Imagine a world where suddenly two fantastic things happened—parents lost their ability to influence their children's decisions, completely, absolutely. They just physically can't give them any advice and cause guilt.
Second, the army was canceled in this world.
I'm ready to put a lot of money on what universities will start empty the next day. In another year, two-thirds will close, 90% of the faculties will disappear, and in two years no one will remember why they were needed.
When I think about it, it hurts. I have a couple of friends who were kicked out of the university. They like to talk about it this way: "Do you know who else threw the tower? Gates and Jobs!" I'm not the enemy of higher education myself, but I don't want to argue with them.
I feel that education today has big — just giant — problems. I think Valve founder Gabe Newell said the best about this: "In a few months at Microsoft, I learned more about software development than in a couple of years at Harvard. At Harvard, I learned to drink beer while standing on my hands - a useful skill, but not so much."
But I don't like just to swear something. I spent a lot of time figuring out how education really should work.
Lectures - not needed
And I'm not saying there's no need for higher education. On the contrary, the university should teach to learn, socialize, teach to search for additional knowledge on its own, discipline.
But here are the usual everyday days of a student, which have not changed a mountain of decades — lecture, lecture, lecture, practice, lecture, exam. Universities are getting worse. More than that, they're losing their understanding of it. When students complain about the program and methodology, the university turns its mission into an excuse: "The university doesn't have to teach you."
At the Institute it is simply impossible to get the actual skeels that will be useful for real projects. People who have come to terms with the profession are looking for salvation in the courses, because they say: "Teachers don't know how to tell and give outdated knowledge. Buy my courses, you'll find a favor in them."
But it's not about teachers or information, it's about the idea of lectures
In the spring of 2014, scientists from the Washington University conducted the largest analysis of scientific research on the teaching of natural sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics. Scientists compared the groups of students who were lectured in the most ordinary classes to the groups that used so-called "active learning" methods—that is, forms where students get the theory and practice it.
For the analysis, scientists selected 225 from 642 studies that met the strict selection criteria, comparing the same groups of students who had the same teachers, had the same examinations, or had the same group of questions.
On average, 34% of students did not take the exam in groups with regular lectures, and 22% in groups with active education. The average score of active-learning students was almost a whole point higher.
Lectures became almost the main form of study
Learning huge volumes of theory has long been a fundamental principle of education. And the conflict of theory and practice is not new. This was argued in ancient Greece, or even before. The same Socrates, a well-known contender, believed that a mentor should only ask the student the right questions to which he would seek answers.
It was always a big secret to me why by this time the method of teaching became the usual method of lectures.
For example, in the early 20th century, the philosopher John Dewey came up with a concept similar to what would be called self-learning in practice today—but by that time it had already been considered progressive and experimental. Dewey believed that students should only be given information when they themselves seek it. Simply theory, according to his idea, it is not necessary to study — it is necessary to solve practical tasks which meet in real life, and all theoretical knowledge of pupils will bear out while these tasks solve.
When I see boring, overloaded programs, I want to drown hard for this approach (if only to abandon radical ideas). Because in my experience, I see that people start to progress furiously, when they get real tasks, get internships, or get juns to do their first jobs.
My business partner left the institute on a second year, and this did not prevent him from becoming one of the best, in my opinion, IT infrastructure experts in our country.
I often do interviews myself, and I see that sometimes educated people talk about technology as if they've seen how they're being worked, just from the outside. It's a different matter when a person solved a problem with his own hands. You can see that right away. He speaks quite differently, feels nuances, sees problems and different ways. And I'm starting to think that a year of active work gives you more than five years of lectures.
But understandably, all of this can be speculation, cognitive distortions, and mistakes of survivors. So I started looking for science and research to understand why people are only beginning to make real progress in practice, and why students who are actively involved are doing better than those who are just listening to lectures.
Brain needs practice
Our mind, memory, skills are all brain. And the brain is a material organ, and it has many trivial physical limitations. I remember being stunned by the realization that all the knowledge we get has a very real weight in my head.
Just a few years ago, in order to become a real taxi driver in London, you had to pass a city orientation exam without a navigator — that is, you know at least two and a half thousand streets, one-way traffic, traffic signs, stop bans, and you can build the best route. Scientists made a tomogram to [taxi drivers] to see the density of gray matter in the hippocampus. It's an important area of the brain that involves memory formation and spatial thinking. It was found that if a person did not want to become a taxi driver or wanted to, but did not become, the density of gray matter in his hippocampus remained the same. But if he wanted to become a taxi driver, took a training course and really learned a new profession, then the density of gray matter increased by a third — that is a lot."
That is, when the brain learns, it grows connections between neurons—roughly speaking, it builds up very real flesh. It's a complex process that consumes a lot of calories, sugar, oxygen, and energy. And the brain saves them, because if it had an unlimited amount of energy and an infinite ability to recycle it, we would remember absolutely every second of our lives perfectly.
But there are no resources and memory is selective - it costs the brain a lot. Naturally, he starts filtering information and cultivating new connections just for what he thinks is really necessary — not always asking us. So any conscious learning is a kind of biohacking.
Information is perceived by different senses, processed by memory, which has limited resources, and then entered into long-term memory, which has no restrictions. Long-term memory organizes complex material into circuits, thus reducing the load on memory and increasing its capacity. The performance of RAM can be affected by both the essential characteristics of the material being processed (its nature) and the external conditions (the way the material is fed). If too much material is supplied so that it cannot be processed by the memory and transferred to the long-term, cognitive overload occurs
In other words, in order to learn effectively, we have to find ways to circumvent the physiological limitations of the brain and the subconscious locks that they create. The brain is incredibly complex, it has many departments, and they divide the work among themselves according to hard-to-catch patterns.
And if you include different processes in your education at the same time, and you use different parts of your brain, then you start learning more effectively.
For example, Eidan Horner, a psychologist at the University of York, did this research. He took two of the same length of text and gave them to read to a group of subjects. Then he asked me to re-read the first text again, and the second one to try to write it on memory paper.
After that, he conducted three surveys on both texts at different times, five minutes later, two days later, and a week later. After five minutes of testing, everyone did well - people remember both texts equally well. And a week later, the tests were different. When asked about a text that the subjects simply re-read, they gave 40% of the correct answers. In the second text, which people retold, 58% of the answers were correct.
A little effort, additional brain involvement on the extra side—not just the trivial intake of information—has greatly improved the retention of knowledge in long-term memory.
I think that's how it is. If you ask where Majuro is on the map and you get an answer, you'll forget him almost immediately. But if you are told where the encyclopedia is and asked to find Majuro on your own, the name of this city will stay with you for a long time, because you put an effort in it.
The brain should design knowledge, not absorb it
There are many approaches to active learning, each of which is better than classical lectures — game-oriented, problem-oriented, collective and different. But most of all, my head turned a constructive approach, a concept that seemed to me the closest to the education I would have dreamed of seeing in my ideal world.
The essence of the approach (or rather philosophy) is that no knowledge can be passed on to the student—it is only possible to create the conditions in which he will construct them in his mind.
"This approach enables students to actively develop their own knowledge based on experience, provides information from a wide range of perspectives, provides help from a specialist or mentor, and gives students time and opportunities to develop metacognitive skills," writes Maria Gianelli.
To put it bluntly, freedom of choice, interpretation, practice and feedback without rigorous evaluation of pre-defined criteria.
I think this approach is best suited to physiology. In nature, there are no people with identical brains, all have different predisposition and experiences. And when new knowledge comes to mind, it's uniquely matched by a completely unique network of neurons. Therefore, naturally, all people understand everything and see in their own way. But that is what creates a sea of difficulties.
"The constructive approach has limitations: Creating contextually oriented content requires a lot of time and labor, and more time and labor is needed to create content that is consistent with students' individual interests and experiences. A teacher who takes a constructive approach to learning is inevitably limited in the ability to focus students' attention and channel it into a specific direction, and students without external motivation may lose interest in the work. Finally, in a constructive learning environment, it is not always easy and even not always possible to evaluate students' knowledge correctly," writes Gianelli.
When I found out, I began to wonder why a totally useless way of learning through lectures became dominant—it's the simplest, and it's the only one that gives the teacher the illusion of control over chaos, completely false. It seems to the teacher that he can simply take and move the knowledge in the same form as it lies in his head, and then evaluate and guide the students in a direction that only he thinks is correct and unchanging.
But that's not the case at all. And now, with the world filled with information, people, professions, technologies, new ways to learn and apply knowledge, this illusion of control over learning has finally begun to crack at the seams.
Learning is a spontaneous phenomenon
Not long ago, I learned the story of Indian scholar and enlightener Sughat Mitr. He is now creating Self-organized Learning Spaces, places where children can study almost without teachers. It's a very long and complicated idea. It began with an experiment that Mitra conducted in New Delhi in the late 1990s.
He built a computer into the wall of a house in slums, where children of computers never saw, didn't go to school and didn't know English, connected it to the Internet and left it. A few weeks later, all the local children were able to use the Internet, teach each other, and even compose music on the computer.
He then conducted the same experiment in Hyderabad, India. Mitra brought together children who spoke English with a strong accent, gave them a computer with a program that converts the speech into printed text. He asked the children to dictate the words—but the computer certainly did not record it correctly.
Since then, he has conducted similar experiments in many cities around the world. Left a group of children with one computer, gave a task and left. And each time the results were phenomenal. For example, 12-year-old children from an Indian village studied biotechnology on their own in English. They passed the pass test, and the results were published in the British Journal of Educational Technology.
Mitra just wanted to solve the problem of teachers, because in India there were not enough teachers. They went where they were paid, but they didn't go where they needed most. And as a result, Mitr seems to have discovered something deeper.
"Do you know what happened? I think we just came across a self-organizing system. Its structure emerges without explicit external intervention. Self-organizing systems are always unpredictable, they start to do things that were not intended for. That's why we react, because it seems impossible. I think I can now make this point: education is a self-organizing system in which learning is a spontaneous phenomenon."
Tasks needed instead of lecturers
A few years ago, we started our company to set up the infrastructure for IT companies. We had a very wide stack of technologies, and it was very difficult to get many strong deviants into such a team. So we decided to teach people for ourselves.
I went to school to figure out how to properly organize online education. We ended up with a lecture-based course. They included a few jobs, about 20, they had two streams, and they realized that we had to change the approach.
I built the training the way I was taught, but intuitively felt that it had to be different. It seemed to me that the student had to face a task from the very beginning of the study. And it's normal that he won't have the slightest idea how to solve it. He must look for a way, untangle, split, and unfold — read, watch, listen, ask, discuss. That's where theory is needed—it's the answer to the student's request. And the result of the training — not perfect for the thought of by someone the dummy — and absolutely unique expert with unique experience.
Then, from the next attempt, we created a program that consists entirely of tasks to be solved on its own (and very little of the theoretical screenshots that are put into context). Instead of teachers, we've attracted existing experts—but they're just checking, evaluating, and directing.
And here's the first pleasant surprise, the right and cool decisions, it turns out, much more than we could imagine. So we're making a problem, we're picking the right answer to it, and in practice, we're finding that the right answers are two, three, four, and more. People think differently, find different solutions — it's incredibly cool!
As a result, the guys we taught already work as leeds in our company. In two years, this methodology has fired so much that we had to open another company that is purely training DevOps specialists. The largest IT-companies, banks and corporations order from us the development of similar programs for themselves and send to us the specialists.
And so I tell the old specialists how everything is arranged in our country, and I hear — "Cool, I didn't have this when I studied".