Sarah Dillard
If you were an autocrat who wanted to maintain power, how would you design your national education system?
If I were a power-hungry dictator, I’d design a system with:
A strong STEM focus. I might distract people with talk of how STEM fields are job creators. But that isn’t my primary motivation. I’d like all the useful things they could produce for me: engineers to compete online, sufficient infrastructure for the state, and advanced weaponry.
Standardized testing systems and competitions. I need a way of surfacing high-potential STEM talent to create the many things my empire needs, so I’d create two different types of filters to identify these people.
A history class that tells the untarnished narrative of our country’s success, culminating in my just rule of the land. Sure, there were hard times in the past, but no need to dwell on these, right? Instead we can focus on how much better things are today (and of course, my role in this!). We are a proud nation.
Large, lecture-style courses. Let’s keep students listening rather than discussing or applying what they’ve learned. A slippery slope best avoided.
Border controls to keep talent at home. If I were sufficiently enlightened, I’d pay for people to study abroad on the condition they majored in a STEM field and returned home to pay off their degree. If I were even more enlightened, I’d let these people live abroad, and I’d tax the remittances they send back home. Keep the troublemakers out but take a cut of their earnings. But maybe I'm not enlightened, and I’d just control migration.
What I wouldn’t want:
Classes where students discuss ideas. They might build the habit, then who knows what they would start whispering about or where that might lead.
Social science courses. It's one thing for people to complain here and there. It's another to give them useful tools for critiquing and usefully reimagining our society. Too high of a risk of creating my own downfall or at least a protest movement I’d have to respond to. Good thing I already have some ideas in my back pocket for what to compromise on.
Student-run organizations. A volunteer club might seem harmless to you, but student-run organizations are training future citizens that they can create things and run things and change things. Hard pass. Better to keep people busy with sports where they accept the goal lines other people set for them.
Which leads me to, if I were pressed to modernize, what, in my beneficence, I’d allow:
Psychology courses. I’d just make sure that the curriculum committee chair knows that our lecture style psychology class should stay focused internally–how to use cognitive science to learn more, not how to use contact theory to bridge differences.
Business courses. A traditional business education doesn’t generally concern itself with right and wrong, or at least doesn’t let morals get in the way of profit. Shareholder value, amiright? Especially because I own everything around here.
Vocational education. We need workers, and workers need skills. Education should be practical!
Wherever you are in the world, when you think about your school, your state: what does it hold up as its goals? What type of education is it delivering? What is it hesitant to offer? And what does all of this say about the deep motivations behind the system?
At Kaleidoscope, we’re designing the antithesis of an autocrat’s dream education. Because we want to live in a world where students become citizens armed not with weapons, but with the ideas and skills to critique society and construct a more just one.
Helpful Links
Learn more about our curriculum.
Read more about our education philosophy:
Why Are We Learning This? The Importance of Asking the Big Questions
Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking: What It Really Is and How We Achieve It