Two New Life-long Learners and their Learning Future 20 Years from Now
Two New Life-long Learners and their Learning Future 20 Years from Now
Learning for their career separate from learning for the sake of learning fun interesting things
I missed a fortnightly installment of Your Reading Life two weeks ago. When I would have been sending the email/posting the post I was welcoming into the world two twin gentlemen by the name of Mateo Kahlil Dyer and Dominic Mohammed Dyer. They’re doing well, sleeping heavily at the moment, and momma is on the mend, and generally in good spirits.
These kiddos will grow up with a dad who writes about his reading life, works on encouraging other people to think about theirs with Extragrad, and who developed a lot of this reading orientation in “higher ed,” studying for a bachelors and a masters. With their arrival I’ve been wondering what their future reading lives will be. In particular, I wonder what their higher ed experiences will be.
My partner and I will setup 529s to save for their possible undergrad experiences but (I think?) I saw that we can choose between accounts that are explicitly for tuition and those that are more flexible. We’ll be choosing the more flexible version if indeed that is possible.
I have a strong hunch that their post high school (and I hope the same is true for high school as well) experiences will be very different than mine and than a lot of my peers’.
Higher ed, in many of its general and especially fanciest manifestations, has begun to cannibalize itself and so will either die off or evolve over the next few decades. When I visited a friend (around 20 years ago at this point so my recollection is a bit murky) at Princeton when we were both in undergrad we got to talking about how expensive private undergrad education was (and it’s grown significantly since). He told me that a few years prior, the school realized that if they raised the tuition people would still pay it. And that the higher the price the higher the signal that the education was better than less costly educations. Since the fanciest universities in the US discovered they’re sitting on luxury products/experiences and raised their prices accordingly, many many other higher ed institutions have followed suit. Generally speaking, to get a private, 4 year degree in the US is extremely expensive. As a result, hopeful students take out mountains of debt assuming it will be a wise investment that will pay off significantly in the long term.
Let’s think for a moment about what students purchase for such sums. (Take all of what follows with lots of grains of salt as I did not attend a typical 4 year private university.) The average student has a major and a minor. Some pursue interests, while others pursue courses of study that set them up for a concrete job they think they will enjoy and/or will pay well. Most of the time, regardless whether they select a path targeting a specific career or job, the institution will insist on the student taking courses outside of their focus area or some sort of “generals” that all students must take. I do not know the origin of this insistence nor why it continues. Listening to conversations around my office between interns still in undergrad, these courses are seen as useless as they do not see how they will advance their careers or make them money.
At the heart of this dynamic is a tension my friend and fellow Substack writer Scott Hartley calls out in his book The Fuzzy and The Techie. The tension manifests as an out and out conflict, at times hostile, between the “humanities” and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics or “STEM.” The tension, he maintains, is baseless and false. Both are important for one’s career and have much to offer even in tech startups with which he is most familiar as a venture investor where you might expect only STEM to be relevant.
More generally, though, I’d say the tension is part of a dual mandate of 4 year universities. On the one side, schools try to prepare students for jobs and careers that contribute to society’s economy, often referred to as a vocation (not to be confused with vocational training schools which denote the same meaning but in our society connote the learning of a trade, e.g. plumbing, electrical, etc.) On the other hand, schools try to form well-rounded, wisely-thinking, well-informed participants in society’s democracy. And not just for democracy’s sake but I sense a sort of paternalism trying to enculturate young people into what’s ethical or guide them toward seeing what makes life meaningful.
When my partner and I’s twins born two weeks ago finish high school, I do not think they will attend an institution with this muddled, implicit, dual mandate. I think it will be more and more encouraged over the next decade or two to seek out training and/or experience that will help you further the (first) career you’ve chosen for yourself and organizations like Extragrad will help people to pursue their own interests that don’t involve job training but help them develop as well-rounded life-long learners.
Allow me to paint the picture of the future I think my twins will live in using the head of the WTO, Dr Iweala’s recent article in Foreign Affairs Magazine titled Why the World Still Needs Trade The Case for Reimagining—Not Abandoning—Globalization. I’m going to assume these two kiddos will grow up with anthropomorphic climate change being the largest weight on its generation’s shoulders and so I’m imagining one choosing a career in the production of green hydrogen and the other in a complementary career in economics and investment helping to identify the best places in the future world of “reglobalization” and freer trade to produce the fuel with the least bad environmental impact.1
I think they’ll take up two separate educational paths. The first is often associated with STEM but is not exclusively STEM. The first twin looking into green hydrogen production might take a lot of chemistry, physics, business, and management courses to prepare for jobs at organizations producing and distributing the fuel. The second twin might take more business and economics and management and accounting courses as well as geography and history courses to be able to work with the other twin’s organization producing the fuel to decide where to do so. Very practical coursework connected to what their day to day work lives will look like. I assume this will look a lot like universities and colleges look today and take place in a concentrated chunk of time with a beginning, middle, and, end resulting in some level of job “readiness”. Let’s call this “Higher Ed Path 1,” or better yet, just simply the “undergrad path.”
The second path they’ll take up is a lot less directly and concretely relevant to their economic lives.
They’ll pursue their curiosity about non-career interests without the forcing mechanism of required general courses or some standard number of electives. A major misconception is that this path will involve only the study of the “humanities.” I disagree. In my strange undergrad we discussed deeply the meaning of Newton’s Principia and calculus and number theory having read Dedekind’s book Essays on the Theory of Numbers. This second path might be more heavily laden with the humanities but need not be exclusively the humanities. (The better label for this path is the liberal arts which are often conflated with the “humanities” in spite of being a super set of them and including subjects like the physical sciences and other STEM topics.)
What will this path look like?
These gents will select a work of art, say, literature or a painting, or a work of philosophy or math, or just select a topic, not unlike selecting a class from a list for the next semester and dissect it in a dialogue or longer deeper conversation.
What will the time frame be?
They will dabble and spread these selections here and there over their lifetime as you’d expect from a true “lifelong-learner.”
What will be the big difference between this future and now?
“Creators” as we refer to them nowadays will offer/curate/design “learning experiences”. They will be “just in time” (arriving when the twin is most interested in the topic or work of art) and cost will be equivalent to the time spent rather than thousands spent on tuition for a course the student does not want to take, isn’t ready to appreciate, and is overwhelmed with the context needed to actually process the content of the course.
What format will the learning experience take?
The default will be to familiarize oneself with the topic or work and dialogue with the “creator”/learning experience designer and/or peers. See my future course, How to Talk about a Book. Other formats might involve travel, or even more practical experimentation.
Why is this kind of learning important?
Learning what’s important for economic contribution, for one’s career is valuable but limited. Questions like: Why are we here? Why contribute to the economy at all? What is just? How might we govern ourselves and work together better? How might we frame problems as root problems and not symptoms on the surface? What do I do with these things called emotions and feelings? What is a number? What’s the history of numbers? What does it mean to be human? Intelligent? Ethical? What should we prioritize as individuals? As societies? These question are not pondered when acquiring skills to do a job like producing an energy input. Thinking about them does however make life richer and society stronger. Longer conversations in the form of dialogues about a text or work of art are much more fitting for this flavor of exploratory learning.
Why will learners choose to pursue these kinds of learnings?
Currently, much of these kinds of conversations take place in environments resembling factories involving compulsion and punitive measures no matter how benevolent the intentions. “If you don’t attend or write the essay or take the test or do the reading or act like you care about, say, Shakespeare, your grade will reflect that and that might have a negative impact on your life and career” is a threat that powers these contexts. We assume people do not want to learn, are not curious, and so we force learning on people during the last chance we get, during the undergrad studies. The fact is these topics are interesting. People are curious why Plato is still read thousands of years later. What did that person have to say so long ago that my peers are interested in it nowadays, even in the anthropocene?
Also, it’s fun. These learning experiences could be brunch at a nautical themed bar, discussing Moby Dick and the pluralistic potential of democracy. It could be sailing around a few Greek islands while reading Homer’s The Odyssey. Strolling Harlem to a sumptuous dinner to dialogue about Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Learning experiences like these, if well designed, are enriching and open up one’s world and mind. And they are still learning even if they don’t take place in a drab, poorly maintained and designed higher ed institution. Let’s call this path “Higher Ed Path 2” or “Extragrad.”
I think my twins will want to contribute to improving the world and do so with their career choices. However, I think they will not have forced on them a more wide ranging education, but instead choose it themselves from a menu of highly curated and designed learning experiences that make their lives richer.
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From Dr Iweala’s article in a recent issue in Foreign Affairs Magazine Why the World Still Needs Trade The Case for Reimagining—Not Abandoning—Globalization :
Moreover, international trade can help reduce emissions related to goods by allowing countries to specialize. Just as countries can reap economic gains by focusing on what they are relatively good at, the world can reap environmental gains if countries focus on what they are relatively green at. From the perspective of the planet, it makes sense to import energy-intensive products from places with abundant low-carbon energy or water-intensive products from places with abundant water. For example, a recent World Bank report noted that abundant wind and sun put Latin America and the Caribbean in a good position to produce green hydrogen.