What NASA can teach us about education reform | Matt Candler | Big Think

One way to think about the state of school today in the U.S. is to ask the question, what did school look like a hundred years ago? And let's say we found someone and brought them in a time machine forward from 100-120 years ago and started to show them what our world looked like. We would probably have to slow down and explain the Internet, maybe modern jet travel, maybe our mobile phones, but if we walked them into your kids' school, my kids' school, we wouldn't have to do that much explaining. That would instantly resonate with them as something they're familiar with.

And to me, that's one example of how little we think about how school could change, how school should change, and specifically what pieces of it could we reimagine, not just for the future but even for today. If you look in Webster's Dictionary, you will see the word institution in the definition of school. We think of it as such when in fact what we all care about, what I care about from my kids, what I care about for other folks' kids is not the building and the institution and the structures; it is their relationship with other human beings, with their own emotions, with the world as it is rapidly changing around them.

And so, what gives me a lot of hope and what I'm really proud of at 4.0 is that we have created a relational and communal way of thinking about school. And when you do that, it doesn't take long for great ideas to start oxygenating the conversation. If you really create enough trust for people to say, "Yes, I actually want to see a prototype of your learning space," and it doesn't have to be perfect, it doesn't have to look like school, and it doesn't need to take more than about 30 minutes, if you can create enough dialogue for someone to say, "Okay, I think I can do that. I think I can create that for a handful of students." Suddenly, you've created a space that is no longer institutional; it's just a few human beings in a space together talking about what they want to learn and what they can share.

And that to me is really liberating because most of my professional career has been spent believing that I must be the most certain one in the room; I must be the most confident and secure knowledge holder; that I must deliver knowledge to children. And for my inner teacher to be along for the ride embracing this new version of me in my participation and a vision of school that is not institutional and not predicated on my certainty as an educator, but on my willingness to go into uncertain places to shine a light on what might be a horrible idea and a bad 30-minute experiment, but to say I'm going to participate in that as a curious human being with other curious human beings, that is what school should be and that's what school could be.

And so, for me, what excites me most about the future of school is that, what if? What if it could be about humans relating to one another, not humans trying to make these institutions less institutional? Here's why I love the conversation about NASA and what it might teach us about school, and specifically getting to Mars. Let's talk about Mars and the moon. The vision is that humans will make that trip. And so, what you see in NASA is this real tight focus on something we've mentioned before about human beings being at the core.

And so, the paradox of NASA where all the cool tech is is that at the core they consider getting humans to the moon and to Mars safely their mission. And that to me, to my inner teacher, that's a revelation because NASA is able to take that same sense of purpose and intensity about serving humans that my inner teacher thinks about his students, and yet they're somehow able to create a culture where you better fail. Like the idea of NASA is that we have to fail; everything has to break while we're here on earth because we can't afford for it to break once a human is in that ship.

And that, to my inner teacher, is such a radical concept. He has fooled himself; the whole construct of how we train teachers fooled me into thinking that I can actually make it all perfect and that going live with my students means no failure at all. And that's something I really love about studying the methods, the culture of NASA is that somehow it has become part of that culture for everyone to embrace the idea that my job is to fail as quickly, as cheaply, and as publicly as possible within NASA.

My inner teacher just is so hungry for that; he is so desperate to be able to live and breathe in that kind of culture because frankly he was never taught that. He was taught you can't screw up, and if you do, you screw up on a Sunday night doing your lesson plan because once you get to school, it's on. And all that weight is on you. And I think we've just done such a disservice to our kids, to families, to teachers themselves by saying failure is not an option. At NASA failure is the only option. You have to push through all that failure to get to the place where you're ready to carry human cargo.

They keep the humanity sacred while embracing the importance of experimentation and of taking risks and of gradually working our way to a future that might be a lot brighter through experimentation and failure. And that to me is a really beautiful thing to try and create for schools and people in schools.