The Single Most Important Change That Must Come to Education Now

I generally stay away from proclamations and I always stay away from the education reform problem. In America, and elsewhere.

But I’ve finally realised what I believe is the real problem in education and why it feels so stalled even in this century.

We must enforce a program of radical evolution in education to rid ourselves, as educators, of this habit of relying on the availability heuristic as a teaching tool, or as a carrot that we dangle in front of students.

The availability heuristic — very simplified — is the concept that if you work hard on gaining knowledge, then the difficulty and cognitive load, so to speak, makes you prize and readily retrieve that knowledge in making your decisions, rather than to work on a new set of insights and problem solving.

Basically, it’s a mental shortcut that replaces future learning, or at least that’s how I describe it to myself.

Schools are really good at training students to use the availability heuristic.

The trouble with the IB is that it cements this process and makes the availability heuristic the goal of our teaching rather than the process of always gaining new insights.

Once we incentivize teachers to avoid following this path, we unlock a better future for our students.