Alexander Laryanovsky: “We stop teaching the crowd”

Alexander Laryanovskiy, Managing Partner of the Skyeng online school, which has become the leader in the rating of Russian EdTech companies, talks about the challenges facing the education industry

There is an opinion that a modern person is forced to study all his life. This is both a myth and a fair statement, depending on who we are talking about. Most often this phrase is said by white-collar workers, but experience shows that they are the ones who do not learn. There is a term “attention economy”. There are 24 hours in a day, and we invest them in sleep, work, transport, series, and education. If you look at the attention economy of an average office worker, it turns out that he spends several tens of minutes a month on education.

Of course, there are people who read 60, and 100, and 200 books a year. But if you walk around the offices and ask how many people before five in the morning could not turn off the series and therefore did not get enough sleep, we will see that there are a lot of them. And if we ask which of them solved any problems, then we will not find such.

Yet in a blue-collar world, constant learning is the norm. I asked a network of hairdressing training centers how much the average stylist learns in a year. So, at least two months to keep up with professional development.

Nonsensical phrase: “Education is an investment in yourself.”

If this is an investment, what will I get in return?

“Well, you can sometime later…

This does not work. There is no learning curve. The labor market and the education market should be two sides of the same coin.

Now public education is not responsible for the result at all. The industry does not have such KPIs. The school cares about how the child will pass the exam, or about his safety. If he accidentally hurts himself, then many people get hit on the head. If the student has not mastered the integral, no hair will even move.

Private education is a buffer against the mistakes of the state system. The faster education and modernity diverge, the faster this business will develop. Life is accelerating, progress is accelerating, and the speed of updating data in school and university textbooks is low. Modern school textbooks differ little from those that I used to study.

The old will be forced to change to keep up with the changes, and as a result, education in public and private schools will even out. This is normal practice. For example, the private medical business spurs the development of the state. Private air transportation is forcing Russian Railways to modernize. Logistics companies are transforming Post to Our Country. In telecom, cellular operators have telephoned the country, although back in 2000 it was possible to stand in line for six or seven years to install a home telephone. Education will be about the same story. Through crises, through denial, through “but what about reasonable, kind, eternal?” it will move on to what will become a service.

As soon as education tries to digitize the most unimportant competence of the teacher – the talking head, everything breaks down. In the Soviet Union there was a TV channel that showed educational films for schoolchildren and students. Online education? No. The function of the teacher is to work with the motivation of the student.

To turn off the teacher from the training system is to doom it to failure. Self-education is the lot of a few, everyone else needs a guiding force. Now on the Internet of data – a wagon. Why do we need online education? Type whatever you want in the search engine and get this knowledge. But it doesn’t work. A person asks: where should I start, and what do I need from this, and who should I ask questions?

The transformation of education is going from the good old classroom with large doors and desks to the point where we stop teaching the crowd and start teaching a specific person. Because people are all different.

The digitalization of the educational process has one meaning – to move to providing a service that has a predictable result. And the client must clearly understand how much time and money it will take him to achieve this result.

Young children in elementary school love to learn and usually do well. Doubles and triples are an exception. But in high school, stratification begins almost immediately. And it’s not at all because the complexity of the items changes a lot. No. It’s just that what they are taught in the beginning is very practical and applicable knowledge. Any child understands perfectly well why he needs to read, why he needs to count, why he needs to write, why he needs natural history. And then there are quadratic equations. The vast majority of adults will not answer the question why they are needed, and the child is even more so. And the brain starts discounting: “This is meaningless knowledge that is being shoved into me.”

If we look at what pedagogical universities teach, we will see that in five years, future teachers are taught motivation for zero seconds. Zero! Our system does not imply that the student has free will. You have to study, otherwise the strap will come to visit the priest. This Prussian system, which we carefully groomed for 200 years, has become obsolete.

It all depends on motivation. If a person understands why he is studying, there are no problems. Twenty years ago I was asked: “Will it be difficult to teach pensioners how to use a computer on the Internet?” I answered: “As soon as it becomes possible to see a grandson or granddaughter from a distance, it will take only a couple of minutes to learn.” And so it happened. Anyone who has tried to teach their adult parents how to use Skype knows this: “Computer? No, no, I’m too old.” You say: “Do you want to talk to your granddaughter every day?” – “Well, show me where to press? Are these three buttons? Great, that’s it, I get it.”

Education is obliged to determine the real purpose of each person and digitize it. And then build a trajectory that will lead him to this goal. Not necessarily fast, easy, cheap and fun, but it will. And you need to work with motivation all the way to this goal.

Our brain controls us with hormones. When we see some interesting task, we get a dopamine prick: “What is there?” The conditional Netflix twists each of its episodes so that the amount of dopamine that you get from it is maximum. And the next series, and the next series… The people sit down on this needle, sit and consume.

The task of education is to learn to do exactly the same thing. So that your brain really chooses directly: the next series or lesson? And when he chooses a lesson, we win. Because we have become balanced: passive pleasure, in which you do not have to do anything, and active pleasure, in which you have to invest. Either we will come to this, or we will die as an industry.