Why Isn't Better Learning a Priority in Education?
There are so many other things to worry about!
Recently, I was surprised while discussing the mission of PlaylistBuilder (to improve learning through better video curation) with our super-experienced edtech advisor Phil Hill when he said:
Universities are not focused on better learning. Of course, right now everybody is worried about budget cuts by the Trump Administration. But even before that, improving learning was not a main priority.
What?! Of course improving learning is a top goal of universities and other educators.
Or is it?
On brief reflection, I realized that Phil’s point had been hiding in plain sight. The linkage between education and learning is complex. Even if educators believe that better learning is at the core of their mission—and many or most do—that does not mean that great learning outcomes are a top day-to-day priority.
The reasons that better learning is not educators’ top priority are in two areas:
There are so many other priorities to worry about.
Education is complex.
Below, I explore both areas, and then consider how educators might better focus on better learning. In short, the answer is to pursue local solutions that solve specific learning problems.
Other priorities in education
It’s not hard to come up with a list of priorities other than learning that are occupying educators. I’ll focus on the university sector, but the same is true for other educational institutions, and for companies in the education sector.
Funding. Without adequate funding, universities cannot exist. This has recently become an acute problem in the United States with Trump Administration budget cuts—as my advisor friend mentioned—but was already a major issue before President Trump took office. Universities in the United Kingdom, where I live, face similar challenges.
Cost-effectiveness and scalability. In many learning contexts, the goal is to teach as many students as efficiently as possible. Teaching approaches that deal with specific learning needs are often not easily scalable. Benjamin Bloom observed this in his 1984 paper The 2 Sigma Problem: The Search for Methods of Group Instruction as Effective as One-to-One Tutoring. This poses a central question that can inform solutions: how can we make teaching for optimal learning more scalable?
Curriculum and consistency. Educators at universities (and schools to an even greater extent) are constrained by decisions about the curriculum that they teach. The content and consistency that inhere in a curriculum have significant learning benefits, but they also constrain educators’ ability to follow alternative paths to improve learning.
Politics influences many aspects of learning. In addition to political effects on funding (mentioned above), ‘culture wars’ are increasingly influencing what is taught.1 Notably, the Trump Administration has taken strong action against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in education and elsewhere.
Complexity in education and learning
Complexity of education is related to having other priorities worry about. But it deserves separate treatment.
Most people seem to think education is simple—it’s about a qualified teacher standing up in front of a group of students, and teaching them stuff which they have then ‘learned’. Or something like that.
The problem with this mental model is that it ignores many inherent dimensions of complexity, including (to name only a few):
differing needs of students in terms of intelligence, learning style, time availability, age and many other factors which may affect the ability to ‘learn’ information and skills that are taught
a huge number of topics to be taught, many of which are changing (sometimes very rapidly, particularly in the technological areas that are currently driving change in society)
differing teaching environments—classroom, laboratory, on-the-job and other
differing abilities and training of teachers
things that distract from the educational mission, like the other priorities discussed in the previous section
the simple fact that the world is unpredictable.
This confluence of factors is a very different kind of complexity from that affecting industries that build technology products. For example, building an airplane that is safe, reliable and efficient is a very complex task—and one that can go wrong when priorities are misplaced, as the recent travails of Boeing illustrate. But ultimately the goal is to produce a machine with highly standardized behavior.
By contrast, standardization should not be the aim in education, as Bloom’s research on one-to-one tutoring shows. Humans resist standardization, and an education system that turns out automatons greatly reduces the strength and innovativeness of society. Recognizing these basic principles, education technology companies have focused heavily in recent years on ‘personalized education’. (Of course, we do try to standardize education to some extent, for good reasons—including through curriculum, as mentioned above.)
This leaves us with a wicked problem. In complex educational environments with numerous distracting priorities, it’s hard even to agree what ‘better learning’ is, let along deliver it.
Localism in education
So should we despair of improving education, particularly during a year when the US seems bent on dismantling effective university education?
I say, emphatically, NO.
My advisor’s observation that improving learning is not the main priority in universities does not mean that it’s not a priority. Teachers want to teach well:
You can’t stop a teacher when they want to do something. They just do it.
— J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
And students want to learn, and they do it best when they are doing something that excites them:
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
— Howard Thurman
Ultimately, the aims of teachers and students will lead to improvement of education, as they have for centuries. The trick is to find out how to enable effective teaching (for it is primary the teachers rather than learners who are currently challenged) for widespread effective learning.
Crucially, this progress will happen best when it is local—i.e. when it addresses specific topics, needs and individuals.
This is the same point I recently made about responsible AI:
[R]esponsible AI … requires a detailed focus on local conditions. These local conditions include many features such as specific applications, types of users, training and inference data, AI models and other technical details, locations, and
Moving our attention from global to local solutions can substantially reduce (or at least manage) complexity, and it also reduces the challenge of addressing the other priorities discussed above.
However, as suggested above, there is an important exception to the clear benefits of localism. ‘Going local’ often addresses less ably the priority of scalability, and is a mixed bag on cost-effectiveness.
Fortunately, this is where digital technologies can help. By combining local action with the ability of AI and other digital technologies to deliver personalization at scale, we can cost-effectively deliver local solutions. PlaylistBuilder does this by enabling quick construction of YouTube playlists on any focused topic, without clickbait and advertising distractions.
As I recently wrote:
AI applications can behave responsibly by addressing the specific environments in which they are deployed, and allowing users to focus on the inevitable messiness of those environments. Purpose-specific learning tools are a terrific example of this.
So, notwithstanding the unavoidable distractions, let us continue to aim for better learning, leveraging the potential of AI and digital technology to help teachers deliver great education in local environments around the world.
Note: This post has been updated from the original version to identify Phil Hill by name, with his permission.
That observation is about Western democracies, where culture wars are increasingly impinging on truth and free speech. In autocratic countries like China, restriction of certain content for political reasons is even better established.