Houses are as conservative as education

I worked in education hoping to generate improvements starting in the early 1960s and going through the mid-1970s. I saw many excellent and successful programs, but I never saw one that spread widely among schools systems.

Education seems impervious to change.

I recently observed the same resistance to change in residential housing.

Back in the late 1970s I worked on and wrote about the first envelop house that was built by Tom Smith at Lake Tahoe. The house had an envelope of air that circulated around inside it from the basement through the roof rafters. It was entirely self-sufficient in heating and cooling.

Tom went on to build nearly a hundred similar houses in Westchester County New York. To this day, that energy efficient style is still a rarity written up in architectural and environmental magazines as a new innovation.

Residential housing and education are both equally impervious to change.

Care to suggest why?