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If you have been around long enough, you would have noticed how sports have evolved from a time-passing activity to multi-billion dollar industry. Back in the day, people played soccer for the sake of staying fit and as a means to pass time. People with extra-ordinary skills kept the ball for as long as they could to showcase their skills or try to dribble from goalpost to goalpost.

Fans, valued the best player more than the team. This was the old good days, then all of a sudden something happened; a lot of money was being pumped into sports (soccer in particular).

Over a period of time, individuals and groups that heavily invested in the trade, needed to see the return on their investment. They went to every corner of planet looking for the best players they could find, once found they were brought together to play not as individuals but as a team. All of a sudden their ratings as players were no longer determined by how long an individual keep the ball or how many people they could dribble around, but by how well they played as a team and whether or not the team they played for was capable of winning. Personal egos came second to investors’ interests; and needless to say that now soccer has become the most popular and well run sport on the planet if not the biggest.

Where is the lesson in this for public education?

To this date, many countries are struggling to get public education systems to produce exceptional results, like early days of sports, you find well performing schools here and there; as one of my former teachers once told me, for every school that achieve exceptional results, there are at least three in the same system that are doing worse. The flaw is not necessarily in the lack of qualified professionals or less-capable students, but in the fundamentals of the system. For schools that receive funding from the same source, which is usually the government, you would expect that they would teach and behave like players on the same team, what we see instead is players on the same team playing against one another.

From this observation, I would be tempted to think that perhaps investors in such an undertaking do not care much about return on investment; thus the priority is not on providing quality education and producing high quality human resources. They are merely focused on providing access to education. It does not take a rocket scientist to figure out that access to education and the quality of such education need to be inseparable if we are to create a well functioning and educated society.

That being said, such investors have to start planning and prioritizing the functions of such a system; and put in place measures of tracking where their money is going and whether such a cause is worth the money being pumped into it. Once that is in place, they need to make sure that people entrusted with each task can and are able to own their functions (so investors are able to hold them accountable for lack of desirable outcome). Encourage the spirit of sharing knowledge and skills as a means to winning instead of guarding positions and knowledge as a means to make them indispensable.

Filed under: Education