Earning by Learning

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.” – Mark Twain

For a nation to spend money on educating its population is an investment in future prosperity.

The current system for schooling, known as the ‘Prussian Model’, is roughly the same throughout most of the world. The governments of all currently-prosperous countries applied the system during their industrial revolutions. It expanded to the general education of most people. This created productive workforces for knowledge-based work and tremendous prosperity.

However, the system for schooling has changed little over the past 150 years. The needs of the workforces of prosperous nations today have changed significantly since the industrial revolution. The rate of creation of new job types and loss of traditional ones is accelerating. If so, people in the modern world need to learn new skills faster than ever before. Fortunately, new technologies exist that can help. Unfortunately, the conventional schooling system is less effective for meeting this demand than an alternative system could be. This essay supposes one.

Note: this is not a proposal for changing any nation’s school system. It merely describes a concept, developed from first principles, of an alternative education system.

In the context of the modern world, the conventional schooling system has several problems.

It is only for children and young adults. Many people do not learn new subjects in adulthood, leaving many older adults without skills that are valuable for applying new technologies in a changing world.

Schooling happens at specialized buildings. It only happens during the first part of the waking day, Monday through Friday, but not during the summer, regardless of families’ calendars or schedules. It mostly happens at desks in classrooms. There are few lessons that teach manual or physical skills.

The fixed pace of lessons is slower than some students can learn. This leaves them with less education at the end of each school year and cumulatively throughout their schooling than they could have obtained with faster-paced lessons.

Worse, the fixed pace of lessons is too fast for other students. As soon as they fall behind, they are unable to learn each later lesson that builds on prior ones. This leaves them with far less education than they could have obtained at a slower pace.

Some teachings, such as sine and cosine, have no practical use outside of school for most students. Other teachings, such as expository writing, are useful, but how so is not made clear to students.

Assessment tests require answers to specific questions where the answers are either correct or incorrect. They do not test the ability to create something complex where success is measured by degrees.

Lessons come from standard books without specialization to students’ different interests and learning styles. Students with different interests and potentially incompatible behaviors are grouped. Students have no choice over who teaches them, and not all teachers are the best at giving lessons and assessing students.

Courses and lessons cover recommended content. Schools are fairly inflexible to people’s varying ideas about what they would like to learn and what is appropriate and important to learn.

Many students who graduate from colleges and universities begin their careers and early adulthood saddled with student loan debt that is a drag on their ability to buy a home or provide for young children.

Following is a concept for an alternative education system that improves on all of these problems. In brief: Pay people to learn rather than to teach.

Because a nation will be wealthier when its people are educated, it is in the interest of the nation to spend money paying people to learn useful things.

The conventional schooling system pays people to teach. It does not provide an incentive to learn beyond kudos for good grades. Teaching is a means to the desired ends of an educated population. With a financial motivation to learn, people would tend to find the most effective ways to do so, whatever those are.

Following is a concept for how a government can conduct a system of paying people to learn. Under this supposed alternative education system, the cumulative amount spent on education might be less or more than what governments spend on the conventional schooling system. If needed, government borrowing to fund education is worthwhile if the expected future marginal tax revenue from a better-educated population would cover the cost of issued bonds.

Anybody, at any age, may study anything they want using whatever learning method and mode they choose. Learning is voluntary and optional, not compulsory.

People could study at any place and time of day and time of year that is convenient for them and the people around them.

Anybody may create lessons with any content and any mode of delivery and offer it for a fee or for free.

For example, some great educators might offer lessons as pre-recorded videos. Some might create full online courses. Some lessons can be given by artificial intelligence (AI) tools. Some lessons can be personalized by professional educators or by AI to be more effectively delivered to learners.

Some educators may offer in-person tutoring to individuals or group classes. They could spend time only with learners who can benefit most from their in-person lessons and teach just the lessons in which the tutor specializes.

Learners can rate and review educators or their lessons, which helps future learners identify the best ones. Readers of reviews can rate them to improve the usefulness of reviews and reduce noise and manipulation.

Guardians could assist children in studying as much as they wish and their lifestyle allows.

For example, adults who are unemployed or underemployed can take lessons when they are between jobs or during hours outside of work to prepare for better paying jobs. Parents with weekday jobs can help their children learn in the mornings, evenings, and weekends.

There need be no particular sequence of lessons. Anybody can choose any skill or subject that they want to learn. They can study skills to prepare them for any career they wish such as careers in computer engineering, finance, basic science, or creative arts.

There is no final exam, no annually incrementing grade levels, no graduation, and no diplomas. Learners can stop taking courses and divert their time to paying work whenever they feel ready and can find the work.

As science, arts, history, and all other realms of human knowledge and skills develop in the future, educators can update their lessons and create new ones.

Guardians can choose topics that are consistent with their values for their children to learn and their priorities for their children’s futures.

To earn a payment, a learner must demonstrate that they possess a particular skill by passing an exam.

Anybody of any age can take any exam at any time. The exam is not associated with any particular course or lesson. There are no prerequisites to take the exam. Learners can learn what they need to know to pass the exam any way that works for them.

Payments for passing exams go to adults who pass exams or the legal guardians of children who pass exams. There would be an exam rate limitation for minors to avoid exploitation.

Pay would be high enough that adults with only the skills to work a very low wage job could earn more by learning new skills than by working such a job.

Guardians could earn more by assisting their young children’s learning than by working at low wage jobs. Less educated guardians might choose to study certain skills together with one or more children, enabling them to earn even more while reinforcing each other’s learning.

Families with guardians who can earn more by working than by passing exams would choose to hire educators for their children or send them to schools during times that guardians work.

People would pursue any profession or none at all and change their decision at any time. This is helpful for people whose interests or circumstances change throughout their life.

Importantly, the payments are higher for passing exams in broadly applicable subject matter such as elementary reading, writing, and arithmetic because they apply across most occupations and enable much downstream learning. The pay to learners decreases for passing exams of more advanced and specialized skills. Such learners are better prepared for high-paying occupations. The diminishing pay for advanced learning motivates people to transition from learning to paying work.

A government might choose to pay especially highly for exams covering topics with indirect public benefits. For example, skills that enable healthy living such as nutrition and civic skills that enable an effective democracy such as government, history, economics, and critical thinking.

In an extreme scenario, a family could leave their child completely uneducated. If, as an adult, the uneducated person needs to support themself, they can take the same lessons that many learners take as children and support themselves with exam payments along their educational journey until they are able to switch to paying work using the skills that they have learned.

In a more common scenario, workers whose job opportunities are lost as a result of a changing world can acquire new job skills without the costs in time and money to obtain a college degree. This would be useful in real-world scenarios such as these:

• Losses of jobs in coal mining as the world stops using coal

• Outsourcing where there is no comparative advantage in manufacturing

• Displacement by new technologies such as LLM chatbots or robots

Any person may be paid only once for each skill demonstrated by passing an exam.

The government would not create the exams. Especially in fields with rapidly changing technologies, private sector innovators and technical specialists such as scientists and engineers are better able to create assessment of skills in applying the new technologies. There would be an open opportunity for anybody to develop new exams for any skill at any time.

The government would periodically adjust payment amounts for exams based on past outcomes and with forecasts for new exams. Adjustments would consider both the value of the examined skills to:

• A productive economy

• An effective democracy

• A vibrant society

Within democracies, priorities among these would be a major campaign consideration and thereby responsive to the consensus will of the people.

The best technologies for delivering exams are beyond the scope of this essay, but would require hard-to-cheat technologies that might involve:

• biometric identification

• surveillance

• proctored testing centers

• cross-validation

Exams would be designed to frustrate mere cramming and “teaching to the exam” without learning practically applicable skills. This might involve:

• time-spaced exams

• realistic simulation

• scenario randomization

By allowing people to choose their own paths of study, rather than a prescribed sequence of specific courses, the workforce would have a greater diversity of skill sets, which would enable building more efficient task-oriented teams of people with complementary skill sets.

Greater diversity of skill sets would also create people and teams with more creativity and innovation.

Due to the economic incentives of payments for learning, the labor market would evolve in a self-balancing way. In response to abrupt changes in technology and economic demands, the national workforce would realign its skills in weeks rather than the years it takes to update school curricula

With learning as a lifelong and personalized endeavor, rather than an obligation for groups of youths, professional teachers would have more enjoyable work opportunities. They would tend to teach small and highly interested groups. Professional teachers would specialize and deepen their own knowledge in areas of their own interest.

Many learners would choose to pay to attend schools with professional teachers. Many guardians would send their children to schools. These would be a lot like schools in the conventional schooling system. Some people would pay tuition to go to colleges and universities. Universities would still host laboratories and receive government research grants.

Because learners would be paid as they progress, they would not need to take out loans for their education. The burden of student loan debt, common in the conventional schooling system, would not exist.

Because payments are greater for elementary skills learned as children, new families, who have the least savings, would earn the most. This would provide better income equality.

Because payments per skill are the same for all learners, they constitute a proportionally larger boost to a poorer family’s wealth. This would progress towards better wealth equality.

The ability for rich and poor alike to learn up until the point their growing wage-earning potential surpasses their diminishing opportunity for per-skill payments is a further equalizer.

The more people who choose to spend their time learning, the higher wages employers would have to pay to those who still work the lowest paying jobs, especially in the service sector. This would put continuous upward pressure on the lowest wages.

New AI technologies and electronic devices of ever-decreasing prices have reduced the cost of effective educational materials. This can be an equalizer of educational opportunity between economically advantaged and disadvantaged groups. The rigidity of the conventional schooling system has long hampered use of the most effective new technologies.

A workforce that is more appropriately skilled for the modern economy, and therefore more productive, would produce more surplus wealth and resultant tax revenues for the government. This could be used to care well for those with the greatest needs. This can include providing or subsidizing work opportunities for people with learning disabilities or providing social welfare income.

The alternative system supposed here separates learning from its traditional institutional forms and places agency in the hands of learners. It recognizes that people learn at different paces, in different ways, and throughout their lives. By rewarding the acquisition of demonstrable skills rather than compliance with prescribed pathways, the system affirms learning as a lifelong, voluntary, and self-directed endeavor

The system aligns the investment of public resources with its hoped-for returns. Through incentives for continuous learning and rapid adaptation, the resulting better educated population would create a more prosperous nation and world.