Tim Harford has some great points here. I recommend watching his video.
"I will admit that [the process of using trial and error to solve problems] is obvious when schools start teaching children problems which don’t have a correct answer, stop giving them lists of questions, every single one of which has an answer, and there’s an authority figure in the corner behind the teacher’s desk who knows all the answers, and if you can’t find the answers, you must be lazy or stupid…When a politician stands up campaigning for elected office saying, ‘I want to fix our health system, I want to fix our education system, I have no idea how to do it. I have half a dozen ideas, we are going to test them out. They’ll probably all fail, then we’ll test some other ideas out, and we’ll find some that work, we’ll build on those, and we’ll get rid of the ones that don’t." ~ Tim Harford
Imagine we used an iterative process to solve the our problems in education. Our current system assumes that there are people who know the best solution already, and that all we need to do is implement it everywhere. Obviously this isn’t true. Our education system is far to complex to be something that any one person can know how to solve, no matter how smart they are.
Imagine we had a public policy that was designed to promote innovation in education. Imagine people were expected to experiment more, and share their results. Imagine we had the mindset that no one could solve the problems in education alone, and that no single theory is the best theory. Imagine we found actual solutions to the education system, even if we didn’t complete understand the solutions, rather than changing policy on 4 or 8 year election cycles with little positive effect on the system.
That would be refreshing.
