stimulant

Said more carefully, the operational culture of educational institutions has more inertia than that of corporations. While it is clear that research universities innovate more than many companies, the past three decades of corporate culture and strategy have yielded many more innovations than their academic and educational counterpart.

This is not surprising: not only is educational culture older, academia starts with a space deliberately set apart from the real world, a semi-vacuum dedicated to learning. With market pressures that do not reward swaths of academic thought, if our values diverge from our pragmatism — which they do — creating alternative infrastructures to support all fields is necessary. It is perhaps one of the most unfortunate side effects of technology’s economic and cultural prominence that the boundary between education and the real world has been blurred in such a way (by no means necessarily) so as to hinder the study of less pragmatic domains. That is to say, the encroachment of industry upon academia — to be distinguished from the export of academia to the world — has made school’s rarefied air increasingly difficult to breathe.

Companies, on the other hand, are organizations that succeed because of a tight coupling with the real world. Indeed, many companies’ fortunes are determined by their ability to accurately predict the future in one way or another. Many balk at the suggestion that schools be run more like companies, and rightfully so. But I think this analogy is unnecessary. Analogies are useful for dealing with ideas that are too complex, subtle, or cumbersome to state explicitly. None of the advantages corporations possess are so hindered.

Now, maybe your disdain for academic culture is sufficiently old or deep that the it doesn’t seem weird that educational institutions are slower to change than corporations. But if we set this observation next to the alleged purpose and character of school, serious concerns show themselves. Education is supposed to create a fresh, creative, unconstrained world of ideas. School is touted as a process for refining the mind. The tradition of liberal education takes at face value the edifying properties of education. How do we reconcile these intentions with a fundamentally static organizational design?

Consider the following excerpt from an article by Bruce Nussbaum:

Enter design and design thinking. Over the past decade, design has evolved to become an articulated, formalized method of solving problems that can be widely used in business—and in civil society. Design’s focus on observing consumer/patient/student—human behavior, it’s emphasis on iteration and speed, its ability to construct, not destruct, its search for new options and opportunities, its ability to connect to powerful emotions, its optimism, made converts out of tough CEOs.

What’s the last institutional, organizational, or cultural shift you can think of in schools? The last one that worked well? Contrast that with the distance we’ve traveled moving from Frederick Taylor to Fred Brooks to Bruce Nussbaum. And those are just three data from potentially dozens of mainstream shifts in corporate culture.

Understanding this inertia is essential changing education; it is far more important than having the answers to how to educate. The explicit solution isn’t the important part. Conflating the inertia of schools with the subtlety of education is a mistake made far too often. The map is not the territory, and even lively debates implicitly constrained by mistaking school for education¹ are a recipe for obsolescence.

1. I owe this ever-useful recognition and articulation of a common, frightening intellectual climate to Noam Chomsky’s “We Own the World”:

   Democratic societies use a different method: they don’t articulate the party line. That’s a mistake. What they do is presuppose it, then encourage vigorous debate within the framework of the party line. This serves two purposes. For one thing it gives the impression of a free and open society because, after all, we have lively debate. It also instills a propaganda line that becomes something you presuppose, like the air you breathe.

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