A Strange Loop

Suppose you wanted to design a bridge. You would study bridges. You would examine materials, loads, failure modes, and successful designs. Nobody would find that particularly strange. But suppose you wanted to design a better way of designing bridges.

Now things get a little more interesting. The principles you would use to evaluate the design process are themselves products of that design process. The tools you use to examine the system were largely built by the system you are examining.

That does not make the task impossible, it just introduces a curious bit of recursion.

Education presents a similar challenge, except the recursion runs deeper. Education does not merely produce knowledge. It helps produce the very habits of thought we use to evaluate knowledge, learning, intelligence, and education itself. Every educational environment teaches people things, but it also teaches people how to think about teaching.

How to think about learning.

How to think about success.

How to think about intelligence.

How to think about education.

The assumptions we bring to discussions about schools were learned somewhere. The questions we think to ask were learned somewhere. Even our intuitions about what good education should look like are products of environments that shaped us long before we began questioning them. It is simply a consequence of being human.

Most of the environments that shape us become nearly invisible. Language. Culture. Families. Institutions. Schools. Like water to a fish, they disappear into the background precisely because they are always there. Until something makes them visible.

A new idea.

A new environment.

A conversation.

A book.

A question.

Suddenly something that felt inevitable begins to look like a design choice. That does not mean the new perspective is correct. Most ideas disappear. Many should. Cognitive sawdust generated as a byproduct of human cooperation.

Some survive because they are useful. Some survive because they lead to better ideas. Some become so successful that we stop noticing they are ideas at all and begin treating them as facts about the world.

Which leads us to a question: If every educational environment teaches people how to think about education, what assumptions is our current system teaching us?

Which assumptions are helping?

Which assumptions are getting in the way?

And which assumptions have become so familiar that we no longer recognize them as assumptions at all?

I do not claim to have definitive answers. What follows is simply an attempt to take those questions seriously. The rest of this collection grew out of a suspicion that some of the things we take for granted about learning, schooling, intelligence, and assessment might look different if viewed through another lens.

Not necessarily better. Not necessarily worse. Just different enough to become visible again.

Enter the loop.