Upgrade education

How to make education better using the Meta-Problem Method

Every child’s right

A great teacher can entirely change the trajectory of their students. Figuring out how to provide that experience to as many students as possible while serving everyone is challenging.

Layer in limited resources, and the need to create a system which is sustainable indefinitely, and you have a high-stakes dilemma on your hands.

That’s the kind of challenge the Meta-Problem Method is designed to tackle. The method helps you choose the best problem to solve, but only after you’ve defined the goals you care about, explored your many options, and weighed the trade-offs. To learn more about the Meta-Problem Method, click here.

How should we invest?

The first challenge is to decide what should we give to our students, and the second is who pays for it. Both issues are intertwined.

Parents sometimes choose non-public schools because they are able and willing to invest more of their personal resources. College students in some countries pay drastically more for their education because of the way college is funded. Some vocations require you to pay out of pocket for your education, while others provide on-the-job training.

The consequences of a change today may only be fully realized decades from now. For example, take away or add a certain kind of support for elementary school, and it will take over a decade to see how it impacts those students as adults.

Facing the tradeoffs

Our quest for efficiency in education raises difficult questions. For example, if kids have almost as good an experience when they have 20 classmates as 30, is it worth losing a couple kids who need more individual attention?

The relentless push for more efficiency takes a toll on teachers too. Over the past several years educators have been burning out at record rates.

If we want a future with qualified doctors, engineers and teachers, we need to maintain the availability of college. If we want to have an educated population who can follow a budget or apply for a job, we need to achieve at least moderate quality for our youngest citizens.

Questions to explore

Which students are not being served with our current level of funding? What changes could we make to bridge the gap?

How are we serving our current population of students? Would more or fewer resources lead to substantially different outcomes? How can we tell what the future impact will really be?

Who should pay for high-quality education? Who will benefit from the investment?

What are we willing and able to do? How can greater clarity help us make good decisions? Which options will provide the greatest return compared to the effort involved?

Choose an example below to learn more about the Meta-Problem Method and how it can help us achieve a high-quality education for all our students.