In nearly every industry, there is one primary goal. That goal is to do more with less work. We want to produce more, in less time, with less effort. We want to provide services for more people with less work, in less time. This desire to increase profits and improve outcomes with less expenses, in less time, with less work is nearly universal. There is one exception: Education.
In education, the mentality is that more work is better. Some teachers have the view that if students are working less hard than they worked in school, then the students are getting off easy. The "I had to work so hard for this, so you should too" mentality is pretty common in schools. Another common mentality is that students that are not spending a lot of time and effort learning are lazy. It is pretty much taken for granted that time and effort spent are equal to the learning that occurred.
Imagine the CEO of a company telling employees that the company is not going to automate processes, because the CEO had to do things manually when he was a grunt worker, and it would be unfair for the current grunts to have it any easier. That CEO would be canned so fast! Successful businesses are constantly looking for ways to cut fat. If they can find a reasonably cheap way to make a process take half the time, they will do it. They even do this for learning activities, like training. Training is important, but if training time can be cut in half without sacrificing learning, then we should do it. Streamlining processes is better for everyone (except the employees who have to find new jobs...).
Laziness in business is a bad thing, but so is useless work. If a fast food restaurant has a lot of employees but not much work, the employees will be told to clean. If the cleaning is finished and things are still slow, a good fast food place does not tell the employees to clean all the same things again (though bad ones do this all the time...). Employees are let off early. There is no attitude that an employee should be constantly doing worthless busywork to avoid laziness. If an employee's services are not needed, then the employee is sent home. If the situation becomes chronic, employees schedules are cut or they start getting laid off.
Lastly, imagine a business that treats time and effort as value produced. No one cares about actual output. An employee who does five times the work, but only works half the time of another employee is treated as less valuable. Raises and promotions are not based on performance but rather on time served. Some companies do work like this. Those companies have been slowly dying out over the last several decades. Many still exist, but the truly successful and promising businesses of today care more about productivity than time spent. The guy that spends half of his time on Facebook but produces more than three other guys is more likely to get the raise. Some businesses are allowing flexible schedules for more productive employees, because they are more interested in how much is produced than how much time is spent producing it. Even though many businesses still value time more than production, it is beginning to be widely recognized that valuing production over time is a more sustainable and profitable long term business strategy.
Now, let's apply this to learning. What if we could teach everything from kindergarten through 3rd grade in a single year? What if we could do it in exactly the same amount of time we currently spend on just kindergarten? Maybe this is impossible, maybe it is not, but what if it was possible? If it was, our current education system would reject it. They would say that one school year is not enough time to learn all of this stuff. They would say that we would be letting the students off too easy. They would compare time spent to learning, as if there were a mathematical formula proving that the maximum speed of human learning is too slow for this to work. Or maybe I am wrong, and they would not, but I would argue that they already have done this.
We have proof that there are better teaching and learning methods than what we currently use in the U.S. The problem is that administration would rather spend money on new white boards (seriously, we already have enough) than on equipment for improving learning. They are skeptical. They don't think kids are capable of learning that fast, and they treat using technology to speed up learning as cheating. When you show them that they are wrong, they will praise you and say a bunch of nice words, but their "I had to do it the hard way, and so should you" attitude does not change. The problem with improving the U.S. educational system is not about mental, monetary, or technological constraints anymore. The problem is the attitude of those in charge, who think that anything that makes learning easier or faster is unfair cheating.
We need to treat education more like a business. The desired outcome is for students to learn (and retain, within reason) a bunch of specific stuff. The input is money, time, and teachers. In a business, we would be looking for ways to streamline the process. A student takes 13 years to teach enough to get through the public school system. How can we reduce that? Maybe we can trim some fat. Is there something we are teaching them that is worthless (in some places, there are)? Is there some way we could change how we teach that would help learning to be faster (the evidence points to heck yes)? What can be do to reduce costs, without sacrificing quality (hint: make the process faster)? Can we reduce the number of teachers without sacrificing quality (another hint: fire crummy teachers and use some of the money saved to pay the good teachers more, so they have more time and motivation to figure out how to teach faster)?
Frankly, this should be an easy task. Just over the last 5 years, education research has come up with many ways of improving learning speeds (in fact, I would argue that this is evidence that our current system may actually be using the single worst possible method for teaching). Cut the fat in places like homework (there is no reason teachers should be grading 30 minutes to an hour worth of homework per student each day, when research has repeatedly shown that there is no value in more than 15 minutes of homework a day). In fact, using the right teaching techniques, some schools have managed to teach students as much as any institutionalized public school, while letting students choose whether they want to learn or play each day.
I once complained that there was not enough research on education, and I still believe that, but over the last few years, we have seen a large amount of new research done. There are no more excuses. If our public education officials cannot treat this more like a business, we don't need them. Maybe we should be electing people with real business experience for this job, instead of a bunch of budding politicians with strong opinions but no real world experience (or even a tiny bit of research) in either business or education. (My solution is home school. At least that way, I can be sure that the teachers are actually fully invested in the well being of my children!)
