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Introduction

When I venture out into the little village where I live, I often run into a guy named Pat at the post office, the bank, or the market. Pat always offers the same wry greeting. What do you know for sure?

For Pat, it is kind of gentle nudge, a way to provoke a response other than the usual. For me, it is an exhortation. Pat gets what he wants, a pithy reply and a little conversation, but I am left to think about it. Some days, it takes a while to shake the words from my head. After all, I am writing a book about education.

What do I know for sure? Maybe I can finally exorcise the question by offering an honest answer. Now in my 50s, I am supposed to have made my mark, matured, accumulated a little wisdom, inspired my children to embrace life, and given something back to my community. To whatever extent I have done these things, I do know this: There is so much left to learn, and time is growing short.

We live in co-evolution with what our brains produce. Our greatest potential lies in better learning how to learn. It is the mother of all issues, yet we have collectively failed to bring it to its rightful status.

Schools house our designs for the future. They represent our best efforts at cultivating knowledge and intelligence. We entrust our young to them roughly 196 days and 1,372 hours each year to animate our collective hopes and intentions. When I think about this, I am embarrassed.

Our formal institutions of learning are the beachheads from which new thinking and new civilization can germinate and take root. By the same token, they are the bastions of the status quo: economic, political, social, and intellectual. Homogenized education that does not take into account individual curiosities, motivations, aptitudes, learning pace, or style creates a kind of social and intellectual poverty in which learning is devalued.

As a nation, we have come to rely on a professional elite to ratify our convictions, to posit what we can imagine. Without the existence of an authentic present-day culture of learning to provide contrast, it is difficult for most of us to imagine what could be. But, you get to be 50. You look around. And then you begin to wonder.

In a society dedicated to learning, the true diversity is diversity of thought, of perspective, and of creativity. I suspect that we humans share many unconscious yearnings and that the freedom to follow our intellectual curiosities is one of the greatest. Yet there are forces in play that would render knowledge an a priori phenomenon—something transferred intact from one mind to another. These forces have less use for creativity and perspective than they do for the ability to perform prescribed tasks and ascertain what those licensed to profess knowledge want us to know and believe.

If we are not a society dedicated to learning, then what are we dedicated to, and where does learning fit in? “Educate” has three Latin roots: educare, to bring up, rear, or train a child; educere, out, bring out; and ducere, to lead, draw, or bring. Combining the roots, most scholars define “educate” as to bring out, as in bring out the best or bring out knowledge. This implies there is something within to cultivate, to bring out. Surely, we have strayed from the roots.

Relying on the definition of this practice we have all been a party to, and putting it in the simplest of terms, I believe we are failing to educate because we fail to bring out what is within. Knowledge has become an increasingly exterior phenomenon. What is within us is going to struggle to come out anyway. It is our prime directive. But, we humans would be so much more resourceful and powerful, our potentials and dreams unbound, if only education would cooperate.

The flaws of schooling are relatively blatant and well underscored by reams of research. The evidence accumulates, pointing to the need for a comprehensive new learning architecture. We have knowledge that can lead us to a collective place where learning flourishes, yet we systematically ignore it. The influencers in the environment surrounding education—instructional designers, publishers, legislators, researchers, unions, and administrators—are locked into place in a tightly wound, self-justifying bureaucracy.

Virtually every conversation we hear about better education is about more money, higher standards, and better teaching. With due respect to the many dedicated public servants in education and government and their advisors, these discussions are, to put it politely, off the mark. It’s time to turn our attention to optimizing learning, not teaching.

To the learning professionals who read this book, I want to make it clear that what I have to say is not an indictment of people. There are many committed, well-intentioned, intelligent, and caring people associated with institutions of learning. All of these people, just like the rest of us, are generally unwitting parties to a paradigm that binds us to our present course. This book asks you to shed beliefs to which we are all a party. Read on at your own risk.

There is much talk of introducing competition into the system. The principle is sound. The methods suggested are somewhat misguided. The best competition we can introduce is offering students and parents the opportunity to compete with teachers and existing curriculum design by choosing from a range of learning resources within the system and anywhere else they can be found. Teachers need to compete with the effectiveness of other learning resources for the attention of learners.

The notion of universal education as the foundation of an authentic democracy was born in America. It was, and still is, the most radical idea to have come from our founding fathers. The great achievement of this experiment is that education is available to all.

But there is also a great failure. It is the existence of an enormous, overbureaucratized system that demands ever-greater funds for increasingly fewer results and cannot respond to the needs and talents of individuals. On present course, it is not justifiable.

The other great failure is that schooling fosters learned dependence and a lack of participation in the search for truth and what is important. Formal learning is seen in terms of discipline rather than passion. The hardware of our “intelligence,” our brains, is significantly enhanced by making learners archaeologists and architects of knowledge rather than receptacles for what educationists decide to fill with “official” knowledge.

The prevailing experience of school, for those old enough to have an independent opinion, is that it is boring. It does not engage. It fails to harness the natural enthusiasm, the drive to individuate that is inherent in all children.

Since public education became an American institution in the mid-nineteenth century, it has, despite many reforms, become increasingly unresponsive to a world that has radically changed. To understand what is dysfunctional about the present system is, in part, to confront our own intellectual limits. Fundamental changes call for new mindsets. Otherwise, we end up with old mindsets driving new ideas into predictable chaos—a pretty good description of the present.

Public education is a $700-billion juggernaut. Any insider who dares take on the power structure knows he or she will suffer political and economic consequences. Private schooling, higher education, corporate and military training, and e-learning have distinguishing characteristics but exhibit many of the same fundamental flaws.

I would put the creation of a twenty-first-century design for education as our first millennial priority. We have the ability. We seem to lack the will. In 20 years, I fear the United States will become a declining civilization and a fast-declining world power if we haven’t “retooled” our brains.

Just in business terms, we have much to gain by establishing global leadership in learning design. In a world where “time to competency” is becoming the most frequent barrier to competitive advantage and where learning can be exported anywhere, the market size is measured in trillions of dollars. There is an enormous and growing demand for interactive products that enable learners to eliminate the middlemen and take charge of a learning event. I believe this demand is the single most important for us to heed and take leadership in fulfilling.

Third world countries such as Indonesia and China, with less entrenched educational bureaucracies, cheaper labor, and a keener sense of the connection between learning and survival, are poised to leapfrog the United States in the next 20 years. The threat is real and imminent. Where we can’t compete with cheap labor, we still have the option to provide better solutions with better-equipped brains. It is truly the leverage point for developed nations in a global marketplace.

The Industrial to Information Age lag is most conspicuous in how we now learn. It is the primary barrier to our evolution as a culture and an economy. Some have already abandoned schools as the places we prepare for the world, saying they can’t, or won’t, adapt.

Futurist Alvin Toffler touched on a key enabling element of the future of learning when he suggested that “kids raised in a smart, responsive environment, which is complex and stimulating, may develop a different set of skills. If kids can call on the environment to do things for them, they become less dependent on parents (and teachers) at a younger age. They may gain a sense of mastery or competence. And they can afford to be inquisitive, exploratory, imaginative, and to adopt a problem solving (learning by doing) approach to life. All of which may promote changes in the brain itself. … A smarter environment will make smarter people.”

At the individual level, learning occurs along the path untrodden. It is inherently nomadic, not homogenous. It relies on relevance and curiosity far more than memory. It is not instructed or meted out but sought relevant to unique inclinations and how each individual experiences the world. We must design learning environments based on these truths.

The “smart, responsive environment” Toffler referred to has to be built by humans with new thinking and new understanding. This new understanding will incorporate the social as well as the individual components of learning. A new learning architecture will not hinge on technology. Technology offers powerful new tools to augment learning, but the tools themselves are still subject to the boundaries of human awareness and ingenuity.

The New Mantra

It can’t be fixed. It shouldn’t be fixed. It’s not broken. It’s obsolete. The machinery and the factories of education are obsolete. No amount of retooling—higher standards, more money, smaller classrooms, or “back to the basics”—is going to alter the truth. We need to stop tinkering with what isn’t broken and recognize its obsolescence.

It can’t be fixed. It shouldn’t be fixed. It’s not broken. It’s obsolete. Try these words, gently but firmly, in your next conversation with one of the members of the educational status quo. You’ll find many of them in agreement but unable to act, not knowing where to start and not wanting to risk their careers. For the status quo and the fixers, the notion of a new design, a comprehensive new learning architecture, is just too complex, too risky, too far beyond the horizon.

It can’t be fixed. It shouldn’t be fixed. It’s not broken. It’s obsolete. To the “educrats,” the politicians, and a large percentage of the biggest industry (more than three million K-12 public school teachers) in our economy, this will be disruptive, disorienting, and threatening. Those invested in the status quo have much to protect. Those invested in learning have everything to gain from the implementation of a modernized, cognitive-based education system. The remedy lies in building strength through numbers—the strength that comes from having learned about learning.

Ignoring what we now know about teaching and learning, and failing to act, is surely our most costly national failure. It is invisible to us, in part, because the rest of the civilized world has copied our own approach. The differences from country to country, though worthy of note, are still trivial in the face of the possibilities.

This book will describe the characteristics and practices synonymous with the liberation of learning and will identify social dynamics, educational practices, and operating assumptions that keep outmoded thinking in place. It is an invitation for seminal thinkers to form the new field of learning architecture, to assemble a master blueprint for learning from cradle to grave. It is a call to the general public—all of us who are going to be affected by the future of learning—to join in the process of changing public policy.

The foundation for a new blueprint is in reversing the order of accountability in the old. At the top of the new order is the learner. How will we provide individual learners with the means to determine and meet their immediate and ongoing needs? Then, how do we hold teachers, providers of learning materials, and designers of learning environments accountable to fulfill these needs?

How do we insure that the customer has received quality service? How do administrators and managers of educational environments become accountable to teachers, facilitators, and counselors so that the input of the customer (the learner) is continually monitored to identify and address unserved needs, additional learning resources, and support for research processes to determine best practices? This can and should be a process that rewards teachers, counselors, and facilitators for meeting learner needs and exceeding standards for progress.

In the new order, instructional designers, content providers/publishers, and curriculum designers are responsible to a design process that allows individual learners to have a continuum of methods and pathways to realize a balance of societal and individual learning goals.

Learning design will be geared toward a variety of learning styles, interests, and rates of progress rather than a uniform grade level or knowledge or age standard by which learners are compared and judged. In such a context, remedial education, widespread failure, and wasted mental effort are profoundly diminished. The cost savings in this area alone would be enormous.

No one can yet claim expertise in the new architecture of learning. We need a renaissance where a variety of disciplines cross-pollinate and collude to create a new paradigm. We need an established profession of learning architecture where such collusion can take place and establish a platform of research and design that we look to and build on.

As a society, we must call on our institutions of learning not just to equip us to lead productive lives but also to encourage us to use our imaginations and our skills to improve the quality of everyday life. Learning is a process of individual growth, not a uniform end product. What isn’t taught says more about us than what is. How we learn mirrors not just our intelligence but our humanity.

Edward L. Davis III Northport, MI February 2005