Unlearning is the next step after your university degree

To this day, millions of students still walk into a university with the hope that their degree will not only get them a job, but will prepare them sufficiently for it.

The common realizations post-graduation tend to be:

1. Finding jobs that are up to your qualifications is incredibly hard
2. Once you’ve gotten a job, even if it’s perfectly within your domain, you’re far from knowing how to execute it
3. The job is actually not what you expected

Without getting too deep into the history of industrialized education, one of the biggest problems with the traditional academic system is that it was conceived at a time where the job market and socioeconomic landscape had little to no resemblance to what most post-grads face today, and it hasn’t evolved as quickly.

A lot of people have tried solving the problem, and in the past five years we’ve seen a surge in alternatives to the traditional systems. Some of them train you for specific careers with a focused six month course, others are online video classes that promise to grant you new skills from the comfort of your home. Whether or not these are proving effective is something that will be apparent in a few years when we have more numbers to study, but one thing is certain, none of them look anything like the traditional system. These courses are often providing their students hands-on exercises, self-assigned schedules, collaborative exercises, and a variety of soft-skills that aren’t even discussed in universities, let alone all the schooling before that.

New methodologies and mindsets focused on working collaboratively, design, creativity, critical thinking, and innovation, once thought of things that are exciting, are now seen as minimum requirements in a variety of industries. While the alternatives to the schooling systems mentioned above give people tastes of these methods, a lot of them often clash with habits and workflows that were ingrained into us from a young age through the archaic schooling system. It’s concerning to see adults take a single class on “design thinking”, which relies heavily on quick cycles of iteration based on user feedback, then resume their standard desk job where satisfying the boss is all that counts, and meeting the users isn’t even a possibility.

Before one can begin to create user-centric products, one needs to understand that they will not be able to stick to their original wireframes all the way through to production. Before one can work collaboratively, one needs to get over the fact that not every decision will be implemented without a challenge from a colleague. What’s becoming more apparent is that the step between university and one’s path through meaningful work will be a lot less about simply retaining more knowledge, and a lot more about forgetting the habits that hold one back. Put simply, we need to start unlearning to move forward.

For educational institutions and organizations, what is often referred to as “learning” should in fact be labelled as “data acquisition”. Unlearning is, as it sounds, the opposite. It is the ability to be able to discard information and habits quickly in order to make room for newer, more relevant knowledge and skills. As it stands today, an engineer will have to go through 4 years of training without being exposed to nary a piece of information that is actually socially relevant or up-to-date. This student has to then face the world and realize that all that they have learned is neither useful in an applied context, nor is it relevant. Her training, through the standard examinations and lectures, in retaining a large amount of equations in her head is interesting as an intellectual exercise, but it does not make her a good collaborator. Even more troubling is that when her field is inevitably rendered obsolete barely a quarter-way through her career, she will have an incredibly difficult time adapting to the new environment.

We need to start unlearning to move forward.

Over the past four years helping people from all walks of life build startups, we’ve come to realize that the entrepreneurs that walk through our space leave stronger despite the success or failure of their startups. That entrepreneurial journey is one of the oldest, and truest forms of education that one can have: experience.

Unlearning and experience are deeply intertwined. One unlearns something typically by proving that an alternative mechanism can work. This can never happen theoretically. If you think of people that are afraid of flying, no amount of statistical data will alleviate that fear, regardless of how irrational that may be. Put them in a place a dozen times, and their perceived reality changes. The same goes with education and how habits are drilled into people. Due to the way exams currently work, students are lead to believe that preparing a long time for something, then showing up and proving yourself in a singular moment is the way to success. There is no ability to then look back at your exam and improve on it. You’re stuck with this result, permanently prevented from getting “100%”. A simple look into the history of any inventions, products or services, shows that often it took a few iterations to get to the “right” version. In fact, one of the most common questions in any job interview is “How did you deal with a failure in a previous project?”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone — there’s a million and one quotes about how experience is the best teacher, and it’s such a cliche advice, it’s impossible to trace it back to the original person that said it — but if this is so obvious, why hasn’t it been deployed at scale?

There isn’t one single answer to that question, but unlearning is definitely an aspect of it. For the longest time we’ve needed people to learn X, get employed for X, and then execute on X. Today, the landscape is more like you learn X, get hired for Y, and execute on Z. The better companies are now aware of this and they are slowly unlearning their habits of looking for the person with the highest GPA as they look at the individual in a more holistic way. These companies didn’t learn that by reading the latest report on how recent hires are performing in another company, they’re seeing the results first hand from within their walls. Thanks to this phenomenon, it’s only now that we’re seeing the big institutions start to move away from the factory model.

The future of education will be a way to help people actively unlearn and learn as they see fit, and educational institutions will have to provide the experiential playgrounds where that can happen. Since District 3 is hosted by Concordia University, which has made experiential learning for students part of its core mission, we wanted to see what the future of the classroom would look like for ourselves.

Taking a card from our own understanding that iterations are the way to success, we started our first iteration of a radically different learning experience with what we called the “Innovation Summer School”. The idea was to go beyond creating some educational workshops for the students, and instead pair them directly with companies with real-world problems that need a fresh perspective. The mandating companies would act as a client, the students would act as the talent at an agency, and we would assign three coordinators to act as the account managers. This would not only satisfy the aspect of providing the students with new skills, but also the experience required to unlearn their previous habits to make room for the new skills. On top of that, the companies will also be learning, seeing both that these new methods will work for them and that there’s more to students than their GPAs.

Our pilot of the Innovation Residency, which ran from May to August 2017, was our first foray into exploring the future of education for ourselves. The residency puts the participants under a 13-week intensive program, with only two weeks of training upfront. They then breakout into teams, each of which is mandated by an external organisation, and have only 11 weeks left to research, prototype, test, and iterate, before delivering a proposal for the mandate — all the while, ensuring that both the users and the mandator are contributing feedback.

We witnessed the participants get challenged with the notions of including user input from the get-go, rather than studying for 4 years before meeting a client, and by the end of 13 weeks, they were organically thinking about getting feedback on the fly.

In that view, it’s not that they had to learn about adapting to change, rather they had to unlearn their fear of the unexpected.

Many lessons were learned from both the mandators and the students that proved to us that this model could be a success, but this doesn’t mean it’s a silver bullet solution. One of the bigger problems we’d need to solve for mass-adoption of this would be the cost of the space and materials needed for it, the willingness of organizations to participate, and the consistent availability of instructors with the right training to provide it.

It is clear to us, however, that thinking about the future of education as merely a numbers game to increase classes is not the best way to more forward. There are a plethora of factors that are going to be wildly different in the changing landscape of technology, politics, and society, and arguably the best “educated” will be those that will have the competencies to adapt and manage their skillsets in the wake of those changes.