KEN ROBINSON EXPANDS ON SOME OF HIS MAIN THEMES

Ken Robinson diagnoses the problem accurately, but what do we do about it? Actually, I wish that governments would lighten their control over education, and get out of the way of innovators who wish to move away from the school centred model, and move towards alternatives, including re-structured schools.

I have reached a stage in my life when I have begun to see schools, as they are currently structured, as institutions that have ceased to be relevant to the needs of youngsters growing up in the 21st century. They will either have to exist - because governments and policy makers can't see beyond them - as cultural anachronisms from the industrial age, or under pressure from cultural, institutional and political change, evolve into very different structures, if not cease to exist altogether.

The same goes for the teaching profession. Just as teachers need to become more attuned to the habits of mind and dispositions of expert workers and practitioners directly affecting (and being affected by) the real world, the professions too need to embody a much larger component of teaching or coaching.

The latter is already happening as businesses and other organizations figure out how to acquire, retain and develop their intellectual capital. In other words, schools could become more like workplaces, and workplaces more like schools. The barriers between schools and the rest of society could be lowered or eliminated altogether, so that activities associated with learning and the responsibilities for it are dispersed more widely in society. The role distinctions between workers and teachers, and the conceptual distinctions between work and learning, could dissolve, and the practice of apprenticeship could be reinstated and universalized. Opportunities for personal and communal learning could become more equitably accessible and more differentiated to focus on the needs of the individual and the community. These changes could bring about a truly learning society. This isn’t an original vision (see The Unfinished Revolution by John Abbott and Terry Ryan), but we seem closer to its realization because of the possibilities opened up by web-based technologies. But technological possibilities will not by themselves solve a political problem.

How could the future of learning envisaged here include everyone? How can such new designs for the learnscape be prevented from becoming another mechanism of social exclusion, as schooling already has?