Education: what are we learning to become capable of?

Imagine a carpenter who makes tables. Now put four possible offers on the workbench: a custom table, a repeatable flat-pack design, downloadable building plans, and a class teaching someone else how to build it.

Same starting skill. Four different products. Different customers, costs, quality standards, and ways of delivering value.

This is a thought experiment, not a success story. The plans might be confusing. The flat-pack version might cost too much to ship. The class might solve a problem nobody is willing to pay to solve. Finding that out is part of the education.

But first, someone has to know those possibilities exist.

What are we learning to become capable of—and which possibilities never even enter the conversation?

Observation: you cannot explore a possibility you have never encountered

For Guatemala, one question worth taking seriously is how people encounter new ways of making a living, solving problems, and participating in the world.

Ask a group what they could make with a skill they already have. Do they see only the familiar job? Can they imagine a service, a physical product, a digital tool, teaching material, a repair, a design someone could license?

That is something we can observe. We do not need to declare an entire population uncreative. We can ask people to describe their options, show them unfamiliar examples, and see whether their options expand.

E-commerce makes this gap visible. Before someone needs a storefront, they need to understand what they could offer, who might want it, and what would make it good. Teaching someone to upload a product photo skips most of the interesting work.

The same applies outside commerce. A student can learn fractions by making instructions another person can follow. A neighborhood group can learn to investigate by mapping a recurring problem and testing a response. Knowledge becomes more useful when people can apply it somewhere they have not been shown the answer.

Analysis: exposure, judgment, and practice belong together

Exposure expands the menu. Judgment helps us choose. Practice reveals what we misunderstood.

Consider those downloadable furniture plans. A beautiful PDF is not enough. Can someone else build from it? Are the measurements correct? Are the materials available? Are the instructions safe and understandable? Does the finished object do its job?

80% useful, 20% beautiful. A working priority, not a laboratory ratio. Make the thing useful and dependable; use presentation to help people understand and enjoy it. Legibility and good design are part of usefulness. A gorgeous cover cannot rescue missing dimensions.

That kind of judgment develops through contact with reality: another person tries the instructions, gets stuck, and shows us where our explanation failed.

School can create more of those encounters. So can apprenticeships, libraries, workshops, workplaces, and adult learning. This question belongs to everyone who has settled into “this is what I do” and stopped exploring what else their abilities could become.

Foundational knowledge matters here. Reading helps you understand the instructions. Mathematics helps you calculate materials. Science helps you understand why something breaks. History and the arts expand what you notice and what you can imagine. A project gives that knowledge somewhere to work—and exposes what still needs learning.

If the only evidence we collect is whether someone reproduced an answer, we leave a larger question unanswered: can they use, question, explain, and improve it?

Proposal: build learning around things people can try and improve

Start with one group, one real need, and enough time for more than one attempt.

1. Expand the possibilities. Show several ways a capability can become something useful. Identify who benefits and what each version requires.
2. Choose a problem. Talk to the people experiencing it. Observe how they handle it today.
3. Make a small first version. A product, repair, guide, service, experiment, or explanation. Something another person can actually try.
4. Watch it being used. Where do people hesitate? What breaks? What can they do without help?
5. Measure and revise. Record the result, make a change, and test again. Explain why the change should help.

For a learning experiment, measure learning: can participants explain their decisions, apply the idea to a new problem, and work with less assistance? For a product experiment, also measure usefulness, costs, and whether anyone actually wants it. Sales alone are not an educational assessment.

Give teachers time and support to run this well. Let learners demonstrate understanding in different ways. Publish adaptable materials and the failures alongside the successful versions, so the next group has something to build on.

The broader ambition is to reconsider curricula, credentials, and adult learning around demonstrated capability. A small experiment gives us evidence for that larger redesign; it should not become an excuse to avoid it.

Learn, experiment, measure, and keep experimenting. Sin fin. Individual projects can finish, fail, or be abandoned. The habit continues.

For the first exercise, take one skill you already have. Describe three things you could make with it. Choose one person who might benefit, build the smallest useful version, and watch what happens when they try it.

Then ask the question education should keep making possible: what can I do now—and what could I learn to do next?