The Future of Education with Justin Reich
In this interview, Don MacPherson is joined by Justin Reich. Justin is an assistant professor at MIT and the director of the MIT Teaching Systems Lab. Don and Justin discuss the future of education, focusing on the impact of COVID-19, online learning, demands on the education system, and how technology will (or will not) disrupt the way we learn.
Season Four of 12 Geniuses is dedicated to exploring the future and how life is sure to change over the next decade. This episode explores the trends that are reshaping the way we learn and how the new educational practices will be implemented in the years to come.
Don MacPherson: Hello, this is Don MacPherson. Your host of 12 Geniuses. I have the incredible job of interviewing geniuses from around the world about the trends shaping the way we live and work. Today we explore the future of education with MIT's Justin Reich. Justin is the director of MIT's Teaching Systems Lab. We discuss why technology has failed to transform education, the challenges of teaching during a pandemic, the incredible demands placed on our education system, and what the future of education will look like.
This episode of 12 geniuses is brought to you by the think2perform Research Institute, an organization committed to advancing moral, purposeful, and emotionally intelligent leadership.
Justin, welcome to 12 Geniuses.
[00:00:57] Justin Reich: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:58] Don MacPherson: Why don't you start off by telling us what you do, and where you do it.
[00:01:02] Justin Reich: I am on the faculty at MIT and I run a lab called the Teaching Systems Lab, and we aspire to design, implement, and research the future of teacher learning. So I run a team, an interdisciplinary team, of instructional designers, software developers, teacher education experts, people who are really good at evaluation and measurement, and we build new approaches to online teaching and learning, and we put them out in the world and we see how they work and then we iteratively make them better.
[00:01:34] Don MacPherson: When you think about the state of education in the United States pre-pandemic, and let's start with K - 12, how would you summarize the state of education?
[00:01:44] Justin Reich: Our schools are deeply inequitable, so there are many places where young people get a robust, meaningful, powerful education, and have all the resources they need at home and in schools to learn and be successful. And there are many places in the country where schools and communities don't have those kinds of resources. So I think that's the sort of distinguishing feature of schools.
The other distinguishing feature is that there's just so much that we ask our K-12 system to do. We ask it to teach kids how to read and write and tie their shoes and be good citizens and be critical citizens and dance and throw a ball and conjugate verbs and learn a new language and program computers.
There's just so much that we're asking the K-12 system to do. And we have these kinds of uncomfortable balances in society where we try to settle on exactly how we negotiate between all those competing tensions.
And how would you summarize the state of education for colleges and universities? Pre-pandemic?
Well, the US higher education system has historically been a gem of the United States and a sort of lodestone for people from around the world. It's one of the most important parts of our society, one of the most important parts of our economy, and so in some respects, it's a treasure. And so then it's a tragedy to see this dramatic withdrawal of state funding to these incredibly important institutions. These institutions are by no means perfect. But our public education, higher education system in the United States is in some respects both the envy of the world for its research output and its teaching and also a really important part of creating opportunities for working-class and middle-class people to get ahead.
[00:04:00] Don MacPherson: Now, we are recording this on December 11th, 2020. We are nine months into this pandemic. What has the pandemic done to education in the US and again, let's start K - 12.
[00:04:15] Justin Reich: So our education system is much less effective during a pandemic. It has both revealed the kinds of inequalities, but also exacerbated them. In my hometown, a school principal in Arlington, Massachusetts, one of the elementary school principals said, It used to be that we had 285 kids that we brought into a shared space to learn. And now we're trying to teach people in 285 different spaces and those spaces are not equally well supported.
There are lots of things about school buildings, about the routines of in-person schools that I think we've really taken for granted. So because of the loss of that resource, you know, there's almost no doubt that in all kinds of dimensions, our schooling is less effective and even more inequitable than it was before.
The main thing, which is counterbalancing that, is an absolutely heroic effort by America's K-12 teachers to make this work for kids. You've got three and a half million teachers all around the country who are doing incredible work - working much longer hours than they've ever done before with kids under feet, trying to manage their own kids' remote learning, and doing a tremendous amount of professional learning to as best they can take our traditionally in-person education system and make it work in hybrid and remote ways. So there's lots of things about that that are not working, but boy are educators trying incredibly hard to do the best they can.
[00:05:47] Don MacPherson: Are there any lessons from the pandemic that we'll be able to apply to improve education going forward?
[00:05:53] Justin Reich: I think there will be a few, probably the most important one is it's quite possible that if you're a kindergarten student today, this is not the first global pandemic that you live through in your lifetime.
There's just going to be more diseases, but there's also going to be more extreme weather events. There's going to be more things like the wildfires that we saw out in California and in the West this year, that shut down schools for longer periods of time. So schools are going to have to become more resilient and more robust to interruption. And this tragically is an important practice and rehearsal for that resiliency.
So I think we'll see some of that. I think idiosyncratically we'll see, teachers have learned some things about technology-mediated-teaching. Students have learned some things about technology-mediated-learning, and I think most teachers and learners will be very, very happy to get back into classrooms with one another, but they're likely to take some of the things that they learned from remote learning, from online learning and bring them into their practice.
You know, there's a whole bunch of math teachers that have been using a great software program called Desmos for creating active learning opportunities and math. And there'll be a bunch more teachers who use more of that kind of thing in person. Probably in ways that are incrementally improving, but not necessarily transformative.
And then it'll be interesting to see in the years ahead, you know, this is a generation of students that we've asked and forced to develop a set of self-regulated independent learning skills that most students are not called upon to develop. And so it'll be really interesting to see how students who develop these skills sort of in the fires of the pandemic are able to apply them in the years ahead.
[00:07:34] Don MacPherson: You wrote a book called Failure to Disrupt, and one of the things that I found amazing was in the early pages where you wrote a letter to the readers on, I think it was March 21st, 2020 - and the subtitle of the book is why technology alone can transform education - and you were in this letter, you're talking about... oh, we're just starting this pandemic. We're not exactly sure where it's going to go, but this is a book about technology and education. And then nine months later here we are talking about technology and education and how it's failing us. Why has technology failed to transform education?
[00:08:20] Justin Reich: I think there are two big mistakes that education technology evangelists have made in their thinking. And you know, and the origins of the book to some respect or over the last two decades, there've been all kinds of folks who in very well-viewed well-read popular media have made the argument that education is on the cusp of a transformation.
So there was a Harvard business school professor who passed away Clay Christiansen. Who wrote this book called Disrupting Class that said by 2019, 50% of all K-12 courses would be taken online. They would cost us a third as much to provision, and they would be more effective than the classes that we have now.
Sal Khan, who people know very well from Khan Academy argued that we would set up this new system where people were sitting in front of their computers, learning math. Independently through these individualized algorithmically optimized pathways that would lead to better learning outcomes.
There was a guy named Sugata Mitra, who said - he was the winner of the 2013 TED prize - and he said, oh, you don't even need schools and institutions. Young people with laptops and access to the internet can just learn anything by themselves. And then this terrible pandemic blighted the world in 1.6 billion learners went home.
And my hunch is that the parents in your audience can confirm to researchers around the world, that kids with laptops and access to the internet cannot learn any academic content they want on their own without any help from teachers and learners. And the promises of these sort of new pathways, these new arrangements that Christiansen and Khan and others talked about, they haven't come about.
And again, I think there are two things that these education technology evangelists have typically misunderstood. The first is that they describe the impact of technologies as "sweeping." That we've built these bulldozers that can clear away the future. We built these Swiss Army knives that can kind of do anything.
And our best learning technologies are actually pretty particular. They do specific things well, for particular functions in particular disciplines for some students, but not others. In some contexts, but not others. So it turns out that we have developed some pretty good gamified adaptive learning experiences for K-5 mathematics.
We don't have the same good tools for K-5 reading, for K-5 social studies, or K-5 science, for tying your shoes, for lots of other things that we want schools to do. Um, so the fact that we have some gamified math tutors that can teach some parts of math, but not others, that's kind of helpful.
But it's not transformative. It's the kind of thing that you can like assign your students to do some of the time, but doesn't teach everything about mathematics. It doesn't even come close to teaching everything about the elementary school curriculum.
The second mistake is that education technology evangelists often describe new technologies as like a switch that you can flip on and off. That if you just download the software on to teacher and student machines, then all of a sudden we'll have better and more powerful learning. And that's not at all what happens. It takes time. It takes practice. It takes experimentation. It takes professional learning for students and teachers and families to figure out how to use new tools.
I think one of the biggest things that we've seen over the last nine months is remote learning is still not great, but it is working better. It's not working better because we've got new technologies or the suite of tools that we're using is changing, it's because every day, teachers and students learn a little bit more about how to make these tools work better and how to make learning in these remote environments work better.
And that's not going to sweep away the future. It's just going to, you know, one step at a time shoulder to the wheel, every day, make this remote learning experience a little bit better. And that can be frustrating for people who want a dramatically transformed future. But if you think human development is a long, slow, slog, where it takes a long time to get better... then in some respects that incremental improvement is as good as it gets.
[00:12:37] Don MacPherson: There seemingly is a difference between education and learning that we don't necessarily talk about. Do you agree with that? And if so, how do you define learning and how do you define education?
[00:12:49] Justin Reich: An incredibly important part of what schools do is they provide people with motivation and structure to learn things that they don't intrinsically really want to learn. And teachers compel people to learn that by trying to convince them it's important, by threatening them with grades and failing, by just building really strong relationships with students that say, look, maybe you're not that into science, but I'm going to do the best I can to care about you as a person and have you be successful, and you'll work on that because of this.
Now one of the remarkable paradoxes in puzzles of online learning is that people learn all kinds of stuff online, very successfully, all the time. I'm sure almost all of your listeners can think about some online community or network that they're part of to learn how to do their hair or their makeup in a new way, how to beat a level in a video game, how to do craft projects, how to cook, how to do other things you care about where you say, "Oh yeah, I've learned all kinds of stuff online." And you've done that probably in many cases, very successfully with very little support, with a lot of independence.
In some ways the ability for people, including young adolescents to teach themselves all kinds of stuff online... it's close to miraculous. And then we ask those people to learn how to conjugate French verbs or something like that. And online schooling is much, much less successful. And the motivation components are a really huge part of that.
Independent self-paced online learning doesn't provide the kind of robust supports that schools provide for helping people learn stuff when their intrinsic motivation is low.
[00:14:31] Don MacPherson: I want to turn to some of the dilemmas around education technology. You've listed a few in your book... The curse of the familiar, could you talk about what that is? And maybe some potential ways in which we can overcome that?
[00:14:48] Justin Reich: So these dilemmas that you refer to, one of the claims that I make in the book is that we actually know something about where learning technologies fall short. There are these, sort of as yet intractable dilemmas that we run into as a field over and over again.
And these are great places for developers and researchers to kind of focus their innovation efforts. One of those challenges is the curse of the familiar. And the curse of the familiar goes like this. Sometimes, what people do with learning technologies is they build things that digitize existing practices.
So one of the most widely adopted pieces of education technology in the world is a tool that was built by a wonderful guy, an MIT dropout, Andrew Sutherland called Quizlet. And what Quizlet does - and it's used by something like half of all high school students in the United States every month - is it helps people build digital flashcards.
If you go to the site Quizlet, you will figure out how to use it very, very quickly. You put questions on the front of things and you put answers on the back and it quizzes you on them. If we get a bunch of education experts to sit around and say, "what is the education system in the United States really need to move forward?"
I'm pretty sure that no one would raise their hand and say, "you know what? The real issue we have in the United States is this huge dearth of flashcards. Like there just aren't enough index cards to get people to memorize enough things and that's, what's really holding us back." Very few people would say that the digitization of flashcards is really like a crucial step forward for American education, but it's something that everyone knows how to do. It's familiar. It fits into existing classrooms, routines.
And so Quizlet has been enormously successful. But successful in a way that doesn't kind of dramatically improve or change routines. It makes us like incrementally marginally a little bit better at doing memorization across the system. By contrast when we build technologies that really do ask people to do things in different kinds of ways, really different kinds of pedagogical routines... the one example I use is the Scratch programming language that some of your listeners may be familiar with.
Scratch is a way of teaching creative computing to young people, where they write computer programs by dragging blocks that represent functions and elements of computer programs and have them sort of click together rather than typing out code and syntax.
And the developers of Scratch have this really ambitious pedagogical vision where young people are computational creators and imaginative, and they kind of build whatever it is that their heart imagines. And what they find is that when these tools are brought into schools, much of the pedagogy that animates Scratch is kind of left behind. Instead of using Scratch to let students be individual, creative, computational creators, teachers tend to sort of make recipes for Scratch programs and then sort of walk students through how to replicate those recipes.
The idea is that Scratch has this really incredible, creative, pedagogical vision, but teachers can't figure out intuitively how to make it work in their local context. So the flip side of the curse of the familiar is that when we build things that are unfamiliar, they aren't used the way they're supposed to because people don't understand how they work or how they're supposed to fit into the existing educational system.
So, the twin dilemma is we can either build things that don't really help that much, but that people will recognize and use a bunch, or we could build things that might really lead to some interesting kinds of changes and improvements, but they're pretty likely to confuse people. For developers who do want to build things that are new and different and widely acceptable, sort of figuring out how to navigate the pathway between those two sides of the dilemma is a really important challenge to be thinking through and exploring.
[00:18:43] Don MacPherson: What role does teacher training play in this? Because it seems like there might be a bit of a resistance to accept something new. Certainly with some of the teachers I've talked to, that has been the case with new technologies. So I just am curious about teacher training and, and its role.
[00:18:59] Justin Reich: Teacher training... another phrase I might use is sort of "teacher community building"... It's absolutely vital. It's one of the only ways through the curse of the familiar. I think you're right, that teachers have a kind of intuitive resistance to new ideas. But that resistance is born out of valid experience that we have very short principal and superintendent tenures in the United States. We've been throwing new technologies at teachers for a long time, many of which have not substantially improved teaching and learning. And so teachers are always being bombarded with, "Oh, we should do things this way. Here's a new program that we're implementing."
And so, implementing programs takes a lot of time and a lot of work. And so teachers, I think with some wisdom behind it, say, "you know what? I'm going to sort of..." Most teachers will minimally comply with new initiatives until they have enough evidence that those things are really worth pursuing. And that there's going to be some ongoing support from the administration for those new initiatives.
So you're right. There's a certain amount of resistance that's out there. And I don't want to posit it as critical resistance. I think a lot of that resistance is based on the idea that effectively caring for students can involve preserving good practices in addition to thinking about trying new practices.
So if you want to have a new technology that does something in new and different kinds of ways, you can't just trust that you can sort of embed your pedagogical ideas, your new approaches, within the software and have people pick it up. You have to go out into the world and you have to engage educators with your new ideas.
You have to build community. Where you can say, "Come hang out with us and we'll show you how this new technology can be used in new ways." The Lifelong Kindergarten Lab that develops the Scratch programming community is a terrific example of this.
They have a Scratch day every year where people all over the world get together. And they talk about teaching and learning with Scratch and experimenting with it. They have all of these products and services that they created at the Lifelong Kindergarten Lab. They have a Minute with Mitch which is a way of hearing from Scratch founder, Mitch Resnick about ideas for using Scratch.
And I think it's called Natalie's Notebook, Natalie Rusk, the co-developer of Scratch, giving ideas for implementation. They've developed a whole variety of ways of connecting with educators to help them build their capacity. To not just bring, Scratch the software into schools, but really bring the pedagogical ideas behind Scratch into schools.
And I think if you look at a lot of the education technology programs that have the most success in having new interesting ideas brought into schools, it's through this kind of teacher community building.
[00:21:50] Don MacPherson: I'm sure you're familiar with the concept of design thinking. When you consider the many, many education technologies out there, you're designing both for student users and teacher users. Generally, are both of those users considered when a new software is developed?
[00:22:14] Justin Reich: Well, lots of education technology software actually has what sometimes economists call the third-party payer problem. So generically speaking, the third-party payer problem is that sometimes the people who use stuff are not the people who are paid for it and the people who use and pay for things can have different incentives.
So in K-12 school systems, a lot of times it's not teachers and students who are purchasing software, it's principals and superintendents and instructional technology folks. And so for instance, one of the most common pieces of educational software in all kinds of contexts, one of the main pieces of software being used in the pandemic, are learning management systems.
These are basically tools for passing documents back and forth between teachers and students. And it's usually the case that there's a school-wide implementation of these things that make sense. But an instructional technology staff might be asking questions like, does this integrate with our grade book? Does this integrate with our student information system? How easy is it to set up and maintain?
None of those questions have to do with teaching and learning. None of those questions have to do with whether or not students and teachers can use it for what they want to use it for. It's probably too far to say that learning management systems are not designed for teachers and learners. Certainly they are. But there is this third party payer problem in that a lot of times these tools get selected for the degree to which they help instructional technology staff do their jobs rather than the degree to which they help teachers and students learn.
And there are variations of this kind of challenge throughout, you know, another issue that I talk about in the book, this connects to an idea that I call the Ed-Tech Matthew Effect. Which is that Ed-Tech evangelists are often saying, "These new technologies are going to democratize education." But all kinds of research repeatedly shows that new learning technologies disproportionately benefit the affluent. They benefit people with the financial, social, technical capital to take advantage of new innovations.
Potentially one of the reasons for that is the people who build learning technologies, may not actually know very much, or understand very well, what the vast majority of teaching and learning looks like in the nation's urban public schools. The people creating new technologies are often affluent white and Asian men living in one of like three or four cities in the United States; Cambridge, Silicon Valley, or Austin, Texas, or a couple of other places.
But the software is being used by Black, African American, Latino American kids in Albuquerque, in Oklahoma City, in Detroit, Michigan. So there's a sort of big social distance between the people who are creating the software and the people who are using the software. That's why I think it's incredibly important to think about how do we get much greater diversity and reduce the social distance between people who create learning technologies and the people who are actually using them in classrooms.
[00:25:22] Don MacPherson: But how do we overcome this? Because this is huge. And if there was one word to describe this last year... well, we would choose a few words... but inequality would have to be one of the most important words to come out of 2020. And it's not just inequality financially. It's inequality in education. It's an inequality in healthcare. And it certainly needs to be addressed, or we're going to continue to have severe problems in this country. So I'm curious, what are the answers?
[00:25:56] Justin Reich: Well, I split answers to questions like this, you know, for those of us who work in education, we have a role to play as educators and a role to play as citizens.
The role to play as citizens is to say that there is no technical solution for some of these challenges. That the solution is to build a more equitable society. You're not going to get a more equitable society by getting better education. You're going to get a better education by having a more equitable society.
So we need to think about how we redistribute resources. I mean, a terrible thing that we've seen in the pandemic is the extraordinary degree to which our entire social safety net for children and their families depends upon schools. We don't just ask schools to teach and learn. We ask them to provide a safe place for children to go, to provide one or two or three meals a day, to be frontline health and mental health screening, to provide technology connections so that people can participate in a networked world.
The burden that we've placed on schools during the pandemic is tragic. And in a better future, there would be many more municipal, state, and federal agencies that are working together to build a stronger social safety net for kids. So one of the things that we just need is a more equitable society. But as educators, that's not our job every day. Our job is to do the best teaching and learning we can within the society that we have.
So how do you get more equitable Ed Tech ones? I don't think we know. But some of the ideas that I present in the book and I developed these with a colleague Mimi Ito at UC Irvine, are you reduce the social distance between the people who build technologies and the people who use them. One place you might do that is at the level of funding, whether that's venture capital or philanthropic. You say, "look, we're just not going to support teams that don't have a diverse group of people that are working on them."
A second thing that we've thought about is asking the question, "How in education technology, do you unite the interests of home, school, and community?" If it takes a village to raise a child, how do we build education technologies that don't just help children learn, but help the adults around them learn as well.
One of the early findings from the Scratch programming language was that it was widely used in homes where someone knew something about computer programming. That it was more likely to be used when mom or dad was a computer scientist, or an engineer, or something like that. One solution then is to say, well, how do you build Scratch?
So that it's something that not only kids are interested in doing, but the adults and caretakers are interested in as well. I have a colleague at, UC Boulder, who works on this idea of family creative learning that I think is a really promising approach to this. One thing that we might do is just make sure that when we're researching education technology, we look at differences between people from different backgrounds.
For many good privacy reasons, it's quite common in education technology research to not try to learn a lot about the students that we're serving. But if we don't know stuff about the students that we're serving, then we can't tell whether we're serving white and black students, rich and poor students equally well.
So there's an argument in the book that says that we actually need to look at student subgroups so that we can answer the question; How are people from different backgrounds, different life circumstances, able to have opportunities to use technologies differently?
[00:29:31] Don MacPherson: You talk about two other dilemmas in the book that are preventing education technology from transforming education. They are the trap of the routine assessment and toxic power of data and experiments. What do you mean by these? Can you describe what both of those mean?
[00:29:48] Justin Reich: Sure, the trap of routine assessment, is this dilemma that our computers are only good at evaluating certain kinds of human performance. And having computers evaluate human performance is important because a lot of the education technologies that we develop, we want them to be able to automatically give feedback to people.
If you show up to a computerized learning experience, you don't just want to be told stuff or be able to practice stuff. You want to know whether or not you're getting better. So we need computers to be able to do automated assessment. Computers are good at assessing things when those human performances have routine and structure to them. They're good at evaluating whether or not people compute math problems correctly. They're good at evaluating whether or not people pronounce a word correctly. They're good at evaluating computer programs - actually is one of the most complex domains in which we can evaluate human performance automatically. We can write computer programs that can evaluate whether the computer programs that humans write are working or not.
There are lots of things though, that computers are not good at evaluating. Probably most importantly, they're not good at evaluating unstructured, natural language, whether in text or orally. And they're really not very good at evaluating people's ability to reason from evidence, but reasoning from evidence is the main thing that we teach in our educational system from kindergarten through graduate school.
So I've just told you that computers are good at evaluating routine things and not so good at evaluating non-routine human performance. The problem is that in the labor market and in the civic sphere, we don't need people to do routine things anymore. We have computers for that.
We need them to be able to reason from evidence to do complex, persuasive communication, to do all the things computers are not good at doing so. A way to summarize the trap of routine assessment is that computers are good at assessing the kinds of things that we don't need human beings to do anymore.
The two things that human beings are really good at, that computers are still not very good at, are complex communication - computers can't empathize with people. They can't figure out what a person wants and figure out a way to address those needs or communicate with that person. And they're bad at solving ill-structured problems. They are bad at solving problems where it's not clear from the outset what information you need or what resources you need, or even what the solution looks like.
Those are all the domains where humans still have a comparative advantage. If you're an educator, when you look at those changes of society, I think part of what you gotta do is say to yourself, okay, then what we need to do as educators is teach people to do the kinds of things that computers are not good at doing.
And then the dilemma turns out to be the trap of routine assessment is that the things that we really want to teach people, the things that would be great to have online self-paced, computer-based learning experiences for, they're exactly the kinds of things that we're not very good at building assessments around.
[00:32:45] Don MacPherson: When you look out a decade, what does K-12 education look like in this country?
[00:32:51]Justin Reich: I think the future of education probably looks pretty similar to the education that we have right now. There'll be a steady increase in the number of people who choose online learning options. But the vast majority of learners, especially young learners, will still prefer face-to-face learning experiences.
There'll be ways that educators have learned how to use new technologies from the pandemic and to weave some of those new practices. Into the future. But if the pandemic goes away, if everybody gets vaccinated in the next year or so, I think you'll see schools snap back to what they were trying to do before, much more than you'll see schools taking new approaches that they develop during remote learning and adopting them in new kinds of ways.
Education is one of the most conservative, small "C" conservative, systems in our society. Which makes sense. There are not many of us who are really enthusiastic about, bold, experimental, radically different approaches to teaching our children how to be good adults.
[00:33:55] Don MacPherson: How important is early childhood education, particularly before the age of four, to creating a fair education system?
[00:34:02] Justin Reich: So I think the researchers and policy makers who have looked at this, have a compelling case to make that there are very few investments that would be better for our society than early childhood education. As we've seen during the pandemic early childhood education overwhelmingly is not supported by the federal government, by States, by localities... it means all this responsibility falls in the hands of parents, mostly mothers.
And we know from research that high-quality early childhood education programs can improve kids' readiness for schools, it can improve long-term life outcomes around high school graduation, college matriculation, getting better jobs, staying out of the carceral system, all those kinds of things. Absolutely, we should be addressing issues of early childhood education throughout the United States.
[00:35:05] Don MacPherson: What two or three pieces of advice would you give the new Secretary of Education that you feel will help make education in the US more equitable?
[00:35:14] Justin Reich: The Secretary of Education does have a kind of bully pulpit. There's certainly some important roles to play. One of them is to maintain a focus on issues of equity. Really, the reason why we have a department of education stems in some respect from Brown v. Board of Education, and the recognition that States and localities don't always honor their commitments in their constitutions to an equitable education.
I think there's probably a special opportunity right now to think about resilience in education systems. The pandemic that we've just experienced, it's not going to be the only disruption that young people face in their schooling in the decades ahead with climate change with other kinds of issues. There's going to be extreme weather events, fires, things that keep kids out of schools. And we do need a kind of one-time surge of funding, or funding structures, to be able to create more resilient school systems. And some of that will mean creating buildings that do a better job of keeping kids and staff safe and healthy during different kinds of emergencies.
But a huge part of it, which is not just in the education department, but in lots of places throughout our governmental system is how do we recognize that broadband is no longer a luxury good, but really a utility that we need to be able to provide to all families with children - probably all families in the United States - so that schooling can happen in an uninterrupted way, in a resilient way, during the disasters and emergencies that are sure to happen in the future.
[00:36:46] Don MacPherson: What do you think the next 10 years of college education look like? Or when you look out 10 more years, what does college look like?
[00:36:53] Justin Reich: My immediate concern about the future of college is that we are seeing working-class poverty-impacted folks withdrawing from the college system at extraordinary rates, which is quite uncommon.
Usually, a recession is a time in which more people seek refuge in higher education. But the pandemic has really reversed that, and it could have devastating consequences for a generation of college students. On the teaching and learning front... at the bachelor level, we'll continue to see continuous growth in online learning. But we have not seen a surge of demand for online learning.
In fact, what we've seen is that lots of folks want to get back in the classrooms with their professors. Even if what their professor is doing is just standing in front of the room and talking. People want that social experience as part of their education. Where we'll see the most growth in online learning is where to some extent we've already seen it, which is in the graduate school market.
Independent self-paced, online learning works best for people who are good at independent learning. And the way to get good at independent learning is during the apprenticeship in the formal education system. So we'll see lots of certificate programs and master's degrees that use online learning almost exclusively or hybridized in various kinds of ways.
Which is roughly to say, if you had looked at the trajectory that higher education was on over the past year or two, you can expect that to continue in the next 10 years. And it's not technology that's the main driver of changes in higher education. The most important trends that are happening are state-level austerity and budgets, which is starving colleges from the resources they need to do their job well and especially to serve first-generation trailblazing students.
[00:38:49] Don MacPherson: Where can people learn more about you, and where can people buy the book?
[00:38:54] Justin Reich: You can learn more about the book, Failure to Disrupt: Why Technology Alone, Can't Transform Education at failuretodisrupt.com, which will connect you to booksellers, including independent booksellers everywhere. And it's got reviews and media and other kinds of things there.
And then if people are interested in some of the research that we do around teaching and learning, you can visit the MIT Teaching Systems Lab at TSL.MIT.edu.
[00:39:21] Don MacPherson: Let's close on this question. What advice do you have for parents or students who want to maximize the benefit of education?
[00:39:31] Justin Reich: As parents and students are thinking about maximizing the benefits of online learning, I think one place to turn to is to recognize that motivation really seems to be a crucial ingredient to online learning experiences. And so, as you're thinking about where to invest time and energy and resources into in-person learning versus online learning, think about reserving online learning for the things that you're most excited about, that you're most passionate about, that you have the most intrinsic motivation to explore.
And then think about school as the place where you go to get the learning experiences where you feel like you're going to need more support, more motivation, more help. I expect everyone in the networked world is going to continue to have online learning be an important part of the educational infrastructure of our society.
Certainly what we're learning during the pandemic is that in the near future, it is very unlikely to be an adequate substitute and that for lots of people and for lots of things that we want people to learn the best place to learn that continues to be in a classroom with caring adults, mentors, and peers.
[00:40:47] Don MacPherson: I think that's great advice. Justin, this has been a fabulous conversation. I appreciate you sharing your wisdom with us. Thank you for your time, and thank you for being a genius.
[00:40:57] Justin Reich: It's been wonderful being here. Thanks for sharing with folks about Failure to Disrupt.
[00:41:03] Don MacPherson: Thank you for listening to 12 Geniuses, and thanks to our sponsor, the Think2Perform Research Institute.
Our next episode will explore the future of climate change. Our guest is Dr. Leah Stokes, a professor from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Dr. Stokes is a climate change expert and the author of the book Short Circuiting Policy. That episode will be released on February 9th, 2021.
Thanks to our producer, Devon McGrath, and our research and historical consultant, Brian Bierbaum. If you love this podcast, please let us know by subscribing and leaving us a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast app. To subscribe, please go to www.12Geniuses.com.
Thanks for listening. And thank you for being a genius.
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