Ken Robinson has given a couple of great TED talks about education. The latest is here. In this talk Sir Ken comments that our current educational model is based on the same approach to quality control as fast food: batched production of standardized items. It’s an old observation that our school system, especially K12, is based on the needs of the industrial revolution, with standardized expectations achieved through clock and calendar driven processes. This is true of engineering education at the college level as well – our curriculum is based around specific disciplines and well defined knowledge expectations in which parts are bolted in order onto the chassis of the student to form the complete product: a statics module, a dynamics module, a thermodynamics module, a fluids module, a control theory module. The total quality management approach to engineering education, formalized now in the ABET continuous improvement model around 11 objectives (lovingly known as “A” through “K”), is a late 20th century industrial engineering model.
Most of us falsely believe that the way we educate today is the only proper way to educate. Our teachers educated this way and we were successful, and so it has always been. But our current approach to education is only about 100 years old. Even the system of grading students goes back only to wild and divergent experiments in the 19th century, timed with the arrival of mass production of books and the mass education for workers in an industrial society. Our educational system is designed for quality assurance through uniformity, and uniformity is not the obvious means to generate creative solutions for a complex future. We must reexamine this manufacturing approach to education. My friend Jack Hu argues that while the 20th century was the time of mass production, we are moving into a 21st century in which the right model is mass customization. Ken Robinson argues for an agricultural model, in which we create the environment for growth, and the growth—the intellectual growth of the student—occurs because the environment is right. What other models can we develop for engineering education in the 21st century?
The medical "standard of care" model?
ReplyDeleteIt's already happening in K-12---just look at Ann Arbor Open, and before that, Community High. Those models require significant self-selection and parent involvement, so they might not scale. But still...possibilities.
ReplyDeleteOur increasing embrace of design-oriented experiences at Michigan, where students don't necessarily learn the same thing, but they all learn something interesting, is possibly another example.