Learning is Not a System

A reflection on systems, standards, and why learning doesn't fit in a box

What do shipping containers, mailboxes, and schools have in common? They’re all parts of systems, and systems run on standards.

In The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Marc Levinson explains how standardization of the shipping container revolutionized the way we ship goods around the world. Making shipping containers the same size and shape allowed them to move seamlessly from truck to cargo ship to train without worrying about whether they would fit. Like swapping out a watch band, standardized shipping containers became interchangeable and shipping became cheaper, faster, and more predictable.

This change led to China’s rise in manufacturing, Amazon’s rise as a virtual storefront for virtually anything, and migration of business away from port cities as goods could now be shipped to middle America quickly and with ease. Knowing the standard also meant that computer systems could calculate how many containers a ship could carry long before loading began. Computer systems could also automate stacking and labeling containers so that they could be easily offloaded in the right order on the other side of the world.

Standards create consistency and conformance. When they are in place, all the parts of a system can work together and play the role they are expected to play. Without a common language or standard, systems break down.

The Babel Problem

Consider the story of the Tower of Babel.

All people on Earth spoke the same language once. This shared understanding allowed them to collaborate easily, and so they set out together to build a great city and a towering monument to show their greatness and unity. But seeing the power of this connection through shared language, God intervened, saying, “They are united, and their single language gives them unlimited potential. I will disrupt their speech so they can no longer understand one another.” Suddenly, the people on Earth could no longer communicate. The confusion of language broke their connection, halted their progress, and scattered them across the earth. From that moment on, divided by different tongues, their ability to cooperate was deeply diminished.

Without a common language, the parts of a system become disconnected, collaboration is no longer possible, and the system collapses.

My Education in Systems

I started working at Learning Tapestry in 2018 to learn about technology and the business side of curriculum authoring and publishing. I also ended up learning about systems. Computers are systems. Money, finance, and our economy are all systems. Our roads are systems. Schools are systems.

Systems run on standards.

When we create a system, we agree, whether explicitly or not, to a shared set of rules, ideas, or standards. Yuval Harari labels these as “stories” or “myths” that we all agree to and participate in to enable cooperation. These standards allow the system to work: A dollar bill has particular value. Our roads have a set lane width so as to allow both cars and buses to fit. Children need an education in reading and math.

Many systems are also networks with smaller systems nested inside them. Standards also enable interoperability, which is the seamless transfer of outputs across boundaries between systems. In the example of the shipping container, standardization enabled the development of a sprawling, distributed network where the outermost edges could still cooperate with the innermost through a series of seamless handoffs. That’s how systems scale. Each individual system produces an output that is needed as an input for other systems to do their job, and everything keeps buzzing along like an assembly line at a factory. At least, that’s how it is supposed to work.

The Systems in Our Lives

When I moved to my current small town, I gave my address to the town water department so they could mail my water bill. John, being more observant than I am, said, “Can we even get mail at the house? Do we have a mailbox?”

To which I replied, “Of course we have a mailbox!”

We did not.

So, after a few trips to the post office, a call with our mail lady, and lots of digging holes, we now have a mailbox.

What I learned in this process is that there are regulation size mailboxes as well as standards for how tall and far from the road a mailbox must be. And that’s because our mail delivery service is also a system.

Mail delivery works because it runs on a coordinated series of handoffs which adhere to a set of standards. A sorting facility routes mail to a local post office, where individual postal workers sort the mail again for their route, and then they deliver the mail. At the end of that system is your address. If you have a mailbox, it is supposed to conform to a specific size to fit the standard mail and be a certain height and distance from the road so that postal delivery workers can easily deliver mail from their standard-sized vehicles.

That’s not to say systems aren’t full of variation and messiness, but networks and systems hold because the transfer points are predictable. For example, while there are differently sized mailboxes and types (mail slots, post office boxes, commercial buildings with a mail room), mail still gets delivered to an address where the mail can be received. That’s a standard. The standards make the handoffs and transfer from one system to the next possible, which allows the network of systems to be so large and complicated and still work.

Education Systems and Learning

Education systems also run on standards. At the classroom level, those standards show up as learning outcomes. Learning resources, teaching, assessments, grades, and more are aligned to them. While learning standards started out with an admirable aim—let’s ensure that we’re holding high expectations for ALL kids and raise the bar for what we want them to learn—I believe that our obsession with learning standards, particularly for reading comprehension, is actually doing the opposite of what we want. While we want more and better learning for kids, what we’re getting is conformance to a set of discrete skills which don’t always add up to the learning we want.

We’ve conflated the system of education with the process of learning in English language arts, and they are not the same.

From a systems view, standards help children move smoothly from grade to grade, generally fitting within the standard box we need them to fit. Upon graduation, K-12 schools hand students off to higher education or the workforce. But from a learning perspective, our goal for reading is understanding, which is highly personal and unstandardized.

When we learn, we’re creating our own internal mental model of the world by taking in and processing the knowledge we gain individually and in shared collaboration with others. While our understanding may align with others, we each have our own understanding. Learning is messy, recursive, and nonlinear. The learning process has fits and starts. We head down one path, see the dead end and head back to the start to try again. Learning isn’t a death march to an answer. In fact, sometimes there is no answer and no outcome. What then?

Unfortunately, the tyranny of learning standards doesn’t seem to stop. Teachers are expected to assess the standards and track data on standards mastery. If a student doesn’t show progress, they are labeled as “behind” and given extra or different instruction to catch up.

Rethinking the Role of Standards

You might think at this point that I’m anti-standards and anti-schools, but I’m not. I love systems, and I understand the comfort and clarity that standards provide.

But I take issue with how learning standards assume that different children will produce consistent outcomes every year and how assessments and accountability encourage teachers to stick strictly to what is written.

What if we used learning standards differently for English language arts?

What if instead of describing how to measure learning outcomes, learning standards were used to identify boundaries for curriculum development? For example: Teach The Giver by Lois Lowry; understanding includes explaining how the ambiguous ending creates affordances for the overall narrative and making connections among Jonas’ experiences with other characters in related stories. These boundaries might allow for more varied learning that reflects students’ strengths and areas for continued growth. Having a common curriculum for a subject and grade can create the clarity and common language we need that makes collaborating possible. A kid can move from one class to the next without skipping a beat. That’s a system which enables learning.

Or maybe there’s a smaller and/or a more holistic set of learning standards that we can align on that isn’t limited by what can be measured? For example, when we wrote our ELA Guidebooks, we wanted all kids to be able to read, understand, and express their understanding. We used the standards only as guides to select the texts we would include: Does this text have the right kinds of opportunities for that grade to think, discuss, and write? If so, we then wrote lessons that prompted the kinds of thinking we wanted and helped us reach consensus on what understanding looked like and sounded like in student responses.

Where Do We Go From Here?

Beyond ELA, we need to figure out how to design an educational system that reconsiders where standards belong and where they don’t.

There are a lot of transfer points in education: between grade levels, between teachers, between subjects, between classes/classrooms, between elementary and middle school and middle and high school, and more. Are all of those necessary? Can they be reduced? Do grade levels still make sense? How can we embrace the thick, messy parts of learning outside of the transfer points and focus on standards when those transfers happen?

Do we need to have so many stopping points in the system to do in-depth checks of learning? Could we use quicker, lighter-touch scans instead of long, tedious assessments? Can we rethink how we measure progress?

I don’t think eliminating the system does us any good, but it can definitely be redesigned. If the educational system relies on standards, can we at least rethink the standards and their role? What would it look like to build a system that supports learning rather than trying to contain it?