Last week I was staying in a hotel for work. The kind of hotel where everything feels right. Clean design, nice materials, everything neatly integrated. Until I took a shower. I wanted to turn the tap. Or rather, I tried to turn it on. Because there was no tap anymore. You can still adjust the temperature with a dial, but beyond that, it’s just a button. On or off.

At first glance, it feels like progress. Minimalist. Intuitive. “Less is more.” Until you realise something is missing. You can’t fine-tune anymore. Not a bit stronger, not a bit softer. Just: everything or nothing.

A small irritation, but an interesting one. Because it quickly reminded me of something similar. Car door handles. Or rather: the disappearance of them. Tesla, and now others, have integrated them flush into the body of the car. It looks sleek. Futuristic. Innovative.

Until you read what happens in accidents. People who can’t get the door open. Emergency services are losing valuable time because something that used to be obvious suddenly requires explanation.

Again, it looks like an improvement. But in practice, something essential is lost. Something that evolved over the years because it worked. Because it was, in a sense, finished.

The first time I heard the idea of something being “fully developed” was in a recording studio. Digital was still evolving, but the technician pointed to an old tape machine and said, almost proudly: “This is done.” There’s nothing left to improve here.

And yet, we seem to struggle with that idea. So I find myself wondering: do we do this in education as well? I think we do.

Maybe not as visibly as a door handle, but just as fundamentally.

Take direct instruction. Refined over the years. Not as a rigid script, but as a system in which a teacher constantly adjusts. You explain something, you check understanding, you slow down, you speed up, you revisit, you differentiate. It’s not an on-off button. It’s a mixing tap.

And yet we keep seeing attempts to replace it with something that feels smoother. Less explanation, more discovery. Less structure, more autonomy. It sounds appealing. Just like that shower button.

Until you notice what disappears. Control. Sensitivity. The ability to do just a bit more or a bit less at exactly the right moment.

Or take curricula. The call for flexibility, personalisation, and constant change. All understandable. But a strong curriculum is precisely something that provides stability. That allows knowledge to build, that enables teachers to build on each other’s work, that doesn’t leave students dependent on arbitrary choices.

Flexibility sounds like progress. But it can just as easily mean dismantling something that worked precisely because it was shared and coherent.

And then there is data. Apps, dashboards, real-time tracking. As a parent, you can now see almost everything. As a school, you can measure almost anything. It feels like control, involvement, and improvement. But here too, something disappears. Calm. Professional space. Interpretation. Not everything that becomes visible becomes better.

What all these examples have in common is actually quite simple: we confuse new with better.

We see something that looks sleek and modern and assume it must be a step forward. While sometimes it is simply a step sideways. Or even backwards. Because we remove functions we no longer notice, precisely because they worked so well.

Good solutions rarely look spectacular. They are the result of years of trying, adjusting, and refining. They feel obvious. Until you replace them.

And sometimes, like with that tape machine, a genuinely new technology does emerge. That happens. But just like vinyl, the old can still remain appealing, precisely because it is fully developed.

Maybe that is the harder question, in education and beyond.

Not: what can we improve? But: what is already good enough? Or even better than what we are now inventing?

Some things are not outdated.

They are simply… done.

P.S.: If this sounds like I’m against innovation, I’m not. I wrote more about that here.

Images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tesla_Model_S._cool_paint_job!_IMG_1506_%28cropped%29.jpg ,  https://www.hansgrohe.be/nl/badkamer/producten/lijnen/showerselect and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studer