|
From Chapter One - Openers
The time has arrived for the United States to think seriously about bidding
farewell to its schools. Our nation’s largest and most time-honored institution, housing some fifty-seven million students
each day, is a relic from another age. The school is responsible for increasing amounts of cultural decay and social dysfunction
in our society. The curriculum found in today’s school is programming our children for the past, not the present, and
certainly not the future. Parents, knowledgeable educators, and savvy business leaders must begin a serious search for a different
medium for educating our children.
A major paradigm shift, or change in perspective, has occurred in the last decade
using the new technologies. This shift represents an opportunity to redesign the way in which we learn and transmit culture
to our children. The school we all know, formed in the 19th century, survives as an institution in the 21st century from sheer
habit. While business, the government, the military, transportation, telecommunications, and most other institutions in our
nation are applying these new technologies to handle the complex
Defining change in terms of a school is both hopeless
and self-defeating. The school can’t be fixed, but education in America can be reformed.operational changes in every
day life, schools are not. Schools remain frozen in place without vision, a symbol of another age. The status of the school
as America’s last operating institutional monopoly suppresses any genuine motivation to modernize.
Technology, at the heart of the phenomenal transformation being experienced in America, is now found in every
corner of American society. These new technologies are responsible for the fundamental changes occurring in the way we do
things every day, pushing out our old ways of thinking and acting. For example, sending mail through the U.S. Postal System
has given way to seventeen million email messages every day in the United States. The change is truly revolutionary.
Signs
of this new technological age are visible throughout American society in the first years of this new millennium. Transportation
has become highly computerized in its schedules and routes, on land and in the air. Agriculture is now a high-tech and worldwide
corporate endeavor. Medicine routinely uses technologies in scanning, cloning, and transplanting parts of the human body.
Our military uses laser beams, computers, and satellites to wage wars on a global scale with minimal loss of life. Even individual
citizens proceed through the day armed with laptops, palm pilots, and cell phones. The school, however, is distinctive in
the retention of its 19th century procedures and concerns. The new technologies have not significantly impacted its operations.Despite
the appearance of success in educating so many students each day, our schools are in serious decline and have been for almost
half a century. The final shift in the control of schools during the 1980s, from local agencies to state bureaucracies, has
resulted in schools becoming both fiscal and political prisoners of government. Special pleadings and whimsical legislation
now act to enforce a kind of irrationality for all schools. The many battles for values in America – sex education,
integration, exceptional 2education – are fought out in the courts and applied in the schools. There is a constant jerky
and piecemeal change occurring in the individual schools that comprise this huge institution so in need of fixing. Our schools
have no true hope of reforming themselves. There has not been a lasting change in half a century. Schools cannot and will
not change!
The institutional perspective of schools and their leaders is myopic at
best. The mind set is a year-to-year, season-to-season operation. The lengthy history of education in America and our previous
experiences with change in schools, has delayed our even being able to see the new technologies as an option for future learning.
Schools, as they address technology, are focused on the “yes, but” aspects of change. Curriculum filters are far
more important than curriculum futures. Regulation and security are on the front burners. Schools are resistant to changing;
they have always been this way. Educators fought against ballpoint pens and hand-held calculators as well. At best, technology
in schools is about being faster at doing old things. Our paradigms have failed us. The critical problem is that schools can’t
“see” the new technologies for what they have become. In society-at-large, technology is the medium that is changing
how people live and work and what they do with their spare time. Schools are not preparing students with the skills and perceptions
to survive in such a fast moving world. Parents should be both frightened and outraged at this lack of relevance and this
leadership incompetence. Perhaps as a result of the world in which we are living, parents feel powerless to intercede. Consider
the fact, for example, that each day there are three million new web pages on the Internet. At the time of this writing, in
fact, there are now more web pages on the Internet than there are persons on Earth. The English Internet, or World Wide Web,
is doubling every 120 days, or three times each year. Some 80 percent of all the web pages that will be available 3to learners
next year don’t yet exist! Nearly one billion persons around the world are regular users of the Internet after only
nine years of availability (May 1995). Most children, at least in school, are not part of this phenomenal transformation in
communication. How can this be? The answer is simple: schools are so large, so much a monopoly in the learning game, that
they don’t even acknowledge Internet resources as a competitor. Schools are the largest impeding force in our nation
as we move into the information age.
Both of the authors of this book have worked in
schools as agents of change for over thirty years. We believe that education in the United States can reform and modernize
itself, given the right opportunity. But our joint conclusion, after working so many years with schools throughout the United
States and in many foreign lands, is that such reform will be successful only if we can shed the school as our learning vessel.
In the case of schools, function is following form, and the “school” in its form is blocking our transition to
electronic-assisted learning in the 21st century.
Even if there were no technological “issues” for educational
reform, the authors believe that the United States may soon have to abandon its schools anyway. In a kind of “black
hole” scenario, it is likely that schools would collapse under their own weight in the near future. Schools are becoming
intolerably expensive and so issue-oriented that they are beginning to pull other institutional agencies downward in a fiscal
spiral. In state after state, legislators are wrestling with the cost of schools in direct competition with health, law enforcement,
and government benefits. There simply isn’t enough pie to continue as we have in the past.
There are signs, hopeful indicators we think, that our nation may be ready for a real change in the way we educate
our children. Those citizens with vision will find the ideas in subsequent chapters refreshing and insightful. Career school
personnel, government agents, university scholars, publishers of textbooks, and other groups heavily vested in the old ways
will 14probably not be able to even imagine that real change is possible. Blinded by their old paradigm that schools equal
education, these groups will opt to hang onto older and obsolete learning procedures.
A great deal is at stake in the
coming discussions about leaving our schools behind. The authors hope that parents, wishing the best for their children, will
ultimately demand a modern and relevant system of education. These parents can, and must, become strong consumer advocates
and critics of the unbearable status quo. With the assistance of knowledgeable educators and informed business leaders, America
can shed its final monopoly, its antique school system, and reform education for the 21st century.
|
