Let's talk about change. Whether we’re talking about change in our children, change in our lives, change in our businesses, change in our institutions, or change in our world, because change is so subtle, because it’s so sneaky, because we always seem to be in reactive mode, it’s often difficult to detach ourselves from the here and now and step back so that we can try to understand what’s going on.
In fact, it’s not just that it’s hard to appreciate what’s going on. Rather, it’s about trying to comprehend the scale and the scope of the changes we are experiencing.
That’s because in the world of today it’s not just about changing today and then going back to normal tomorrow. In reality, it’s about change today and then more change tomorrow. It’s about change forever. It’s about constant and never-ending change. It’s about exponential change.
What’s This Got To Do With Schools?
The problem is that while our world outside changes, our schools are finding it increasingly difficult to recognize and respond to these changes. Interestingly enough, despite all the rhetoric about how schools are failing, many of the traditional tools we have always used to measure the success of schools—test scores, higher standards, graduation rates at high school and college, SAT scores, participation in AP and IB courses—tell us that schools today are doing many things better than ever, despite the enormous expectations and demands placed upon us and the criticisms sent our way.
Despite our doubts about the next generation, our traditional tools tell us that this group of children is probably the best-educated generation of children in history.
So What’s The Problem?
At the same time that they are the best-educated generation, they are also the least prepared for what’s about to happen. And this is hard for many of us in education to understand, because most educators have spent their entire lives since the age of six years old (first as students, then student teachers, and teachers) in school.
We come from what Bill Spady describes as the “educentric” point of view. We’ve had very little need (or opportunity) to step back from education and start to understand what’s happening outside of education. From our travels, it’s our observation that, despite ongoing reform, education is largely disconnected from the rest of the world—a world that has radically and fundamentally changed during the last 15 years. This is a dramatically different world than that of our experiences growing up.
How Much Has It Changed?
Let’s consider for a moment a person who retired from a company 20 years ago. Let’s take them back to the office they worked in then. What’s changed? In a word, everything! That retired individual would have been gone before the times where fax machines, email, the WWW, cell phones, pagers, wireless networks, and vast array of other digital wonders even existed. Take that person back to the office they retired from 20 years ago and they would likely find that to be a highly overwhelming and disorienting experience.
Now let’s take that same person back to the high school they graduated from 40 or 50 years ago. What’s really changed? (Not culturally or socially but structurally) The answer is very little. Students still attend schools approximately 180 days a year, 5 ½ hours a day—about the same length of time that American kids did back in the 1930’s, when American schools had the longest school day and the longest school year in the entire industrialized world. (Today, American schools have the shortest.)
And we still release those kids for 3 months in the summer so they can go harvest the crops based on the European agricultural cycles from the 1800’s. This begs a question: How can it be that our businesses have changed (or had to change) again and again over the course of just the past few years, while for many educational institutions, structurally it’s pretty much same old, same old?
Outside Education
Outside of education, it’s a completely different world. Powerful global trends and new technologies have fundamentally and irrevocably changed our lives. And it’s not just about them changing once and being able to go back to normal tomorrow.
The impact of these dramatic changes has embedded every aspect of our lives. The only time you really understand how dramatically our world has changed is when the power goes out or the batteries die. You can’t even cook a meal! At the same time, new technologies have compressed time and distance to the point where time and distance have never meant less than they do today. We see the effects of a tsunami, volcanoes erupting in Indonesia, and hurricanes hitting the US in real time. We see history as it happens. We see world events as a mini-series.
Today, we live in a smart-embedded environment that allows us to have capabilities, to do things that even a few short years ago would have been absolutely unimaginable.
So we ask again, has the world changed and if so, how has it changed? (This is obviously a rhetorical question—you’re expected to respond with a resounding “YES”.)
Tomorrow: What Has Been Education’s Response To These Changes?