In previous posts, I have recapitulated the thoughts of Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their book “Revolutionary Wealth” about transportation and energy policy. But nowhere is the “wave conflict” — the failure of industrial-wave institutions to keep pace with knowledge-wave institutions — more critical than the arena of education. The situation is dire. As the Tofflers write, “The United States will not maintain its spearhead role in the world wealth revolution, it will not hold onto global power and it will not reduce poverty without replacing — not merely reforming — it’s factory-focused education system.
The mass education system of the industrial revolution represented an advance over the educational system, such as it was, of the agricultural era when only a small percentage of children attended school. Mass education was organized to instil “industrial discipline” on young workers fresh off the farm, teaching them punctuality, frugality, sobriety, orderliness, hard work and inner discipline. Schools mirrored the industrial system as well, studying standardized subjects and marching cohorts of children in lockstep through 12 grades. In the words of Sir Ken Robinson, the keywords are linearity, conformity and standardisation.
Over time, a variety of vested interests grew around the educational establishment. First and foremost are the teacher unions. But public agencies also see compulsory education as a mechanism to keep “millions of high-testosterone teenagers off the streets, improving the public order and reducing crime and the costs of police and prison.” What exists today is “an unbreakable coalition that has preserved the factory-school model — a mass education system that fits neatly into the matrix of mass production, mass media, mass culture, mass sports, mass entertainment and mass politics.”
Needless to say, that system fails to deliver the education required for the knowledge economy, where creativity and innovation are at a premium. The gap is growing between what the schools produce and what the business community needs. The Tofflers quote Bill Gates as follows:
America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t just mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and under-funded. By obsolete, I mean that our high schools — even when they’re working exactly as designed — cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. … This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.
Millions of Americans agree. They are hiring tutors to supplement their childrens’ education. Many more are dropping out of the system entirely, turning to home schooling. The Tofflers don’t proffer a laundry list of of solutions. They simply suggest that a new coalition — of “angry parents, frustrated teachers, skill-hungry innovators, online educators, game designers and kids themselves” — will seek to replace the existing system of assembly-line education with new models, content and institutions.
What are the implications for Virginia? For one, Standards of Learning (SOLs) are a relic of assembly-line education. While they may ensure that students advance through their grades with a minimum command of the facts — a basic prerequisite for functioning in the world — there is no assurance that they are learning to think. The Standards of Quality (SOQs) are another relic of assembly-line education, defining educational “quality” by the inputs into the system of money, teachers and resources. The centralized, top-down bureaucracy is another assembly-line relic. Teachers sit at the bottom of a massive bureaucratic structure that absorbs resources, imposes uniformity and squelches experimentation and innovation.
On a more topical note, extending the K-12 educational model to pre-school, as Gov. Timothy M. Kaine proposes to do, is exactly the wrong thing to do. Kaine’s proposal would root out and destroy one of the last places where the assembly-line model does not prevail.
Private schools may not be the answer either. Private schools do have certain advantages: They are far less bureaucratic than public schools, and they have more freedom to experiment. They do a better job of tailoring the scholastic content of their classes to the abilities of their students. But they, too, are based upon an industrial model of standardized subjects and moving cohorts of students through grades. Further, as I have argued previously on this blog, their costs are out of control as they engage in the “country clubification” of their school grounds in order to attract the most desirable students and prestigious parents.
Frankly, I don’t know what a knowledge-wave educational institution should look like. I don’t purport to be an expert. However, I am willing to wager that the institutions of the future are more likely to arise from the ferment of the home-school movement than they are from the established educational system, public or private. The home school movement is innovating and maturing at an unbelievable rate. Indeed, the term “home” school no longer describes the phenomenon in which education is increasingly moving out of the “home,” in which parents are increasingly reaching out, cooperating with one another, and pooling resources and talents.
One last speculation: I predict that we may see more “cognitive development centers” like the “center for the mind” run by kSero Corporation here in Richmond. (Disclaimer: I serve on the kSero board of directors.) kSero recognizes that education and cognitive development take place in a social environment polluted by excessive exposure to electronic stimuli, atrocious nutrition, eratic sleeping patterns and overworked, stressed-out parents. Besides addressing the environmental causes of learning problems, kSero maps children’s cognitive skills and limitations and custom-designs mental exercises that will improve cognitive functions — from short-term memory to pattern recognition — that they need to advance.
