This week, EdSurge’s weekly Innovate newsletter featured a piece by TeachBoost’s own Ben Stern, who reflected on Marc Andreessen’s and Ben Horowitz’s argument that education—along with the rest of the world—will be “eaten” by software.
The entire EdSurge article is worth reading, but here’s our favorite bit:
The many issues in K-12—the achievement gap, funding disparities, and teacher attrition rates, to name just a few—are not issues that can be resolved by instant access. In fact, they are not software problems. They are human issues, political issues. Software alone will not change , much less save , the world of education.
Software can help, under three conditions:
Edtech should be designed to focus on a narrow set of problems. The complexity of the American education system can be frustrating for companies, but it exists for a reason: educating 77 million students isn’t simple. Certain parts of it must exist to manage so many people. Companies aiming to overhaul education with their product are DOA. Instead, they should be targeting inefficiencies in the system. Companies ought to recognize that there are certain confines within which they must operate.
Related, edtech companies ought to make sure the problem they solve is a real problem, not a mere annoyance. Often, great edtech software never gets adopted because it’s solving a problem that doesn’t yet exist, or won’t exist until 20 years of innovation have transpired. Companies that believe that their software will help to usher in a whole new educational model, who will truly disrupt or “eat” education, probably won’t. Iterative—not radical—change is itself ambitious in education, an industry in which the most successful companies thus far reinforce the status quo.
To focus on the right problem, companies must assume a purely Socratic approach : know that they “know nothing,” and be inquisitive, open-minded, and responsive . By asking rather than answering questions, companies can deliver software that helps humans improve teaching and learning.
Many thanks to EdSurge, our favorite edtech publication, for consistently putting out great content. You can read our write-up of their latest Tech for Schools Summit here.
