Shaping The Future of Education by Nolan Bushnell and Dr. Leah Hanes

This is going to be a long one, so buckle up. TLDR: If Elon Musk did education.

Before I begin, you probably need to know a little about me. My mom began her career as a second-grade teacher. It was where she met my dad, a high school physics and chemistry teacher. I grew up in public schools. My childhood was spent in the company of teachers, even on nights and weekends. My parents’ friends were teachers. The woman who taught me piano was a special education teacher. The person who inspired my love of the Spanish language was an amazing woman who taught Spanish at the high school and let me hang out in her classroom while my dad graded papers and set up labs. Education, especially public education, is very close to my heart. Which is why this book sent me into paroxysms of anger.

Let’s start with the positives because there aren’t many. The person who narrated the audiobook I listened to did an excellent job. She spoke very clearly and enunciated an appropriate amount.

The book starts out with a bold statement: This is the authors’ manifesto. This is also a lie. This book is a business plan and a sales pitch. The underlying philosophy of their plan to revolutionize education is founded entirely on making our nation’s children better employees for corporations. Despite what they might claim to the contrary, neither author truly understands the purpose of a K-12 education.

But, before we get into the nuts and bolts, I have to say something about the writing style of this book. Nolan Bushnell is the top credited author on the cover. However, nearly every 5th sentence began “Nolan says”, which is poor writing, to start. It also implies that Nolan didn’t have a part in actually writing the book. I have no evidence of this, but I imagine he ranted at Dr. Hanes for several hours and she coalesced that into the book.

Bushnell and Hanes’s vision for the future of education is bleak and dystopian, to my mind. They want students in individual cubicles with noise-cancelling headsets and microphones, being monitored by video cameras. Everything they need to learn is a video game, which they somehow both understand is how they’re learning but also the lesson is buried so deceptively in the game that they don’t realize it. The modules, as they’re called, are developed by teachers and older students for money in a horrific commission-based model that prioritizes completion time and student enjoyment over academic merit. Students pick what they are interested in and study only what engages them. To chat with friends for free (because everything has a price in this model), they have to incorporate that week’s vocabulary words. Resources are both limited and unlimited; no expensive robot kits but all of the individual pieces one might need to build a robot. Students can go to the fashion district for fabric but have to buy leisure time. And when you’ve finished some undetermined amount of modules (or when the eBay business you’ve set up is churning out enough money), you graduate. Employers will hire you based on skills and a coded number system that tells them how many thousands of modules you completed in what the authors consider the core curriculum areas.

Oh, and the school day? Yeah, the students get to decide when they do their coursework. No math at 8:30am! But if you do your Chinese module while running on the track you can get bonus multitasking points to spend on sleep pods later in the day! Doesn’t that sound super rad?

The whole system is Montessori but digitized. However, in 6 hours of audiobook never once was the word Montessori used. It was like they had no idea that method had already been tried, to mixed reviews. And the type of student this system caters to is already somewhat self-motivated and would excel even in a traditional classroom.

That leads me to the problem I have with this whole concept: it won’t work on a large scale because it doesn’t account for students who need any amount of accommodation. Vision or hearing impaired? Colorblind? Tremors or motor skill issues? Migraines or motion sickness triggered by screens? Then you’re out of luck. What about special education students who might struggle to follow a narrative or problem-solving video game? Too bad. Overstimulated by the colors and noises of the game? No education for you.

The entire premise seems to hinge on the idea that EVERY. SINGLE. CHILD. is totally and completely enthralled by video games. Now, I don’t have data to back up my assertion that this is not the case. I know my own history of being quickly bored with video games. I have friends who have never owned an Xbox, Playstation, or Wii. What do you do with a child who would much rather read than play a video game? Or one who just wants to draw all day? Sure, these things are taken care of in their non-module time. But I think I would struggle to get through the gaming portion of my day and would then lose out on opportunities to create and socialize.

And that’s where this educational system fails most spectacularly. The authors assert that there is too much wasted time in current classrooms. A motivated student could finish a semester’s coursework in a few weeks on their own! But often the history lesson isn’t just about Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo. It’s about following rules, both explicit and implied, in a classroom. It’s about collaborating with a team and interacting with the students around you. It’s about following a class schedule and strategizing when to go to your locker to swap out your textbooks. It’s about small freedoms, like hall passes and study halls. And personal responsibility; turning in homework on time, and asking for help when you need it. None of this is included in the syllabus, nor declared in state-mandated learning objectives. And yet it is part and parcel with the way our education system functions.

There are so (so, so,) many things about this concept (and this book) that I have objections to, but there are two more I want to cover: residential schools and exploitation.

The authors clearly identify ways in which students come to school unprepared to learn. Food insecurity, housing insecurity, and neighborhood violence are at the top of my list. They list parents who work too much and divorcing parents, but tomato/tomahto. What is there solution to this unstable home life? Residential schools. Specifically in the inner cities, because those are the only students who struggle with such things. Students would come Monday morning and get their DNA-specific meal (don’t even get me started) and would then stay at the school until the end of the day on Friday. The authors assure us that the cost for this would not be incrementally more. Which is, honestly, not the problem I have with it. I dislike the idea of targeting “inner city”, which I’m taking to mean poor and minority, students and taking them away from their families and communities for the majority of the week. Throw uniforms on them and enforce English as the only language in the building and I’ve seen this show before. It doesn’t end well for the students. But don’t worry! Poor kids are much more resilient than their wealthy cohorts, Nolan says.

My last point, mostly because I feel like this review is already as long as the book itself was, is that there is so much of this that is ripe for exploitation. Students setting up corporations and paying their peers as employees. Taking these goods and services outside the school in the form of catering or product distribution. One-on-one video chats with mentors, teachers, etc. Economies within the school which can be used for privileges and resources. Software that compiles massive quantities of data on each student including interests and skillsets. All of it could, and likely would, be exploited. Who is monitoring to make sure students aren’t being asked to work 12 hour days for their catering business? Who is making sure appropriate sales and income taxes are being paid? How are the mentors and teachers from around the world vetted? Are the one-on-one calls monitored or recorded to make sure students are being groomed or abused? How will you stop a black market of school currency from forming? None of this is answered by the authors.

I cannot in good conscience give this book anything higher than 1 out of 5 stars. To paraphrase The American President, “We have serious educational problems to solve, and we need serious people to solve them. And whatever your school’s problem is, I promise you, Nolan Bushnell is not the least bit interested in solving it.” This book is highly problematic and I don’t recommend it to anyone.

Disclosure: I listened to this audiobook as an advance reader copy through NetGalley.