However it is not good at training leaders, inventors and innovators. And we need people to change the world as much as we need people to operate it.
We live in an environment that always changes. Rules that apply today might no longer apply 15 years from now. So we need to train people to be able to adapt to those changes.
But how do we do this? The entire process of education is different. And if we want societies with complete human beings, we need to think about this.
In formal education, we need a measure of right and wrong. We either know something or we don't. This binary form of learning applies itself to things like engineering and sciences. It requires we have a teacher of greater knowledge than us that directs us in structured segments, until we can reliably get the right answers on our own.
My first university experience was learning applied physics. This mostly consists of well established rules of mechanics and energy transfer that are right or wrong. Usually people who study physics end up working in some kind of engineering, for example aircraft engineering.
For that this system works very well. We need it. Imagine if an aircraft engineer designed an airplane you were on with a bit of trial and error? If they just tried something new to see if it would work? Some skills need this style of education.
However most things don't. Even things we like to think of as "right or wrong" subjects often aren't. Business, emergency services, even medicine involve ambiguous situations. And this is where creativity becomes important.
By creativity I don't just mean the arts. I mean the ability to do something new or unorthodox. To do something not directly taught. This comes from intuition. A businessman might decide to launch a new product even when it appears to be a bad idea (it took Otto Rohwedder 6 months and many banks to find one who would finance his product: sliced bread). Police need to use their intuition to asses a situation. And sometimes a doctor will just have to take their best guess to save a patients life.
Intuition can be reliable if it's forged through extensive experience. The key is how to get the right experience, and I believe this is where informal education plays a vital role.
Formal education thrives in a world of right or wrong, and with a teacher who passes his knowledge downwards to the student. Informal education thrives in an environment of ambiguity.
Informal education doesn't need teachers. It needs mentors. It isn't concerned with the teaching of specific materials. Rather it is concerned with the process of learning the material.
A mentor doesn't necessarily know what the student is learning, but they can try and help the student find out. They do this through collaboration, not dictation.
I refer often to business, because it's where my formal training comes from. In the degree, we have dozens of models thrown at us. How we market something, how we price something, how we minimize costs, etc, etc. We are told a lot of 'whats' but not a lot of 'whys'.
Some of these models will endure the test of time, and others will become obsolete as soon as the business environment changes. Already the forces of globalization have made many business models more than 20 years old obsolete.
Because of the formal education model, we have plenty of students that can recall models or charts from the book. I have a feeling that many would not know when they are appropriate to use them, though.
In an informal model, we could be given the requirements we need to meet (e.g. research product pricing methods) and then we have to find the information for ourselves.
This achieves a few things:
1. Students learn how to research business topics. This is a skill that can be used later in life if they change careers, or new theories about business become available.
2. Students gain the confidence that they can learn whatever knowledge they will need in the future, by themselves. This takes the student out of a cycle of dependence and towards becoming a capable and responsible member of society.
3. Students understand the reason for the current theory/concept/idea. This allows them to know the limitations of the theory. It also teaches them the environment that created the theory. They then know if that environment changes, so do the assumptions that support that theory.
4. Students may come into contact with new untested theories. This gets the student thinking about the future progression of the subject. It then becomes dynamic in the students mind, not just a static rule set in stone.
5. Students may come into contact with real life current examples of the theory. This would usually be in a form of something that interests the student, rather than a case study in a book that the author thought would interest all students reading that book.
6. Students may find something that interests them about the subject. Even if the student is not interested in the subject as a whole, they may find an aspect that appeals to them if they are allowed to explore. (For me, it was accounting. It doesn't interest me as a whole, but when I found IKEA was the worlds largest registered charity, I gained a new respect for accountants.)
This list is surely not complete. But even if it were, we have to think about what we are giving up when we try to apply formal education to every subject equally.
The cost of not providing an environment where informal education flourishes is giving up the opportunity for the people to learn:
- How to find information for themselves
- How to be confident in their knowledge and ability
- How to use knowledge in real life situations
- How to adapt knowledge as needed
- How to understand how past environment creates current knowledge, and how current environment creates future knowledge
- How to find what motivates the individual, finding their passions
Of course, these things can be learned in life from the self motivated learner. But experience shows that most people won't unless they have a good reason to.
Informal education allows us to provide an environment where this learning flourishes. By supporting the system, it encourages some people to develop personally that otherwise would not. It is a system of education we are starting to value less than formal education. But undervaluing this form of education would be a mistake. It could cost us a society of happy, confident, creative and strong people. I for one would prefer to live in that kind of society, than one full of technically skilled but miserable, insecure and nasty people.
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For further ideas I have on how to run a business degree, see my entry in Brad West's Payap Blog on contingent pedagogy.
