The Classroom is Wrong

Many think the problem with education is bad teachers. Or perhaps unmotivated students. Or maybe an obsolete curriculum or lack of funding. But what if the real problem was the classroom itself?

For over a century, we've known how people learn best. It's not by sitting passively and listening to a lecture. The human brain isn't designed for that. We learn by doing, making mistakes, receiving feedback, and teaching others. This isn't a modern theory; it's backed by decades of research in cognitive psychology.

Imagine you're that teacher. You walk into a room with 30 pairs of eyes looking at you expectantly. What's your instinct? To start talking, give a lecture. The room is designed for it. Fighting against that instinct is like swimming against the current. A few exceptional teachers manage it, but it's exhausting, and most will eventually let themselves be carried by the current.

However, walk into almost any classroom in the world, and what do you see? Rows of desks with a teacher at the front. It's a configuration that practically begs the teacher to lecture. Even if you put the best teacher in the world in that room, the environment itself pushes them toward poor pedagogy.

We've been trying to solve this problem by training teachers to swim better. We give them workshops on active learning techniques, preach about the importance of group work and peer feedback. But it's not working. Most teachers still lecture most of the time.

Why? Because we're solving the wrong problem. We're trying to change the swimmers when we should be changing the river.

Some innovative institutions are already pioneering this approach. For example, Minerva University. All their classes are online, and they built a learning management system that literally puts a muzzle on the teacher. The system only allows the teacher to speak for a fraction of class time, forcing more active student participation. And it's working. Minerva is now more selective than Harvard. For the class of 2026, Minerva had an acceptance rate of 0.99%, compared to Harvard's 3%. Effective teaching is one of the things they're doing right.

In Photoshop you can do anything, even more than in Canva. But unless you're an expert, you end up using four or five tools from the main menu. Canva democratized good design. We need the Canva of education - a system that makes great teaching accessible to everyone, not just experts.

This is somewhat like what Canva did with graphic design. For years, we thought the solution for better design was to train more people to use complex tools like Photoshop. Canva took a different approach. They eliminated most of the option-filled menus to create a product that allows anyone to create beautiful designs. As a result, Canva is now more widely used than Photoshop. In fact, Canva has 150 million users worldwide, five times more than Photoshop, despite being launched 23 years later.