Some
half-formed thoughts about how the education system might be radically
reformed, and in the process solve a host of political, economic and
social problems bedeviling our world, from a guy whose experience in
education, both as a teacher and as a student, was, at best, sobering and
frustrating.
Emma, Doug, and I
have been blogging lately about how education systems worldwide
discriminate, demotivate, subjugate and demoralize most young people,
teaching them not to think, but just to consume, and to allow the
established, moneyed and powerful elites to pass on their business and
political empires to their usually unmeriting children. And then,
broken by that system, most young people willingly and gratefully work
and grow old at boring, unfulfilling jobs, in constant fear of
unemployment, and blame themselves for not doing better in our lands of
supposedly unlimited opportunity.
A reading of the research cited in our earlier posts leaves little
doubt that this subjugation and wage slavery were the intended purposes
of public education systems when they were first formed.
What is hard to fathom is that, given the effort and desire of most
public school teachers to give young people the best education
possible, the system seems to perpetuate itself generation after
generation, and the gap between the elite and the rest of society grows
massively wider every year.
Why is this? I think teachers are caught in the system's net
themselves, and would probably be the first to admit that the rules
under which they must work largely undermine their ability to actually
teach anything.
What would happen if we reformed the education system so that it didn't
perpetuate the cycle of economic fear, political apathy, social guilt,
and self-loathing?
Let's consider what such a system might look like, starting with
objectives. I would suggest it should strive to do just two things: (a)
Provide the skills, and ability to apply them, needed to make a
comfortable, enjoyable, fulfilling living (as owner of or partner in an
enterprise, not as an
employee); (b) Provide the skills, and ability to apply them, needed to
be an informed, contributing member of society (in other words, to be a
good citizen and get along with others).
To do this it would need to teach young people some basic life skills, something like the list of eleven I published here back in March:
| Creative Skills: |
Ideation: Coming up with new ideas
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Representation/Spacial Skills: Capturing, applying and
executing these ideas
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| Language Skills: |
Written Communication
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Oral Communication
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Non-Verbal Communication
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| Knowledge Processing Skills: |
Synthesis: Distilling and summarizing information
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Analysis: Breaking down information
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Interpretation: Determining what information means; adding
insight
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| Interpersonal Skills: |
Sensing: Listening and appreciation
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Connecting: Engaging, sympathizing, organizing and relating
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Persuading
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Applying these skills to the tasks of making a living and being a good
citizen is best taught by people who are actually doing it, where they
are doing it, not by teachers and not
in classrooms. If some young lady visits a team doing land surveying
and decides she might want to make a living doing that, she should be
equipped, and encouraged, to identify the resources needed to pursue
that calling and apply herself to acquiring the knowledge and talent
needed to do that. If surveyors have a professional qualifying
examination, that, and not some standard pre-set grade-school examination program, should be her self-set gauge of accomplishment.
So I'm proposing a system that has no schools, no 'teachers' in the
traditional sense, and no examinations. Is this naive, and an
invitation to anarchy? This was in fact the way education worked before
formal, standard education systems were introduced. Then, however, you
had limited choice: your father taught you his skill, and you either
succeeded at it or went off to learn another trade from someone else
who needed apprentices. Once you had 'mastered' the trade you were your
own boss.
The system I propose would take advantage of new communication and
information technology and our greater interconnectedness, to allow
each young person to pick from thousands, millions of possible
callings, and link up with others with complementary skills to create
what I have called New Collaborative Enterprises, businesses of equals. The basic rules
of entrepreneurship are easy to learn, and all it takes to succeed at
it is lots of practice, and the younger you start the better.
Perhaps it sounds as if I'm reducing education to finding a job, but I'm not. Making a living
is not the same at all as finding a job. Discovering and pursuing the
role you want to fulfil in society, what you want to spend most of your
life doing, is probably the most important decision any of us makes. To
some extent how we make our living defines who we are.
And the second objective, becoming an informed, contributing citizen,
requires us to learn most of the things that a traditional, elite,
'liberal education' requires: a knowledge of history and geography, an
awareness of what's happening in the world and what it means. The best
way to imbue this, and to measure it, is for the 'teacher' to engage
students in discussion about specific pre-determined issues, enable the
students to do their advance research using the above life skills, the
internet, and other tools at their disposal, any way they want to do
so, and then gauge each student's progress by the quality of their
participation in the discussion. No 'bums on chairs' one-to-n teaching/preaching, but instead engaging in conversations. As grad students know, that's how you really learn.
The 'teacher's' role in all of this is facilitation,
not instruction. That means setting up opportunities for students to
meet and see and talk with people who make their living in different
ways. It means ensuring they have access to the learning resources they
need, and steering them in the right direction to learn how to use
them. It means arranging and coordinating the discussions. It would
require that all of us making a living now set aside a significant
amount of time to show, and talk with students about, what we do and
how and why we do it. It might well require a lot more 'teachers' than
we have today, though it would save billions by eliminating curriculum
development, textbooks, school buildings, and the administrivia that
accounts for much more than half of the current education budget.
The implications of doing this would be staggering. There would be no
employees, no labour pool for large corporations to dip into. I don't
think most corporations would mind this at all. They have already
basically transformed most jobs into contracts and eliminated most
employee benefits. The idea of converting every employee position into
a supplier position is quite well understood by senior management and
might even be welcomed.
In the longer term, the liberation of being one's own boss and having
free choice about how one makes a living would work strongly against
large, hierarchichal corporations. If we were all entrepreneurs with a
choice of customers, few would put up with the control and bullshit
that large employers today impose on employees, and the new 'contract'
between large corporations and entrepreneurs would inevitably be much
more egalitarian and much more expensive than today's employment
contracts. The consequence, I believe, would be that large
organizations would break up into small, autonomous units that would be
almost indistinguishable from entrepreneurial ventures, more responsive
to customers, and free of the overpaid management and administrative
bloat that makes most large corporations arguably (read John Ralston
Saul's The Unconscious Civilization)
even less efficient than similar-sized public organizations. As a
result, corporate power would devolve, and our whole society might
become, at last, classless, a world of equals, fulfilled, empowered,
working and thinking for themselves.
As I said at the outset, these
are half-formed thoughts. I wish blogs had more flexibility as
collaborative tools, but in the meantime, please use the comments
feature to join the dialogue and share your thoughts.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
