Look at how the UN is set up: the World Health Organization for health, the World Food Programme for hunger, UNHCR for refugees and the International Labour Organization for work. None of them is organized by profession. Getting food to people in a crisis takes logistics, nutrition, engineering and economics, so the World Food Programme brings all of those people together around the one problem.
Education works the other way around. We sort learning by subject: majors, departments, degrees, and eventually job titles. Most of us pick a subject first and work out what it's for later.
You can hear it in the questions students ask: "What major should I do?" rather than "What problem do I want to solve?", or "Will this be on the test?" rather than "Will this make a difference?" A lot of that comes from the advice we give them. If a 16 year old is determined to get plastic out of the ocean, we tell them to focus on their grades and wait for a marine biology degree, when they could be prototyping a solution today.
How learning got separated from problems
This wasn't always the case. For most of human history, learning and survival were the same thing. If someone in the tribe ate a berry and got sick, everyone learned to stay away from it and made sure their families knew too. What you learned kept you alive, and I think of that as learning for survival.
Then the industrial age put a job between what we learned and why it mattered, and with it came a manager, a ladder and a title to collect. Getting ahead started to depend more on where you sat in a company than on the value you added, so we learned to collect credentials instead. I think of that era as learning for status, and it's still where most of us are today. It worked while a degree reliably led to a job and then a career, but technology now moves faster than any curriculum can be rewritten, and the problems don't wait for the credential to arrive. Climate change isn't pausing while the next generation finishes an undergrad degree.
Climate change is one problem that no single subject can solve, and an aging population is another. Solving it needs architects to redesign cities, engineers to build assistive technology, psychologists who understand isolation and economists who can rethink retirement. Today those people sit in different faculties and companies, and they rarely meet until they're well into their careers - if they meet at all.
The UN figured out long ago that a problem like that needs one team built around it, and education still hasn't caught up.
The UN builds its agencies around problems like hunger, health and work, but when leaders talked about skills last week, they mostly talked about them on their own. Singapore called for investment in infrastructure and skills, Jamaica for infrastructure, skills and capacity, and Zambia for education, skills, technology, entrepreneurship and decent jobs. They're right that skills matter, but a skill is most useful once you know which problem it's for, and that's how the UN already organizes everything else.
What changes if we start with the problem
What would it look like to organize learning around problems?
Imagine a Department of Access to Healthcare instead of a School of Medicine, where doctors, nurses, engineers and economists all work on getting care to people who can't reach it. A student in that world wouldn't say "I want to be a doctor", they'd say "I want to save lives", and then learn whatever that takes.
Starting with the problem doesn't make skills any less important. It changes the order you learn them in, and that's what I'd call learning for solutions. It's the reason we built NextWork. Our mission is to meet the skill demand to solve the world's toughest problems, and every project on NextWork starts with something real that anyone with a laptop can build.
That 16 year old determined to get plastic out of the ocean doesn’t have to wait for the degree to start working on it. They could begin this afternoon.
All my best,
