Moving Toward Life Learning – August 26, 2008
A few years ago, my mother’s trailer home was falling apart around her (at age
91, she hadn’t planned on outliving it). She was still relatively independent
and not yet ready for a nursing home, so we invited her to move into a townhouse
we were vacating but weren’t ready to sell. Since it was in a condominium
project, we sometimes referred to it as “our condo.” She had never visited
us there. When she saw it on moving day, she was upset because she had expected
it to be a highrise apartment; she had seen photos of the interior and because
it had many similarities to her trailer home and neighborhood, it never occurred
to us that she might not expect a townhouse. I tried, unhelpfully, to explain
that condo meant a style of legal ownership, not a style of architecture, nor
was it going to change her lifestyle or attitude toward life in any fundamental
way.
In the same way, charter schools, public schools and
homeschools differ in the details of their legal and organizational structure;
but all three can – and sometimes do – provide very similar types of
educational experiences. If one views education as something that is done to
people, that view will structure one’s educational experience, no matter the
location or the organization. And until enough people understand that learning
must be in the hands of the learner, our education system won’t change, in spite of all
the tinkering that happens in the form of lower teacher-student ratios, more
computers, more money, different textbooks, more testing, and so on.
I’ve been reading a book about how that paradigm shift is
actually happening – by stealth, if you will. I’ve been predicting and, more
recently, watching this happen for years, as computer technology puts control
into the hands of learners and frees us from the straightjacket of someone
else’s agenda. But Clayton Christensen in his new book Disrupting Class: How
Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (2008, McGraw Hill),
brings a lot of clarity to the process. Christensen is a professor of Business
Administration at Harvard and, therefore, might seem an unlikely choice to write
about radical education reform. But he uses his well known business theory of
“disruptive innovation” to explain how technology is allowing young people
to learn at their own speed, in their own style, when and where they want, and
what they are motivated to learn. But more than that, he demonstrates how this
disruption is bound to demolish the current legal and organizational structure
of schooling, just like Sony’s transistor changed (and, ultimately, put out of
business) the old tube radio companies like RCA, and how Canon disrupted Xerox
and Japanese car companies disrupted North American car companies. This is just
a part of what I see as a confluence of thought that will inevitably move us
away from the antiquated warehouse style of schooling toward life learning.
Posted: 2008/08/26 2:29 PM
