Throughout a variety of continued blog discussions, there appears to be a lot of repetitive bashing of the current “education system”, as though it were some dystopian governmental monolith, intentionally preserving its status quo through oppression of better ideas for teaching and learning. I suggest, though, that it is doing what it was designed to do, as a product of the Fordist assembly-line factory organization of the first half of the Twentieth Century. We should recognize that, as a vehicle without wings, traditional education cannot provide effective and relevant learning experiences for ALL students, as we wish. Further criticism won’t change the situation.
What is missing, though, are the understandings we have gained with a “PostModernist World View” which has evolved in latter half of the century. Von Bertalanffy, Boulding, and Beers (The “Three B’s” ?), among others, have given us “systems thinking” methods of looking a structures and relationships among organizations to make them more efficient and cost-effective. Deming’s techniques of measuring quality can be also used to improve the rates of “success”, even when applied within that factory model.
Computer processing speed and displays now let us interact with modeling constructions so that we may visualize how natural, social, and education systems and processes work, to simulate alternatives, and to predict possible outcomes. Most recently, the use of digital media, wide-bandwidth communications, and data storage capacity have made quality content information available to the far reaches of the globe. We are also learning techniques of informatics for analysis and to make real-time recommendations about various choices students, teachers, and administrators can make, much as Amazon tracks and suggests our online shopping experiences. Also, the science of complexity has provided various “non-linear” ways of looking at learning and education as diverse, evolutionary, and emergent processes, utilizing effective strategies from gaming theory, graph theory, and risk management to improve the sustainability of our current and future societies.
So I see this decade as an exciting time in which a true transformation in education can occur, when the perspectives of “Systems, Quality, Modeling, Informatics, and Complexity (SQMIC)” are implemented. I feel these five perspectives are parts of “WKID Intelligence”, a substrate underlying the typical content areas of STEM, the “Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (HASS), as well as “Health, Physical Education, and Recreation (HPER)”. Access to a variety of interactive “apps” would provide tools to assist learning, as technology skills needed in a global economy, and would also be part of the organizational processes that guide their learning experiences.
Rather than an assembly of instructional components put in place and tested at certain times, learners could become designers of their own understandings of their world, by developing data into information, building that into the knowledge they need for entry into society, and, hopefully, gaining wisdom enough to become successful. Much like the “3-D printers” we are seeing these days, education could become an efficient, effective, and customized production and delivery system that morphs out of rigid traditional modes, and truly becomes a “Comprehensive STEM Curriculum Framework for the 21st Century”.