“Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.”

― Edward Humes, Garbology: Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash

 

It seems strange to me how much of our society, myself included, has accepted the idea of inherent disposability as a key design element over longevity.

However, in our education systems, both online and onsite, the exact opposite is often true – content that should have been thrown onto the compost heap several semesters (or even years) ago is still being fed to the learners.

The learners might not be able to tell the difference in the moment, some of them having never seen fresh content in their entire educational experience – but they will know when they attempt to utilize what they’ve learned and are then told that it is: outdated, wrong, narrow-minded, or worse. 

Unable to get a (non-intern) job in the field that they have been prepared for they will turn to crime and violence and the lawless graduate students will descend upon us all – devouring everything in their wake like over-caffeinated locusts.

OK – maybe not that, but they will be dissatisfied with their options and possibly have to make hard choices about whether they even pursue the careers that match their degrees.

Well that’s all pretty bad, but we can just make the content better so that the students will have the most accurate and up to date information when they need it later on in their lives, right?

Nope, we cannot do that either. 

We have to teach them to be prepared to throw away what they have learned at a moment’s notice when the reality of the situation changes. Which means we have to provide them with the most up to date version of the information possible and also teach them how to acquire, analyze and sometimes discard it and build their own datasets.

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.”

― Pablo Picasso