
• deeply contextual: teachers judge what’s best to do next in a given moment using a wide range of very human inputs, many of which computers won’t be able accurately to assess any time soon. It’s not just about what has been chosen in the past —it’s about things like has it been hot today? or did that child eat breakfast this morning? or Jill is upset after that row in the playground;
• active not passive — to coin an old phrase comparing the internet and television, “lean forward” not “lean back”;
• sometimes inevitable, grinding hard work (however hard we try, learning Mandarin characters and sounds is just difficult and dull);
• often profoundly un-digital, involving practical messy work with the hands, or outdoor investigations, or physical activity like sport, drama or music.

I guess I feel the whole idea diminishes what I feel education is really about. And, incidentally, the scope of how Pearson and others might deliver impact, revenue and profit. A shame.

Photo credit: “South Carolina First Steps 4K students recite the alphabet in class at the Child Development Center at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C., May 31, 2018. The children learned through play, structured lessons and social interactions in preparation for further schooling. (U.S. Air Force photo by Airman 1st Class Kathryn R.C. Reaves)”

Perhaps it’s because I have needed to consult doctors and nurses recently. Perhaps it’s because there is one over-simplification about education that annoys me more than most others – the meme which unfavourably compares the relative use of technology in operating theatres and classrooms now and a hundred years ago. Perhaps it’s because I’m spending a lot of time working with the medically trained founders of adaptive learning company Area9 at the moment. But the use of medical language in the debates around the future of education seems to be growing, and doesn’t seem to be questioned very much. Whilst the analogy can sometimes be helpful, it can also be lazy, misleading and counter-productive – both as we think about teaching and learning, and about medicine.

One area where the medical comparisons are useful is when talking about the value of professional training. Most researchers agree with the not-exactly-controversial idea that teachers are the single most important ingredient in student success. It’s hard to argue differently about doctors and nurses in the treatment of patients. Yet in the medical world, continuing professional development is not only regarded as common sense, but in many countries it is a legal requirement. In formal education, not so much. A failure to provide resources, incentives and career pathways which recognise teachers as reflective professionals is, in my view, a glaring failure of many education systems around the world.

It also means we aren’t widely gathering evidence and reflecting on it to make things better. As Michael Feldstein recently wrote:

“…effective ed tech cannot evolve without a trained profession of self-consciously empirical educators any more than effective medication could have evolved without a profession of self-consciously empirical physicians”

Ah, “Researchers”. “Student success”. “Empirical”. Michael and I are of course adopting the language of “learning science” – the fraught and freighted sphere of establishing “what works” in education. And this is where the problems start.

Being empirical is relatively easy in medicine. People can be scientifically tested for the presence of ailments, diseases, pathogens and “abnormalities” within reasonable, globally agreed levels of probability. To caricature, you’ve got tuberculosis or you haven’t. Once the drugs have been administered, doctors and their managers can agree on whether or not the illness has gone.

Classrooms aren’t operating theatres. As I have written before, education is a world of values, subjectivity, and Politics (big “P” deliberate). Whilst most of the world can probably agree on whether or not three individual children from England, China and India can solve quadratic equations effectively, views on the “right” history of Hong Kong under the British Empire might be highly divergent. It’s very difficult to establish a definition of “success” here without acknowledging the (inevitable and necessary) value judgements which are involved. Which means a universal definition of “empirical” is often impossible. We all need to be honest about this, and devise intelligent ways to deal with it.

There’s also a more detailed debate about medical research methodologies being applied in education, thoughtfully covered by the UK National Foundation for Educational Research here, so I won’t go into detail. Whilst a randomised controlled trial (RCT) is the gold standard in the world of medicine, it seems it isn’t necessarily always the right way forward in education.

More interesting, perhaps, is a linked broader issue. RCTs aim to find drugs and processes which make people better – medicine, at least in conventional Western circles, is mostly a business of repair. In classrooms or educational systems, we probably shouldn’t be “fixing” people. We should be nurturing them to fulfil their unique potential and giving them tools for life (note the Western liberal assumptions here, naturally).

The description of some educational software as “interventions” is almost militaristic – implying a dramatic break with a present which is unsatisfactory. When governments and thought leaders start talking about education as “broken”, there are worrying implications of retrospective conservatism, rather than creative, hopeful imagination.  When I’ve worked on successful educational resources, the process has been one of co-creation and discussion – something done with teachers, institutions, researchers and learners, rather than to them. Medical metaphors take us down a troubling road here, and it could be argued that the top-down “intervention” approach to improving education has seen some notable failures (inBloom’s collapse or Zuckerberg’s doomed initiative in Newark being good examples).

Then again, many major healthcare systems are now adopting the idea that theirs is not just a work of treating problems as they arrive. Living well, for a long period of time, can be seen as a partnership between medical researchers and the evidence they provide, trained reflective professionals acting as advisors and deploying the researched resources at their disposal, and patients taking responsibility for their own choices. A reflective, comparative discussion between health and education – about what they do and how they describe it – seems ever more fruitful.

Image: Engraving by Daniel Chodowiecki from Franz Heinrich Ziegenhagen, Lehre vom richtigen Verhältnis zu den Schöpfungswerken und die durch öffentliche Einführung desselben allein zu bewürkende algemeine Menschenbeglükkung (1792). Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain.