We’re living in the Cambrian Explosion of Education
Education is a complex, adaptive system. This non-trivial level of complexity is something I’ve been thinking about and wrestling with for about 20 years. My own secondary education was in a traditional, American, public middle and high school. It wasn’t until I got to a private liberal arts college and began working for Outward Bound, that I began to consciously understand that there were alternatives.
Once I had the realization that my understanding of education was synonymous with “school” I began looking for other educational models that might be appealing. I was immediately struck by the breathtaking diversity of educational options. My initial struggle with understanding the explosion of options I saw was that I was using the wrong analogy. I thought that I was looking at a mosaic of disparate pieces and that it was the learner’s job to choose her own adventure and knit together a custom tailored education from the disparate options available. Ideally she’d have the approrpiate guidance to make informed, reasoned choices and the genuine personal and financial liberty to choose freely.
As I went through my own graduate school and early professional experiences, I couldn’t help but notice that there was a fundamental mismatch between the skills taught in graduate schools and the skills needed to succeed in our economy. I also couldn’t ignore a fundamental dislocation that I saw in my chosen fields of law and finance, though it’s everywhere you look and under just about every stone you care to turn over and examine.
Technology, like education, is a complex adaptive system. However, until very recently, education proceeded along a linear path while technology has famously kept changing at an ever-accelerating rate. This mismatch in rates of change has created a gap between the skills required to succeed in the modern work force (the environment) and the skills being taught in schools, particularly graduate and professional schools (the adaptations).
This situation is not at all unlike the Cambrian Explosion, when 542 million years ago the diversity of organisms on earth increased by orders of magnitude. What’s most astonishing about this biological event is that this rapid increase in diversity occurred in only 20 – 25 million years, or 0.005% of the earth’s history. Or to say this another way; for a very long time, not much happened and then all at once, everything changed. Scientists are still trying to understand what caused the Cambrian Explosion. Perhaps the appearance of an evolutionary adaptation like vision was the cause. Perhaps there was a steep rise in the concentration of oxygen in the atmosphere. Or, perhaps the cause was an emergent property of several complex adaptive systems interacting.
Whatever the cause, we can say this much about it: it arose from a deep and fundamental dislocation between the environment and the adaptations that organisms had developed to succeed in it. It has been my experience that a similar dislocation is due, at least in part, to the widening rift between the technological environment on the one hand , and the educational preparation provided to the people who will seek to thrive in that environment on the other. It is in this space that the diversity of educational options, for people of all ages, talents and interests will multiply with breathtaking speed. We’ve already seen this trend begin with the rapid proliferation of alternative education models in the last 50 years.
We are living through the Cambrian Explosion of education. It presents an incredible opportunity to innovate, scan the environment for strategies to replicate and scale, and experiment freely.