Question
How might we build an education system that is centered on creating rather than replicating knowledge?
Answer
This question misframes the issue, and to understand why, you need to understand the history of how the creation/preservation tradeoff has been managed.
The short answer to your question is that to create MORE and BETTER knowledge, paradoxically, we need to TRY to create FAR LESS.
Longer answer.
The Historical Facts
Until the late 19th century, there was no such thing as professionalized research/knowledge creation. There were only institutions like the Royal Society which prided themselves on a gentlemanly amateur culture, and individual and government patronage that went either to support individuals or institutions.
Around the turn of the century, Johns Hopkins received the first recognizably modern "research grant."
Around WW II, the visionary founder of what would become DARPA, Vannevar Bush, came up with a well-intentioned innovation that would revolutionize the mission of universities: indirect cost support.
Research grants had existed for quite a while before this innovation, but they were basically no different from the patronage model: governments or wealthy people simply paid smart people to create knowledge. Or if they had no particular focus, they endowed universities or libraries. People kept support for institutions separate from support for individuals.
Then Indirect Costs were invented, and everything went to hell.
The Effect of Indirect Costs
Quite simply, indirect cost support was an overhead rate tacked on to any grant to help defray use of institutional resources, ranging from libraries to classrooms to office space.
Currently this hovers around 50-55%. So if you get an NSF grant for $100,000, you will actually get $150,000 and the extra money will go to the university.
Why does this minor bureaucratic item matter?
Financially, this is a drop in the bucket. For large universities, their budgets are far bigger than the little pool of money created by indirect cost support.
The reason it matters is that this is entirely discretionary money. Institutions can use it to do whatever the hell the want. It is the primary fuel for growth initiatives. The rest of the budget is already spoken for, by needs ranging from salaries to building maintenance.
Presidents, deans and departments fight over the indirect cost pie.
And they crack the whip on faculty to bring in the money. Hard.
Hiring is influenced by who can bring in money. Money-maker disciplines like engineering and pay-for-themselves disciplines like Law start to overwhelm disciplines like literature, where far less grant money is available.
The Birth of the Research University
They've been fighting and cracking whips so hard for nearly 70 years in fact, that their fighting has transformed universities (originally institutions dedicated to preservation and teaching of knowledge, with creation being more of a hobby) into an entirely new kind of institution: the "Research University."
It is a shift that has massively swung the balance from knowledge preservation (achieved through teaching) to creation (achieved through research).
How does this relate to your question?
You see, this scaling and professionalization of knowledge creation as "research," while it has had many fantastic benefits has also killed the golden goose.
The industrial scale knowledge creation is no longer about discovering the most interesting, humanity-elevating kinds of new knowledge. It's about creating the knowledge that attracts the most funding.
The Age of Intellectual Pygmies
Both the spirit and quality of the great age of amateur knowledge creators has vanished. We live in an age of (frankly) intellectual pygmies. Bureaucratic knowledge creators who pretend that there are no more Newtons and Shakespeares because those lucky guys happened to get in on the knowledge creation scene early and pick off all the juicy low-hanging fruit.
We've corrupted the spirit of no-strings-attached exploration. We've traded quality for quantity. We've traded deep thought for productivity. We've traded works that derive from decades of obsession, such as the Principia, for TED talks.
We've allowed awe of amazing feats of industrial-scale knowledge production (actually, refinement rather than true production) and application, such as landing on the moon, to obscure the fact that we can no longer produce a Newton or Gauss (who between them, provided most of the intellectual firepower needed for getting to the moon).
For the record, though I am no longer formally part of the academy, I am a product of the academy, and as much an intellectual pygmy as the grant-grubbing insiders.
Creating a New Age of Giants
It's too late for you and me. But if we want the giants to return, we have to do one single, simple, and incredibly important thing:
We have to deprofessionalize discovery, and return it to amateur status.
Paradoxically, to get back to "giant-driven" discovery, we have to focus on teaching and preservation.
We have to turn off entirely, or significantly reduce, the cocaine of indirect cost support that flows through the veins of research universities.
Grow thinkers, not buildings.
Let institution builders get back to doing their own damn fund-raising, instead of leeching off thinkers and knowledge creators through what is in effect, predatory taxation that enslaves them.
The short answer to your question is that to create MORE and BETTER knowledge, paradoxically, we need to TRY to create FAR LESS.
Longer answer.
The Historical Facts
Until the late 19th century, there was no such thing as professionalized research/knowledge creation. There were only institutions like the Royal Society which prided themselves on a gentlemanly amateur culture, and individual and government patronage that went either to support individuals or institutions.
Around the turn of the century, Johns Hopkins received the first recognizably modern "research grant."
Around WW II, the visionary founder of what would become DARPA, Vannevar Bush, came up with a well-intentioned innovation that would revolutionize the mission of universities: indirect cost support.
Research grants had existed for quite a while before this innovation, but they were basically no different from the patronage model: governments or wealthy people simply paid smart people to create knowledge. Or if they had no particular focus, they endowed universities or libraries. People kept support for institutions separate from support for individuals.
Then Indirect Costs were invented, and everything went to hell.
The Effect of Indirect Costs
Quite simply, indirect cost support was an overhead rate tacked on to any grant to help defray use of institutional resources, ranging from libraries to classrooms to office space.
Currently this hovers around 50-55%. So if you get an NSF grant for $100,000, you will actually get $150,000 and the extra money will go to the university.
Why does this minor bureaucratic item matter?
Financially, this is a drop in the bucket. For large universities, their budgets are far bigger than the little pool of money created by indirect cost support.
The reason it matters is that this is entirely discretionary money. Institutions can use it to do whatever the hell the want. It is the primary fuel for growth initiatives. The rest of the budget is already spoken for, by needs ranging from salaries to building maintenance.
Presidents, deans and departments fight over the indirect cost pie.
And they crack the whip on faculty to bring in the money. Hard.
Hiring is influenced by who can bring in money. Money-maker disciplines like engineering and pay-for-themselves disciplines like Law start to overwhelm disciplines like literature, where far less grant money is available.
The Birth of the Research University
They've been fighting and cracking whips so hard for nearly 70 years in fact, that their fighting has transformed universities (originally institutions dedicated to preservation and teaching of knowledge, with creation being more of a hobby) into an entirely new kind of institution: the "Research University."
It is a shift that has massively swung the balance from knowledge preservation (achieved through teaching) to creation (achieved through research).
How does this relate to your question?
You see, this scaling and professionalization of knowledge creation as "research," while it has had many fantastic benefits has also killed the golden goose.
The industrial scale knowledge creation is no longer about discovering the most interesting, humanity-elevating kinds of new knowledge. It's about creating the knowledge that attracts the most funding.
The Age of Intellectual Pygmies
Both the spirit and quality of the great age of amateur knowledge creators has vanished. We live in an age of (frankly) intellectual pygmies. Bureaucratic knowledge creators who pretend that there are no more Newtons and Shakespeares because those lucky guys happened to get in on the knowledge creation scene early and pick off all the juicy low-hanging fruit.
We've corrupted the spirit of no-strings-attached exploration. We've traded quality for quantity. We've traded deep thought for productivity. We've traded works that derive from decades of obsession, such as the Principia, for TED talks.
We've allowed awe of amazing feats of industrial-scale knowledge production (actually, refinement rather than true production) and application, such as landing on the moon, to obscure the fact that we can no longer produce a Newton or Gauss (who between them, provided most of the intellectual firepower needed for getting to the moon).
For the record, though I am no longer formally part of the academy, I am a product of the academy, and as much an intellectual pygmy as the grant-grubbing insiders.
Creating a New Age of Giants
It's too late for you and me. But if we want the giants to return, we have to do one single, simple, and incredibly important thing:
We have to deprofessionalize discovery, and return it to amateur status.
Paradoxically, to get back to "giant-driven" discovery, we have to focus on teaching and preservation.
We have to turn off entirely, or significantly reduce, the cocaine of indirect cost support that flows through the veins of research universities.
Grow thinkers, not buildings.
Let institution builders get back to doing their own damn fund-raising, instead of leeching off thinkers and knowledge creators through what is in effect, predatory taxation that enslaves them.