There's a funny thing about life. The more you learn about anything, the more you learn how broken things are.
Take education for instance.
The gold standard of learning is a process called deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is the idea that people learn best through doing and getting real time feedback from a coach. For example, if I want to learn to fix a car engine, instead of reading a book on engines, I should work with a mechanic who'd coach me through the process.
It's so obvious it's almost ridiculous to say.
Well duh! You can't learn how to fix engines from a book!
But much of our schooling is done out of a book. Which shows how broken the school system is. Like what are schools doing if most of the curriculum isn't structured around deliberate practice?
It's not like they can't do it. My 4 year old is doing 2nd grade math. How? We got him using the Khan Academy Kids App. It's a deliberate practice approach to learning math, packaged as a game. He loves it!
What if we did this for all kids? For instance, what if the K-12 school system was structured around deliberate practice? Outcomes for students would skyrocket.
So there's this massive hole in our education system, and that makes me optimistic.
It makes me optimistic because this means we don't have to discover a new solution.
We're not the Manhattan Project, trying, but unsure if we can create the atom bomb.
No. The solution is known. We just have to apply it.
This is the case for tons of stuff.
Think about the energy crises and global warming. Right now we're facing a huge push to reduce our use of fossil fuels and lower our CO2 footprint less we destroy the planet. But we can't actually reduce our use of fossil fuels. We need them to heat our homes, drive our cars, and do just about everything else which makes the modern world run. In fact, if we want to raise the worlds population out of poverty we need to be using more energy. The poorest among us need fossil fuels to heat and cool their homes and clean their water.
It looks like we're stuck between a rock and a hard place.
But apparently it's not really a problem. We can just use atomic energy. Yes, the old reactors blew up. But the modern reactors are designed so it's physically impossible for them to blow up. And with atomic energy we can produce cheap power for the masses.
Most of the problems I see around the world are like this.
So when I look in the future, I see a world where students are educated with mastery based learning, everyone has free cheap abundant energy, and we use solutions we already have to fix the rest of our problems.
Yeah, the future is looking bright.
If you liked this post, check this out next. I think you'll like it ;) It's more about deliberate practice for counselors.