Education and Healthcare Suck for the Same Reasons: And Here’s How We Can Change That
1st December 2024
The clock strikes 6 AM in a hospital room. An attendant barges in, disrupting precious sleep to swap out an untouched water jug. Soon after, a parade of nurses follows, each focused on collecting their designated measurements. Blood pressure. Temperature. Oxygen levels. In this flurry of activity, something crucial gets lost – the actual patient.
Miles away, in a classroom, a similar scene unfolds. A teacher moves mechanically through standardized material, focused on test scores and grade averages. Thirty unique minds sit before her, but what exists in the system’s eyes are just data points to be measured and tracked. The student, like our patient, has vanished.
These aren’t isolated problems. They’re symptoms of the same disease: our obsession with measurable outcomes has eclipsed the humans at the center of these systems.
Health care and education are the last two major fields of human service that haven’t been significantly automated, and thus require a lot of ‘personal service’. In any economic activity, the major cost factor is people — the more people involved, the higher the costs (which is why automation is increasingly the go-to method for improving the bottom line). In education, people (mostly taxpayers) aren’t willing to pony up for the high cost of getting really excellent teachers, and so our schools suck. In health care, people aren’t willing to sacrifice quality, so costs shoot through the roof.