I’ve had this idea for a long time now, but really only recently had the language and the knowledge to put into words the idea. It is part of my overall treatise on power and core governing principles, but as I have difficulty getting myself to write long books all at once, a series of notes and essays to later be compiled is a much more straightforward task.
I have for a long time thought that the US system of government was flawed. When I was younger, in the early 00’s, I was excited for a future where we could use technology to assist in governance, and could eventually make life better for everyone. Now, I still desire that future, but I have simultaneously become frustrated by the amount of technology that we have continued to develop, but still have a massive lack of technological integration into our government.
I even understood, back then, that technology has vulnerabilities, and that developing a complex infrastructure to incorporate into society would take time, to work out security, and to perform testing. The systems would need to be well-planned, so they could use cutting-edge technology at the time that would, with some effort, be able to be upgraded in the future, or would be able to be effective before becoming outmoded for a long time.
Alas, there have been few public works projects on this scale, with the most advanced typically being attempts at large-scale transportation infrastructure (trans-continental high-speed rail and the hyperloop are notable examples of this).
By now in our history, I would have expected for technology to have radically shifted how governments run. Now, the coronavirus is pushing some aspects of governance and society at large to be moved forward by technological needs, this fast pace of change carries with it great risk, as there is little time to deal with security risks, or to appropriately fund public projects to deal with the issues that we are faced with, instead being forced to rely upon the solutions that corporations have provided, cobbling together a patchwork system of applications, and systems that are becoming increasingly cumbersome and incompatible with each other.
A good example of this is education. I know that I am a pretty decent student when it comes to self-directed learning (it’s how I’ve managed to continue learning so much without access to formal classrooms), but I know that many of the people that I have met my age are not. I know how to find information that I am searching for, and even often how to get around financial barriers to that information, and I am so relentlessly curious that I won’t stop searching for information until my questions are answered, including those I didn’t know that I had until finding the information that answered them. With the power of search engines and the open internet, a person could become an expert in a particular niche, diving into their topic of interest, and gain a high-level mastery of it in just a couple of years, without ever setting foot in a classroom. Without some sort of guiding curriculum, most people’s educations’ would be limited to their areas of interest, leading to what would be an incomplete education, but these are simple considerations that are workable.
When I was in middle school, I was part of a magnet program for rocketry, but the program’s approach to interdisciplinary studies was genius, and I could see it, even in it. Across each of our classes, we had connections to each of the other classes, and at the end of each quarter, had an integrated project, a single project across multiple subjects that connected the things that we learned into something practical and interesting. One example of this was our pyramid project. I don’t quite recall all of the elements of the project, but I recall that it involved physics and engineering to make traps, a presentation that explained our pyramid in the context of history, and the pyramid had to be made to specific mathematical specifications. We had a number of these projects over the years, and each one brought to life the things that we were learning, instead of just learning a series of facts for each class, separated by subject and intention.
I knew that this was important. I had been interested in psychological hacking at this point in my life, and had been doing research on mind hacks, figuring that learning these hacks early in life would allow me to leverage them for the rest of my life. One of the things many of the resources I read taught you is how to create mnemonics, as they are often described as incredibly important tools for remembering things. You connect a new idea to an existing idea, to create multiple neural pathways to that idea in the newly created memory in your brain. Many of the things I read created arbitrary mnemonic systems that, while useful for remembering specific facts, I found became actually cumbersome. However, after reading enough of them, I found that along with reading some more reputable published sources on learning and education, I was able to get to the heart of the issue, and the jigsaw pieces fell into place.
Everything is connected. All of it. This was further reinforced by my interest in economics, and how I realized that economics ends up being a study of everything, as everything, from charity work building farms in Africa, to high-energy physics research, to steel production in China, to the latest viral video trends and creator content, is all within the realm of economics, and connections can be drawn between these elements.
Students don’t care about their learning when it seems that there is no connection to their everyday lives, or their understanding to how a piece of information will be useful in the future. Now, it’s not that those facts won’t be useful, and in fact, things that I thought would be completely useless to me in my adulthood have ended up being surprisingly useful, but if you had given me a few examples of where something like this is actually useful, instead of simple, silly, and unrealistic word problems, or just insisting that it would be useful eventually, I might have been able to more easily integrate the piece of information, instead of rote memorization. Also by connecting pieces of information that are connected, you build a more complete fundamental understanding of the world that is easier to build on.
I could see that the future would be a combination of integrated learning to create a broad but solid foundation, with more advanced integrated learning techniques being able to convey more advanced information at a younger age, we would be able to compress more education, with the other piece being narrow, interest-driven learning, essentially allowing children to begin finding their field of specialization early on. Unfortunately this has not happened, and while the amount that kids know by the time they get out of high school has certainly increased from where it was 20 years ago, much of it is not the result of more advanced curricula, but by absorbing things that they learn on the internet, the focused self-directed branch solely, and not guided by the educational system itself.
There is much that can be done to streamline costs and even the educational gap between wealthier districts and poorer ones, notably a free federal education system. Such a system, I imagine, would be able to be enrolled in completely digitally, with in-person/online supplementary facilities, perhaps placed in already existing infrastructure, where students could advance at their own pace, which would include classes and educational resources for students from K-12 and would include all of the courses required for at least an undergraduate degree, and continuing education for that degree for free through this federalized digital system, and would allow for students to move at their own pace outside of the typical fall/spring school year.
Having a “federal college” would be difficult, you need to create the classes, the curriculum, the paths of advancement, the exams, standards, and determining the requirements for degrees, building the digital infrastructure, and having the supplemental human resources for the program to assist children. Of course this college would probably be seen as less reputable, at least off the bat, so other schools would need to be phased out, simply making it an option for students. By having a digital infrastructure like Blackboard that students could access (accommodations including devices and basic internet service should be provided to low-income families), you provide more broad access to education.
Another advantage to having access to digital resources, and to allow for students to go at their own pace, you can track how quickly students are moving through courses each year, you can analyze when they are doing school work, and adjust resources. This also gives the federal government access to a depth of information on their future labor force, allowing them to more accurately project what the workforce will look like in the next decade, allowing for more informed policy decisions to be made. It can also be used to analyze how students prefer to learn. Do they do more work at night? Do they take the summer off? How quickly do they move through education if unimpeded by the barrier of the school year that we put in place to create even “batches” of students, like a factory.
The real test of such a system is how young will the average age of a degree-earner be? Even with increasingly difficult and dense curricula early on in life, we could still see the average age of a degree-earner drop steadily (or quite quickly for the most advanced students). Without the learning loss of summer and winter breaks, we could see people regularly earning their bachelor’s degrees by the time they are 18, and those who still seek it, but are slower, instead of being forced out of schools, can take things at their own pace and still find success with few financial barriers, and would provide an opportunity for those who were blocked out of higher education to catch-up, or to gain access to ambitions that were seen as out of reach.
/rant 