An Education System Stuck in the Past

In this article I want to address a topic that is of greatest importance to me. It concerns education and the shortcomings of our education system. I want to discuss some of the shortcomings I have experienced with structured education and discuss ways to change and improve them.

Every university I have attended was a disappointment from a classroom educational standpoint. This includes my experiences at UCLA, Stanford, UCLA Anderson, and one can most likely extend this statement to any university, including other elites like Harvard or Princeton.

It always felt like I was wasting my time in these university lectures.

When will the education system change so we can get a little more for the time and money we invest in education?

In my opinion the current education structure has three main shortcomings all partially due to standardization.

1. Arbitrary pace of lectures

A big shortcoming of our education system is its one-size fits all approach. Every lecture moves at the pace that can be followed by the median of the class and in a sense neglects those that are falling behind and those that are getting bored with a slow pace.

2. Useless teaching methods focused on reproduction

Another shortcoming is that every educational institution uses the same educational methods. These emphasize knowledge reproduction instead of focusing on knowledge creation.

All institutions use the same standard homework and exam structure. All we do is repeat what we see and get tested on it, therefore all we learn is how to copy. Teachers put very little effort in creating engaging and meaningful educational methods that help us create and innovate.

3. Obsolete curriculum and content

The third shortcoming is that the curriculum and material taught evolve at a very slow pace and usually do not keep up with the changes and needs of the real world. This is especially significant today, given that the information technology revolution is triggering transformative phenomena in all aspects of the world. So everything in the world is changing faster than usual.

Growing up I was a curious child. I wanted to learn and understand every phenomenon in the world. I used to experiment, explore, read books to better understand the world around me. I used to explore the marvels of the outdoors and interact with the world in many different ways.

But when it came to attending structured education most of that changed.

Before I discuss the shortcomings of the US higher education system and my personal experiences with university learning, I will share some high school educational experiences from Germany.

When I was young my parents emigrated from Armenia to Germany. I got lucky since in my opinion Germany has one of the better high school systems in the world. But as with any education system there were still issues.

Together with about 10% of the population I am dyslexic, which I did not know when I was in high school.

As a dyslexic I am relatively bad at reading, grammar, spelling and pure memorization. Therefore many high school classes that required these types of skills were more challenging for me. These included language classes like English or German, or text heavy classes like literature or world religions.

I used to fall behind in these lectures, since I couldn’t read the material at the set pace. After a while I would get bored in class, since I was not following. Eventually, I would stop attending class and just roam around the downtown streets.

Yet as a dyslexic I am relatively good at complex systems, dynamic environments and visual reasoning. So in many subjects that require these abilities the lecture pace was too slow for me. These included classes like Physics, Sociology, History and some aspects of Math. But interestingly enough being better at these subjects led to the same outcome.

Since the pace in these classes was too slow for me, it was difficult to concentrate, so after a while I would zone out, get bored and eventually not go to class and just roam around the downtown streets.

One does not have to be a dyslexic to face similar issues. Most of us are better at some cognitive patterns and worse at others. All of us have our weaknesses and talents, which get completely neglected in a homogeneous structure. We are all forced to move along at the same pace.

If it were not for the slow pace of the lectures, the topics that I was naturally good at would have been interesting and stimulating, so I decided to devised a better approach than skipping class. I started to attend class about 30 minutes after it started. This way I would stay engaged trying to guess what had been covered in my absence and it would keep me stimulated to the end of the class. However, many of the teachers did not like that I was often late to classes for the subjects I enjoyed or would not attend classes for the subjects I did not enjoy.

And then there was my high school Physics teacher, Dr. Stark, who in my opinion had the biggest impact on my intellectual development. He had the courage to devise a different educational method and teach something different than what was part of most high school Physics curricula.

I still remember the very first statement Dr. Stark made in the first lecture.

He said: “I am not here to teach you physics or any other type of information. We are entering the information age and soon you will find any information you need on the Internet. I am here to teach you how to think and how to distinguish the quality of information. I am here to teach you how to distinguish accurate, true information from inaccurate, false information.”

He was unconcerned with the standard curriculum and was more concerned with teaching what was most useful for us from his perspective. In a sense he was pretty visionary because this was 1996. We were just entering the information age and services like Google or Wikipedia did not exist yet.

Also his educational methods were significantly different from the norm.

The emphasis of the entire class, including homework and exams, was on knowledge creation and critical discussion.

Instead of giving us ready information about physics, the class had to come up with most of the physics theories in a discussion setting that he would moderate. He would say: “If Newton, Amper and Einstein were able to do it, you should give it a try as well”.

The lectures usually started with the illustration of an experiment or a description of a phenomenon we observe in real life. It usually concerned a topic that we had not covered yet and the goal was to come up with a theory that governed the behavior of that phenomenon.

So the students were asked to come up with their own theories and use logical reasoning and facts to back up their theories in front of the class. The goal of the discussion was also to criticize the competing theories and try to find inconsistencies and logical errors in them.

After some discussion, during which we would try to prove or disprove theories, we would take a vote on all the standing theories. After the vote, Dr. Stark would reveal the correct relationships governing that phenomenon.

In many instances the majority would vote for the wrong theory and he would happily exclaim: “Once again the majority was wrong!” In these cases he would make some statements about some of the shortcomings of democracy and emphasize how easily the majority can be misled.

Then another important part of the discussion would follow, which focused on understanding how a wrong theory had misled most people. We would discuss what were the inconsistencies and logical errors that many had missed in the wrong theory.

He would continuously emphasize all the modes by which people can be misled and can arrive at wrong conclusions. He wanted us to become more aware of these modes. People can often be misled, even if presented accurate numbers or correct facts, when these are presented in creative ways.

Dr. Stark’s exams also had a creative nature. The exams would involve a topic that we had not yet covered in class and the goal was again to come up with our own theory that governed an observation or experiment. The exam would also ask us to criticize our own theory and discuss its shortcomings. It is a very useful practice trying to refute one’s own opinion.

We were even asked to derive our own equation that governed the experiment. This last step was something that he did not expect most of us to get correctly. But that wasn’t the goal anyways. The goal was the process — to learn a certain way of thinking.

Dr. Stark’s goal was to teach us two main skills, which in my opinion are some of the most important skills in today’s information economy:

1. Knowledge creation

Knowledge creation is used to understand and conceptually explain an observed, real-world phenomenon and to devise a generalized theory for it.

It can also be used to synthesize existing information to come up with our own theory about a subject.

Knowledge creation gives one many advantages when it comes to depth of understanding and the ability to adjust to an ever-changing world around us. It also makes us more creative since it teaches us how to create and not replicate.

2. Information consistency analysis

Information consistency analysis is used to build a logically consistent argument or thought process, as well as, to find the inconsistency in a logically inconsistent argument, thought process or information.

Information consistency analysis helps us find the correct information and reasoning.

Today our main source of information is the Internet. Therefore, it is important to distinguish, which information on the Internet is correct and which is not correct, since the information on the Internet does not undergo a rigorous validity and consistency check.

The consistency analysis also helps us catch situations when the majority has arrived at a wrong conclusion. This gives one the confidence to take contrarian steps. Some people may call this critical thinking but it is much more than that.

Both of these are very important skills in our current economy since we can Google most things by now.

Dr. Stark was able to avoid two of the three shortcomings I mentioned at the beginning of the article. He had created his own teaching method and a curriculum that was more meaningful.

The approach Dr. Stark used could be expanded to most subjects including Biology, Chemistry, Economics, Neuroscience. It just takes some creativity to implement it.

Instead of providing knowledge to the class, one would let the class discover knowledge and in the process the students can learn how to create and discuss. It just takes a different type of instructor to moderate and guide the class and it takes courage to experiment.

After finishing high school I moved from Germany to Los Angeles. I was not sure if I wanted to attend college, since I was tired of the standard education structure. I was not really sure what I would get out of it and what I should study, so instead I experimented in different sociological settings for about three years.

But eventually I realized that in our society it is more difficult to get the opportunities and recognition needed for progress without the stamps and signaling from educational institutions (especially for an immigrant who did not speak English well). So I relented and decided to get some of these stamps we all go after.

I attended UCLA and was sitting in classes that seemed to follow a path of reproduction that I found meaningless. The professor would tell or show something for us to remember, we would do the exact same thing in a homework assignment or exam, and get graded on how well we are able to copy something that was shown to us.

What was the point of that? How did that test understanding?

So I went back to the same pattern of skipping classes that were not interesting to me and arriving late to classes that I found interesting but too slow. Many professors did not like that I would sometimes arrive up to 45 min late to class. They would try to discipline me, but to me they were the confused ones, who wanted me to waste my time on something that didn’t add value for me.

Yet at UCLA I encountered few professors that tried to do something different. One of them was the french-born Professor Pilon, who taught heat transfer and thermodynamics. He did not emphasize how well we could solve some standard problem, answer some standard question or remember some standard information. His goal was to help us develop a deep and intuitive understanding of the subject.

He used different teaching methods involving more discussion, in-class oral examination and a two-part exam. It included a conceptual part that discussed unusual questions that would help us develop an in-depth understanding of the subject and help him better gauge our real understanding.

This was different from the approaches of most professors, who would just lecture, state what type of questions would be on the exam, show how to solve them and just have you repeat that under time pressure.

A total waste of time!

Since at UCLA I had chosen to study aerospace engineering, which involves many complex, dynamic systems, I performed well despite my dyslexia, of which I was still unaware of.

After UCLA, I attended engineering graduate school at Stanford and had high expectations, because of Stanford’s reputation.

But I was disappointed. Stanford was just more of the same. It just had longer homework sets and less time on the exams. There was nothing qualitatively different, that was more intellectually stimulating and helped one develop a deep and intuitive understanding.

I was hoping that Stanford exams, to incentivize deeper thinking, would involve topics that we had not yet covered in class. But that was not the case at Stanford, with the exception of one, single aerodynamics exam that really required an unusual thinking process.

So in a sense at Stanford we just wasted more time on longer homework sets.

Yet by then I had learned to view higher education differently, as a setting with the flexibility to do what I wanted with my time to maximize value. So I spent a lot of time traveling, experimenting, exploring San Francisco and playing with some startup ideas.

Stanford had one interesting innovation, which back than was called SCPD (Stanford Center for Professional Development). The usual classroom lectures were video recorded in high quality and could be viewed online. It was mainly intended for people who were doing a fully employed masters and had to be remote. With SCPD I could watch lectures at my own convenience, while sitting in a coffee shop in San Francisco. I could do it when I felt intellectually most receptive and not at some arbitrary set time.

The best part about it was that one could speed up and slow down the playback speed. Interestingly, I found these video lectures a lot more engaging and meaningful, since I could capture and deeply understand every single statement of the lecture by speeding up and slowing down the playback. Consequently, my understanding of many topics improved significantly, ironically by distancing myself from the physical Stanford campus.

With SCPD the lecture pace could be personalized, which solved the first major shortcoming I mentioned at the beginning of the article. Granted it also eliminated the discussion and knowledge creation component, which was so important in the high school story described above.

Maybe one could use technology to have both a pace controlled video lecture setting (for information input) and a live discussion and knowledge creation setting (for information creation and analysis).

Nowadays Coursera and Udacity are trying to disrupt higher education and the playback speed adjustment is in my opinion one of the best features of online video education. With time they will hopefully introduce more useful innovations into education. But today both Coursera and Udacity are still using the same archaic teaching methods of information presentation and reproduction. I would like them to be more innovative.

About two years after graduating from Stanford, I was considering getting an MBA. By then I viewed university education more as time off from conventional work to do different things. A friend and I had started an electric bike startup and my goal was to quit my regular job to work on that startup. I also wanted to develop my stock investing philosophy. By simultaneously doing an MBA, I thought I could augment my learning experiences from the startup and stock investing with theoretical classroom knowledge, and also mitigate the risk of the two ventures.

In my opinion this was a powerful educational approach by combining theory with real world experiences. Another reason I considered the MBA was that as an immigrant, who only had an engineering background and worked as an engineer, I had weak communication, presentation and writing skills. I thought of the MBA as a good environment to kickstart working on these weaknesses.

In retrospect, I think the combined approach was very powerful, especially for devising new methods for knowledge creation, which I discuss in another article.

One interesting aspect about business is that it has very few absolute rules and hence the best way to learn business is by doing it.

By then I was somewhat disillusioned with educational institutions and was not even sure if it would make a difference what university I attended.

I even remember asking a friend, who had a Stanford MBA, if it would be worth moving back to the Bay Area, since I was living in Los Angeles again. My disappointing educational experience at Stanford Engineering made me question the educational value of these elite institutions.

In retrospect, the combined approach of running a startup, developing my investing philosophy by closely analyzing the stock market and simultaneously attending MBA classes turned out to be pretty powerful.

But I think an MBA from an elite institution could be worth it for many, but not for the classroom experience or learning, but just for the network and signaling value of the institution. In today’s education system, network and signaling are the main returns that many institutions provide for the ever increasing tuition cost that is contributing to a dooming student debt crisis.

One additional reason that tipped the scale for Los Angeles was that I had gotten really into surfing and wanted to become better at it. I wanted to live as close to the beach as possible, so I could surf every day. I always believed that the general environmental influences can have a large impact on one’s performance. And being able to consistently surf is something that makes me really happy.

UCLA Anderson, just five miles from the beach, signaled an emphasis on finance, economics and entrepreneurship, a combination of specializations that I was interested in.

While attending UCLA Anderson, I spent most of my “study” time working on our startup, analyzing the stock market and sometimes attending classes. I was mostly interested in finance and economics classes. I still skipped the initial portion of many lectures to make them more engaging and interesting, as the pace of many MBA classes can be grudgingly slow, if one has a strong math and analytics background.

There it was again the issue with the arbitrary lecture pace, that is imposed on us and set by the class median. Once again there were some classes, where the pace was so slow, that I could not pay attention to the lecture. The worst was a statistics class that for someone with a strong math background felt like high school again.

Many professors did not like that I arrived late. I remember one economics professor making a comment about me being late and calculating how much money I was paying per minute for his lecture. It made me think, that I better not waste that money by sitting too long in his lecture, which only conveyed a superficial and purely theoretical understanding of economics.

As an economist he had forgotten that as a customer I am paying for a service, and if I am not getting what I want out of it, the school should make an effort to provide a better service that adds more value.

I think the saying, “the customer is king”, should also apply in education!

Interestingly, the same economics professor later during a lecture stated that he cannot justify Microsoft’s investment in Facebook at a $10 billion valuation. In his opinion, as he had not yet spent a single dollar on Facebook, Facebook did not justify that valuation.

As a reference, six years later Facebook is valued at $350 billion and he probably still hasn’t spent a single dollar on Facebook. But that didn’t seem to be the significant point.

Luckily, his opinion did not sway me and I invested in Facebook few months after the IPO. So in a sense I am happy that I did skip some of these lectures, since they conveyed a superficial understanding of economics, despite the professor’s “seemingly useful” economics PhD from Harvard.

My high school physics teacher’s “discussion-focused knowledge-creation” approach would be an ideal teaching method for economics. We could observe real world phenomena occurring daily and could attempt to understand them in an economic context with class discussions and theory creation. This would be far more meaningful for our understanding of economics than the simplified, linear equations, that have little relationship to real world economics.

Ironically, during the MBA the most meaningful economics class I had, which improved my understanding of economics the most, was during a semester abroad in Australia (where I also got to surf a lot :).

Professor Moshirian, from UNSW in Sydney, would sometimes wander off with his own stories and teach us a deeper understanding of economics. This occurred at the height of the European Debt Crisis, so there was lots of real world material to discuss macroeconomics. Then he would catch himself and get back to the less meaningful standard curriculum. There is a fair amount of irony in that.

It is possible that many professors are restricted by the overall system structure and have no other choice than to follow a standard method.

One problem with many current MBA classes is that they are 50% crap. Unlike in sciences and engineering, where the world is more stable, business evolves at a much faster pace.

The pace at which technology is currently transforming our economy changes everything about business. Many topics covered in my MBA classes are already meaningless and obsolete.

MBA programs should put even more effort on changing their curricula very frequently, to reflect the needs and approaches of the current economy.

Our MBA program only offered one web-technology related class. Given the Internet’s drastic transformation of business and that the biggest companies in the world are in the tech sector, all MBA programs need a rapid curriculum update towards high-tech.

In addition, the programs should stay away from applying statistics and probability theory in areas where these do not actually apply.

Another challenge with MBA classes is that business understanding is really hard to test in a written format. Many MBA classes teach a lot of meaningless and simplified equations to generate material for some basic exam questions.

This phenomenon is not limited to MBAs, but is a broad outcome of all institutionalized education in many fields. For many subjects, the material is not guided by what is most meaningful to learn, but by what can be easily tested in a written format. This is another adverse outcome of a flawed education system.

At the current state of education, the universities and professors act as if the students owe them something. In reality the schools owe the students a meaningful service and we should be the one’s complaining for the disappointment we get in return, considering the ever-increasing tuition cost. It would take ten articles to discuss all the shortcomings of our education system and the flawed incentive structure it has created, but I will stop here.

As our higher education system has evolved to a poorly functioning state, it seems the two most useful aspects of higher education are the signaling value of the diploma and the network of the school. Considering how much time we spend in lectures/studying and how much money we pay for the degree, this seems to be a bad tradeoff. There must be ways to get something more meaningful for our investment.

I think the key to making the current education system more meaningful is addressing the three shortcomings mentioned at the beginning of the article: 1. Arbitrary pace of lectures, 2. Useless teaching methods and 3. Obsolete curriculum.

My high school physics teacher Dr. Stark, my undergrad heat transfer professor Dr. Pilon and the Australian economics professor Dr. Moshirian showed that better approaches are possible. It just takes more professors with courage to try something new. If we cannot find these professors, I think the most meaningful way to structure education in the future would be with the help of AI bots, that can capture the needs of every student and can modify the teaching method based on needs.

In the information age, information is abundant and processing information is one of the most important skills. Instead of focusing on how well we memorize something or replicate something, we should focus on skills that involve information processing, which is more meaningful today. We already have access to most information in the world, so there is not much value in remembering facts.

Knowing how to distinguish correct information from incorrect information for a given field, and using knowledge creation technics to synthesize information to create our own theories, seems to be more meaningful. This should be a focus of education today!

At the very least, educational institutions should create teaching methods that emphasize these skills.

Hopefully, at some point in the distant future, if we are feeling even more courageous, we can disrupt the entire education structure and create something more holistic, that really teaches each individual what he/she needs to live a successful, meaningful and happy life in the real world.

Disclaimer:

Since I am a dyslexic, I am prone to spelling and grammar mistakes. Hopefully it does not distract from the substance of the article.

Thank you for reading this article