Education Should Prioritise Principles over Knowledge

Examining education from first principles

When Elon Musk wanted to start a space company, he did what anyone in his position would: he went to Russia. But, as anyone that isn’t Musk would expect, they didn’t exactly welcome him. And they weren’t thrilled about selling him rockets. One rocket designer even spat on him.

The rockets were far too expensive, ranging between 20 and 65 million dollars. So Musk tackled the problem from a different angle. He priced the raw materials on the open market and discovered that they were only 2% of the amount he was quoted. First principles led SpaceX to build 85% of required parts, cut the cost of space travel by a factor of ten, and still make 70% gross margin.

Thinking from first principles is as simple as it is difficult. Identify the assumptions in your solution — or problem — and break them down. A first principle is a base assumption that cannot be deduced from another assumption.

Tackling challenges like this creates the space to assess superficial and systemic problems. While the former dominates, the latter is overlooked and not without good reason. Changing anything at a systemic level usually requires peripheral dependencies to change too. At the very least, it affects them. Software engineers know this. Ask any senior developer what they would choose, given the resources, when faced with the age-old fix or rewrite complex legacy systems.

It’s not unseen complexity (read: risk) that makes a rewrite better choice, it’s also a chance to use new technologies, methodologies, and designs. This kind of change can improve systems by orders of magnitude, like Musks ten-times-cheaper rocket. Thinking from first principles forces us to rethink the limitations that are usually taken for granted.

Learning to think from first principles is critical to step-jumps in innovation. It’s the difference between making a better typewriter and a word processor. Or, in Ford’s famous adage, the difference between faster horses and a car. Considering its protagonist role in progression, one would think they would prioritise it in education. But it’s not.

The education system has more dependencies than any other system in society. Which also makes it one of the hardest to reform. The world is a moving monster, and education is fuelling the beast. To change it, at least at the level it requires, we’d need the world to stop for a period. Something that seemed impossible until now. The COVID19 pandemic has forced the world to look at everything a little differently and education is no exception. It’s showed everyone that there is far more potential in digital, which has been pushed for a long time in education but never taken seriously. This time, though, there was no choice.

One of the major benefits of moving education into a digital space is that the system becomes a lot easier to change, to improve. It drastically reduces the turnaround time for innovation. Digital systems have created and responded to an unprecedented rate of societal change. While this dash into the future has left many industries behind, they are catching up. They have to; it’s that or die. Education is no different.

The incredible rate of change has also created a problem for education. By the time people garnered enough experience with a technology to teach it, it’s already out-dated. For example, DVD experts no longer have any reason to pass on their knowledge.

That knowledge is like a system. It comprises superficial and systemic elements. The information specific to DVDs, in that example, is superficial, but the experience is systemic. Ironically, though, the systemic elements don’t need to change because humans haven’t.

While the issues we face in modern times differ from the issues we faced earlier in our history, the core human drivers are the same. The story may be different, but the moral is the same. As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

So if we were to use first principle thinking, we could break experience down to its valuable core and focus on passing that down. We could ensure that education prioritises systemic rather than superficial experience.

And it also means that a generation that we thought was no longer relevant has a lot to offer. What makes humans powerful are the principles that underpin developments, not the developments themselves. Sure, they’re useful, but limited. If we had the latter without the former, we would not advance much and, after a generation or two, likely regress.

Yet, people are cultivating a lifetime of wisdom and when it nears the crescendo of value, they retire. But the need for personal growth and development doesn’t go away, it transforms. We should pass it on, which is why so many executives go into mentorship programmes when they retire.

Until now, though, it’s been unsuccessful on a scale that makes any difference because of the limitations of physical infrastructure. Now, in this digital environment, and with the visibility that COVID has provided, it can creep into our actual education system.

Maybe even become it.

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