So now what? A few ideas on education and deadlines.
In the early 1900s, French publisher Jean-Marc Côté published a series of postcards titled “En l’An 2000”, showing a range of wild inventions humanity will be endowed with in a hundred years: from the obligatory flying cars to what seem to resemble Roombas, Zoom and synthesizers. One postcard in particular is striking: a classroom where a teacher feeds books into a hand-cranked machine, being turned into lectures for the students. It’s a rather top-down approach; the system seems to work, at least in the eyes of the educator.
That future didn’t arrive 22 years ago, but some gists seem to be floating around. Frankly, it would be lovely to just throw a book at someone and have it memorized instantly. Sadly, us humans are complicated units, so we’ll have to look for other ways to deal with education.
In a previous article, I responded to Mathijs van Kouwen’s plea for a ban on deadlines between 11PM and AM. While I agreed with his general principles, it had to be added that deadline culture can stifle some, could blur a work-life distinction and create a bummed-out student.
There were some reactions, so some nuance should be provided. Just pointing out what doesn’t work is easy, but coming up with something better? That’s a challenge. This article posits three ideas for education that might ease this problem of deadlines and other educational gripes for the better.
1: Means and ends
First off, the underlying problem here seems to come down to a confusion of means and ends: what serves what? More concretely: are the systems put in place for education mostly serving themselves, or the educators using them for their students?
Take grading, something also touched upon by Bob van Vliet. While it usually seems to work out fine, it has shown itself to be lacking in nuance - how can someone really be .2 grade-point better than someone else at an essay? - as well as demotivating those that need motivation and vice versa. The same goes for deadlines: weekly box-ticking does not always equal learning.
So, what to do? Don’t put all hope in the system and leave some room for human-to-human interaction. It is worth noting that having hundreds of different systems for different students is impossible, so there will always remain a certain system of generalization. Just know when it has gone too far.
2: Taking the weight off
We Dutch don’t really like to celebrate things lavishly. Our birthday parties can look more like a plastic chair therapy session than a jubilant fest and we’re among the quickest in Europe to finish our meals each day. So it should come as no surprise that this ‘act normal, that’s crazy enough’ mentality is ingrained into educational events as well: when you’ve finished a course, there’s no time left to ponder. Move on, dear.
And yet, finishing a large deadline can leave many unresolved feelings; clicking a button is something you do umphteen times per day already, so why would that one ‘submit’-button be more special?
There are some professors who are doing things differently, with a post-deadline lecture congratulating the students on their achievements, looking how far they’ve come. It can sound a bit silly, but it really does allow for good closure and reflection of where the student is at. After all, as John Dewey once said: “we don’t learn from experience, we learn from reflecting on that experience”.
So here’s the thing: humanizing systems of education makes them less daunting. Of course, trinkets should not be the focus of educational activities, but a little gown would make it all the more worthwhile.
3: Learning, unlearning.
Amar Bose (yes, that Bose) was somewhat of a legend at MIT. His tests were a thing on their own, with all of them being open book, though with questions that could nowhere be found in the curriculum and had to be solved anew. Moreover, there was no set deadline for the tests: as long as you wouldn’t leave the class, you could work on the test for as long as you’d like. Finally, about an hour into each test, TAs would rather abruptly bring out ice cream to hand out to the students, because, well, why wouldn’t you do that?
However unorthodox it might seem, his classes yielded good results: many students of his went on to become prominent audio engineers, with the field as a whole being revolutionized by Bose. So why did it work?
Bose seemed to focus on discipline without caveats: it doesn’t matter how you do something, as long as you just do it. In a sense, Bose looked to gamify the course to a certain extent: students can do whatever they want, but would soon discover their own methods of dealing with tests, which could often overlap with the conventional, but not always.
In a way, education could shift from the craftsman-apprentice model to something more like a provider-creator model. In this model, the student is someone who creates and/or interprets something provided by the teacher in the form of a case, a theory, or something similar. The result of this is more freeform, challenging the student to come up with something of their own, yet still incorporating the existing matter at hand.
Now, before there can be innovation, there has to be some education about what actually is supposed to be innovated: learn first, unlearn afterwards, otherwise a totally chaotic learning environment will arise.
It is therefore wise to only try this in a master or doctoral environment, not in the bachelor.
Closing notes
Hopefully, this conversation will develop further into something more solid, with a continuous drive towards innovation in education. And again, our current method of education isn’t all too bad. It could just use a little more future.
