Quality Education

About Quality Education

Everyone agrees that some education is better than other education. Almost nobody agrees on how we would know. This issue is about that gap, and about what happens inside institutions when we pretend the gap is not there.

Start with the smallest honest observation available. A person walks into a room not knowing something, and some time later walks out of a course, a workshop or a degree changed in ways that neither they nor anyone else can fully describe. Something happened. The question that has occupied educators, funders and administrators for as long as formal education has existed is whether that something can be caught, weighed and compared against the something that happened to a different person in a different room. Every serious attempt to answer that question runs into the same wall: the thing we care about is not directly observable, and everything that is directly observable is only loosely related to it.

This is not a complaint about bureaucracy. It is a description of a genuine epistemic difficulty, and one that education shares with medicine, with parenting and with almost any field where the outcome of interest is a change inside a person. Where education differs is in the length of the delay. A course may pay off in the week after it ends, or in a decision made a decade later, or in a habit of mind so absorbed that the person no longer remembers acquiring it. By the time the effect is visible, the causal chain has been thoroughly contaminated by everything else that person did, met and survived in the meantime.

Education pays out on a schedule nobody designed and nobody can wait for.

The most quoted figure in the sector answers a question about persistence.

This is the most reliable finding in the whole field, and the least acted upon.

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