For education, but much more as well

From my friend Andrew, the best educator I have ever met. And I think this premise has as much to do about business as it does about education.

One of the biggest obstacles to fixing education is this: 

Big challenges are overcome by small steps, iterating a solution, getting feedback, reiterating, and trying something a little different until, little by little something wonderful begins to reveal itself. 

(Btw: iterate seems to come from the Latin iter, which means journey) 

However, as education is structured these days, it seems to be more like a high stakes war fought on the principles of factory production. 

You don’t get to iterate and reiterate a factory. You don’t get to hesitantly step your way onto the fields at Waterloo. 

School populations are too big. Textbooks are too expensive. School buildings are too large. Administration is too extensive. 

That is why the conventional school is where ideas and hopes and reforms go to die. 

Until we come up with modest approaches to education that don’t have to get everything right the first time, we’re going to continue to achieve mediocre results at the top and soul-crushing consequences at the “bottom”, and, throughout, we’ll have the historical glory of destroying communities by ignoring their feedback lest it interfere with our reductionist, ideological solution to a comprehensive, soul encompassing question.

(Btw: question comes from the Latin quaestio, from which we also get quest). 

Let’s escape the impositions of theorists and get back to the humane quest and journey that seeks wisdom with an open heart.

Andrew Kern, 5/30/25