From Thinking in Systems — A Primer by Donella H. Meadows on the folly of over-specialization.

Once upon a time people raised sail boats not for millions of dollars or for national glory, but just for the fun of it. They raced the boats they already had for normal purposes. Boats that were designed for fishing, or transporting goods, or sailing around on weekends. It was quickly observed that races are more interesting if the competitors are roughly equal in speed and manoeuvrability.

So rules evolved, which defined various classes of boats by length and sail area and other parameters, and which restricted races to competitors of the same class. Soon, boats were being designed not for normal sailing, but for winning races within the categories defined by the rules. They squeeze the last possible burst of speed out of a square inch of sail, or the lightest possible load out of a standard sized rotor. These boats were strange looking and strange handling; not at all the sort of boat you’d want to take out fishing or for a Sunday sail.

As the races became more serious, the rules became stricter, and the boat designs more bizarre. Now racing sail boats are extremely fast, highly responsive and nearly un-sea-worthy. They need athletic and expert crews to manage them. No one would think of using an America’s Cup yacht for any purpose other than racing within the rules. The boats are so optimized around the present rules that they had lost all resilience. Any change to the rules would render them useless.

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Commentary by Majed

Systems tend to produce the strict outcomes they were designed (wether intentionally or not) to perform. It’s worth looking at the outcomes of educational institutions; the type of people they produce, to understand more about the core task the institution is designed for.

Take a university, for example, that produces hoards of engineers to maintain human capital flow into a hierarchical “big” corporation. The core task of the university, is to do just that. It is not, to the dismay of many, to produce entrepreneurs or critical thinkers to challenge the status quo. If the latter is produced — by chance or individual effort  that is— , it cannot be attributed to the institution, but rather it is a failure on the institution’s part in performing the task at hand.

This begs the question: if universities were systematically designed — that is, all assets and resources were allocated towards the fulfillment of the task - to produce the next generation of forward thinkers, in what ways would these institutions be different than the current ones?