Educational limitations

Educational limitations

It's inevitable that I often speak to people working in education, not just because of my profession but also because there are so many people working in education. What strikes me in these talks is that for every optimist (usually young, usually technophile), there are five who bemoan the effects of progress and change.
One could say that education is inherently conservative. It transmits the past and so relies on established approaches and accepted knowledge. But claiming that the past -any past- was better or easier does nothing to help one understand what is happening now, let alone find promising solutions fit for a dynamic world.
Quite a few complaints are recognizable: skills that disappear and knowledge that is lost, while they matter for learning. It's not always clear whether they matter for learning or for specific forms of learning but, in any case, it is evident that there is a mismatch between what people should learn and how they could learn it.
My biggest worry in this respect comes from an ecological perspective: our species -any species- has developed so as to perceive and utilize information from the particular environment we happen to be (https://www.routledge.com/The-Ecological-Approach-to-Visual-Perception-Classic-Edition-1st-Edition/Gibson/p/book/9781848725782). We have become quite good at that but we are also quite good at adapting and augmenting our environments with technologies that range from motor vehicles to writing.
Some suggest that we are reaching the boundaries of our capacities in perceiving and processing information. While I'm reluctant to subscribe to simplistic notions of information overload, it is quite evident that e.g. motorized traffic may be too tough on our attention and working memory capacities (http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/).
The same may apply to education. It may be hampered too many subjects vying for attention in short times and disconnection from experience and utility. Educational approaches that used to work a few decades ago might be outdated, although from personal experience I would argue that they were already outdated.
In conclusion, we may be asking the wrong questions with respect to education today. We may have to reconsider our means and ends, or even accept that education cannot achieve or cover all that it is supposed to do, certainly not in the short periods of formal education.