What our education system does to the way people think, and what we could build instead
I stumbled across an Amish family’s business the other day and had one of those epiphanies where something that had been sitting right in front of me suddenly became obvious.
The idea had been there for a long time. I had written around pieces of it before, and I understood parts of the problem, but I had never quite been able to articulate the structure underneath all of it. Then I started looking at what this family was doing, and it was almost like getting slapped in the face with the answer.
Here were people from a culture that much of modern society would probably describe as undereducated because formal schooling generally ends after eighth grade, yet they were building businesses, solving practical problems, learning new technologies, finding markets and moving comfortably between completely different kinds of work.
That bothered me, because it raised an obvious question.
What exactly are we calling education?
Education Starts Long Before a Credential
Kids begin learning how the world works long before anybody hands them a curriculum.
They learn language from their families. They learn consequences from touching something hot, breaking something, helping somebody repair something, forgetting to do a chore or taking care of an animal that depends on them. They learn how adults interact, how their neighborhood works, how money gets earned, how things get built and eventually how they can become useful to the people around them. That is education too, and I think we have gradually lost sight of how important that foundation is.
The Amish appear to take that part very seriously. Their children still learn the basic academic subjects, but practical learning is happening alongside all of it. Farming, equipment, animals, weather, money, family, responsibility, business and repair are not treated as unrelated academic departments. They are simply different parts of the same world.
Reality works that way whether our schools organize it that way or not.
A farm does not care that biology, mechanics, weather, finance and logistics appear under different headings in a textbook. If a tractor breaks while bad weather is coming and the animals still need feeding, nobody gets to announce that the problem belongs to another department. Somebody has to figure out what is wrong, understand what else depends on it and solve the problem NOW else we don't eat.
That teaches a person something deeper than the name of a part or the definition of a term. It teaches relationships, cause and effect, consequences and the habit of asking how one thing affects another.
That is where structural thinking begins.
Look at What Mike Yoder Actually Did
Mike Yoder is one of the examples that made this click for me.
He grew up Amish on a dairy farm. His formal schooling ended after eighth grade, but clearly his education did not. He grew up around animals, machinery, work, repairs, responsibility and all the ordinary problems that show up when real things have to keep functioning whether you are ready for the problem or not.
He was also interested in the outside world and technology. From what he has described publicly, there was a place where the kids could get access to things that were not normally part of Amish household life, I believe he called it the shack, and he used that access to learn.
Later his interest in hunting and drones led him to film hunts and learn the business even if there was not much money in it because the experience itself had value. Then the idea became easy, a hunter shoots a deer, the deer runs, the blood trail disappears and sometimes the animal is never recovered. Traditionally you might bring in tracking dogs and spend hours searching while the meat is deteriorating.
Mike saw thermal-drone technology and connected it to that problem.
Now the drone was not merely a flying camera. It became a way to locate an animal quickly from the air by using thermal imaging, which turned an expensive and frustrating hunting problem into a solvable technical problem. So he built a business around it.
That alone would be interesting, but what happened next is what matters to me.
He had grown up on a farm, so agriculture was not some abstract market segment in a PowerPoint deck. He understood what farmers actually do. Once he had learned what modern drones could do, it was not much of a leap to ask what the same technology could accomplish in spraying and other agricultural work.
Now he had crossed back into farming with an entirely different toolset.
Now came another money funnel out of thin air from the kid with the 8th grade education outthinking many MBAs.
Other people wanted to become drone pilots and do the same kind of work. But this was a completely different type of problem. This one was not about hunting, thermal imaging or flying a drone. It was regulation. People could be waiting months to get through the required process before they could operate commercially in certain applications.
Mike saw that bottleneck and figured out a way to build a legitimate business around helping people cross it. Think about what just happened. He had moved from farming into hunting, from hunting into thermal imaging, from thermal imaging into drones, from drones into a service business and then from the service business into Agriculture. Then finally solving a regulatory problem that affected other pilots by allowing them for a fee to become contractors under his brand and license.
That is cross-domain structural thinking.
Mike did not simply become a drone expert and spend the rest of his life seeing every problem as a drone problem. He kept looking at the relationship between a capability and a problem. Sometimes the problem was hunting. Sometimes it was agriculture.
Sometimes it was regulation. Sometimes it was helping another person get into business.
The domains changed, but his way of thinking traveled with him.
That is what interested me.
Now Look at What We Do
We start with children who are curious about almost everything, and then, year after year, we progressively narrow them.
First there are subjects. Later there are tracks. Then majors, professions, specialties and sub-specialties. Somewhere along the way we tell an eighteen-year-old to pick a direction, spend four or more years proving commitment to it, borrow an enormous amount of money if necessary and then build a career around the credential.
Once they do that, changing direction becomes expensive.
Not just financially expensive either.
Suppose somebody spends years becoming an accountant. Their income comes from accounting. Their colleagues are accountants. Their professional associations are filled with accountants. Their reputation, vocabulary, status and relationships become tied to accounting. Eventually there is a subtle change. They are no longer simply someone who knows accounting. They become an accountant.
That sounds harmless until the profession itself becomes part of the person's identity.
Now an argument about the assumptions of the field may no longer feel like an argument about an idea. It can feel personal.
The same thing happens everywhere. Lawyers naturally look for the legal structure. Economists look for incentives. Engineers look for engineering problems. People in finance look for capital and risk. Technologists look for technical solutions. Academics tend to look toward research and the accepted language of their disciplines.
There is nothing wrong with expertise. We need experts. The problem comes when expertise becomes the only window through which somebody can see the world and they begin applying their expertise in domains where it does not apply.
The old joke says that when all you have is a hammer, everything begins looking like a nail. Our educational structure takes that one step further. We make the hammer extremely expensive, give somebody a certificate proving they are an approved hammer expert, attach their livelihood to the hammer and then surround them with other people who spent years acquiring the exact same tool.
Then we wonder why intellectual tribes form.
Universities Have Helped Build This Problem
Universities should not get a pass here.
There are fields where deep formal education is absolutely necessary, and there are universities doing exceptional work. I am not arguing that nobody needs college or that an eighth-grade education is enough to become a surgeon, engineer or physicist. That would be silly. But the university system has also become enormously expensive, increasingly credential-heavy and, in many places, far too comfortable narrowing people into specialized intellectual and ideological lanes.
An institution that is supposed to broaden a young person's mind should be very cautious about supplying the frame through which that young person is expected to interpret the world. Too often we have moved in the opposite direction. Race, gender, political ideology, grievance and whatever the fashionable institutional framework happens to be can become part of the educational environment before young people have accumulated enough experience of reality to examine those frameworks critically.
I have written before about what happens when identity and frame begin being supplied by institutions rather than developed against reality, family, community, civic structure and independent thought. This is another part of the same problem.
You do not create independent thinkers by handing them the approved lens through which they are supposed to see everything. You create people who become very good at seeing through that lens. Then we funnel them into increasingly narrow professions, attach status and debt to those professions, and act surprised when society becomes divided into groups of people who barely know how to talk across domains anymore.
At some point we should stop being surprised by outputs that are perfectly consistent with the structure producing them.
Kids Are Different, and That Should Be an Advantage
Another thing our system tends to forget is that children are not interchangeable units.
Some kids are naturally mechanical. Some are verbal. Some are mathematical. Some have extraordinary spatial ability. Some love people and relationships. Some are entrepreneurs before they know what the word means. Others love machines, animals, art, science or abstract ideas. Some naturally connect things from different domains.
A good education system should help discover those differences instead of trying to make everybody move through the same sequence, at roughly the same pace, toward the same institutional destination. The important thing is the foundation.
Every kid should learn to read well enough to understand difficult material, write clearly enough to explain what they mean, use mathematics, understand basic science and the physical world, know the history and civic structure of the country they live in, understand money and basic economics, and develop enough practical competence to solve ordinary problems.
That foundation is non-negotiable because everything that comes later depends on it.
After that, I think we should open the world rather than progressively close it.
AI Is About to Make This Much More Important
This is where the timing becomes interesting.
For most of modern history, specialized knowledge was difficult to obtain. If you wanted to understand a new field deeply, you usually had to find an expert, buy the books, enter the institution or spend years learning the domain yourself. AI changes the cost of getting into unfamiliar territory. It does not eliminate expertise, and it certainly does not magically make everybody competent. What it does is give somebody who already knows how to think an extraordinary tool for entering another domain.
A mechanic who wants to understand electronics can ask questions until the relationship makes sense. A farmer can dig into soil chemistry, weather modeling or automation. A programmer can explore biology. A business owner can investigate engineering. Someone who hits a mathematical wall can get tutoring immediately and keep pushing. The specialized information becomes easier to reach. That changes what becomes valuable.
The scarce ability increasingly becomes knowing how to connect the information, not narrowly expertise and advice.
Can somebody recognize that a bottleneck in a business has the same structure as a bottleneck in a physical system? Can they recognize feedback, dependencies, load, state, constraints, failure and cause across completely different subjects?
That is cross-domain structural thinking, and I have been writing for some time that AI is likely to increase its value. My earlier work on structural and divergent thinking makes essentially the same point: when specialized information becomes easier to obtain, the person who can see relationships across domains gains leverage.
Mike Yoder is already doing that without needing a fancy name for it.
Give someone like that AI and you have not merely given him more information. You have given somebody who already moves naturally between domains a much larger world to move through.
Our educational system should be producing more people like that.
Instead, too much of it still rewards staying inside the lane.
So What Would I Build Instead?
Now, if I think the structure is wrong, then I should at least be willing to say what I would replace it with and provide a solution, not just run around spouting off without providing at least some semblance of rational thought as to what may enhance our current malformed educational system.
I believe would start by protecting the foundational years much more seriously than we do now. Through roughly eighth grade, every child should come out able to read, write, speak clearly, understand mathematics, know basic science, understand American history and civics, handle basic economics and money, and connect academic learning to the practical world.
Kids should build things, fix things, grow things, experiment with things and experience real consequences when something does not work. If a family cannot provide enough structure because of poverty, instability, a missing parent or some other serious problem, then society should care enough to make sure that child still gets the foundation. Maybe that involves stronger neighborhood schools, child centers geared towards specific activities, mentors, farms, trade programs, community organizations or something we have not invented yet.
I am less interested in which institution provides the structure than whether the child actually gets it. I also think a functioning country needs a common civic language. If a child comes to the United States legally and does not speak English well enough to participate fully in school and society, then rapid English acquisition is something worth investing in.
I had not initially thought about it that way, but the more I do, the more obvious it seems.
If assimilation and participation and finding good people are the objective, helping somebody learn the common language quickly is not charity. It is infrastructure. It allows that person to understand the wider culture, communicate outside their immediate community and participate in the same civic system as everyone else. It helps them assimilate.
Once the foundation is established, the system should become much more flexible.
Homeschooling may work for one family while a small neighborhood school works better for another. Someone else may want a traditional school, a technical academy, a classical school, an agricultural program, a religious school, a STEM-focused school or some hybrid nobody has thought of yet.
I would rather define the educational outcomes we expect and then let different institutions compete to provide them. That probably means letting more of the educational funding follow the child. If schools have to convince families that what they offer is valuable, the incentives begin to change. A school that produces capable graduates will attract families. One that spends enormous amounts of money without producing people who can read, reason, work and function independently should have to explain why anyone should keep sending children there.
Universities should have to compete too.
They should not simply inherit millions of young people because we have decided that four years of college is the respectable waiting room between childhood and adulthood.
If a university is providing something genuinely valuable, students will want it and employers will value the people coming out of it. If a program does not produce knowledge or competence that anyone values outside the institution, maybe the institution should have to reconsider why it exists.
Competition has a funny way of forcing people to answer questions that captive markets allow them to ignore.
Put Productive Life Back Into Education
I also think teenagers should encounter more of the real world before we ask them to choose what they want to do with the rest of their lives. Let them spend meaningful time around electricians, farmers, machinists, nurses, mechanics, builders, programmers, scientists and business owners. Let them see what the work actually looks like and discover which problems interest them.
A kid who thought he wanted to become an attorney may discover that he loves electrical systems. Someone who thought she wanted to become an engineer may discover medicine, agriculture or business.
That is not failure.
That is exactly what exploration is supposed to accomplish.
The tragedy is asking somebody to discover that only after they have spent four years and $100,000 getting permission to enter the wrong lane.
Make Changing Lanes Easy
This may be the most important part of the whole redesign.
Suppose somebody becomes an electrician and starts working around control systems. That gets them interested in automation, which leads them toward programming. Programming eventually gets them interested in systems engineering, and perhaps several years later they start a business. Why should every movement require starting life over again?
Make credentials smaller where possible. Let them stack. Reward demonstrated competence. Make apprenticeships normal. Recognize useful prior experience instead of pretending it disappears when somebody crosses into another field. Most importantly, make changing your mind inexpensive. Because every time somebody crosses into another real domain, something else happens. The electrician learns load, capacity and protection. The plumber learns pressure, flow and restriction. The mechanic develops an instinct for tolerances, wear and failure. The farmer learns biological systems, weather, uncertainty and risk. The programmer learns abstraction, state and logic. The business owner learns incentives, capital, customers and human behavior.
Someone who has lived inside several of those systems eventually starts recognizing what they have in common.
They stop seeing only the subject.
They begin seeing the structure underneath it.
That is the person I want our education system producing, especially now.
Maybe the Amish Preserved Something We Lost
I am not suggesting that everybody become Amish. There are parts of Amish life most Americans would never choose, and they certainly have not solved every educational problem. But I think they preserved something important that we managed to confuse.
They seem to understand that a child needs a strong foundation, that responsibility matters, that useful work can be educational, and that learning does not stop because formal schooling does.
Go back and look at Mike.
He started with an eighth-grade formal education and a life on a farm. Then hunting became filming, filming led into drones, drones became thermal deer recovery, the business exposed a regulatory problem, the regulatory problem became another opportunity, and the drone knowledge eventually crossed back into agriculture.
He kept learning because the world kept presenting him with problems worth solving.
Meanwhile, we spend enormous amounts of money complaining about college debt, ideological tribalism, workforce shortages, people who cannot see outside their specialties, young adults with little practical experience and organizations full of highly credentialed people who each understand their component while nobody understands the whole system.
I am beginning to wonder whether those are really separate problems. Maybe a lot of them are outputs from the same structure. We take children who begin life curious about almost everything, progressively narrow their world, make the narrowing expensive, attach status and identity to it, and then wonder why adults become intellectually rigid and protective of their tribes.
The age of AI may finally force us to rethink that because access to specialized information is becoming cheaper while the ability to connect knowledge across domains is becoming more valuable.
That should tell us something about what we ought to be teaching children.
The Amish did not stop educating their kids after eighth grade.
They simply never confused schooling with education.
The people who helped trigger the thought
Elias & Esther Yoder
https://eliasyoder.com/
Mike Yoder / nuWay Ag
https://nuwayag.com/
Related
The Question Nobody Wants To Ask About AI
Why the future may belong to structural thinkers rather than narrative thinkers and larger teams
https://samirac.com/article/the-question-nobody-wants-to-ask