One thing I find interesting about nature is its motif of generating genetic diversity. Through ways little and big such as errors in copying DNA, swapping DNA between neighbouring bacteria, and inheriting some but not all traits from each parent, life forms change and adapt. The paradox is, even when one characteristic can be more prevalent than others due to its survival advantages (hence the saying of survival of the fittest, the fittest traits being passed down), genetic information is deliberately programmed to diversity. That’s why bacteria can adopt new resistance arsenal from to evade antibiotics, and why having a baby with your first cousin might not be the best idea.

What is really smart about nature is that it recognizes that environment changes, so that today’s pros can be tomorrow’s cons as a volcano erupts or the climate gets colder. A classical example is if the wall is completely pink, the pink butterfly will have a survival advantage over other colours by better evading predators, and most of the butterflies will be pink. The interesting thing here is that despite the obvious advantage of pink butterflies, nature still has its ways to generate genetic variation so that other colours and traits might be possible. (For example, Yellow butterflies may still be able to survive if they can fly faster than others.) If somebody painted the wall green, suddenly the butterflies with a mutation for green camouflage will be favoured, and as the pink butterflies get caught by predators most of the butterfly population will be green.

The diversity in the genetic information within the population allows that should conditions change, by chance there could be a trait that would be superior than the rest in thriving in the new environment, and this trait becomes the next norm.

Our education system parallels the multiplication of cells in nature in many ways. Similar to nature, schools passes down the knowledge of one generation to the other. Curiously, unlike nature, our schools doesn’t deliberately foster knowledge diversity. It transfers the old wisdom thinking that it will still apply regardless of changes in the new environment. In K-12 and undergrad, the ability to become homogenized into the dominant beliefs is valued over exploring fringe ideas or developing new ways of thinking.

There’s some merit to this rapid download of knowledge, but will this drown out the renegade ideas or approaches that can be particularly effective when new challenges arise? Perhaps we need to evaluate the role of intellectual diversity in education, both in terms of the diversity of knowledge, and the diversity of approaches to learn.

My questions are, what does education do to us, and what should education do? If creativity is what’s often valued, how do you teach creativity?

Interestingly, with most revolutionary startups headed by 20 somethings who didn’t finish university, compared to other disciplines the IT field seemed to be one step ahead in redefining education. A few observations about the IT field that are often absent in other disciplines: 

• crowd source and collaboration
• open source codes
• vibrant developer communities
• no set school/curriculum - people just try and fail and try again
• judged by usability, design, and innovation, not multiple choice
• lots of opportunities to learn, test, and practice
• no “censorship” - ie. upload all crap and gem, let the market determine whether something is crap or gem; successes and failures are both shared. In the scientific publishing world: good luck (only significant results are published)

These are just my guesses. In upcoming posts, I will approach the questions I posed by first chatting with people in the IT arena to find out how they learned what they know, how the field has made itself a fertile ground for innovation, and what this could mean for education.

Lemme know if you have any thoughts/ideas/suggestions!

Photo credit: 123 posters