Educational Leadership - September 2009

In a classroom like this, something educationally revolutionary would happen: Students and adults would connect in a global, purposeful conversation that would make the world a better place. We would pry the Socratic dialogue from the hands of the past and lift it into the future to serve the hopes and dreams of all students everywhere.

In the future, we will incorporate
a whole array of technological options into
how, when, and where we learn.
The Future Is Here—Almost

Some of what constitutes this new approach to learning is already underway. Teachers and students already use the Web to create lessons, communicate, and share with others across the globe. Schools have Web-based curriculums, and many people already use Web 2.0 technology to reach thousands, if not millions, of learners.

But a model like the LearningSphere would add another dimension. Learning would take place both in and out of school. Teachers would no longer manage learning through the rigid enforcement of rote learning but would learn alongside their students, creatively adapting curriculum to their students’ needs. Like any creative effort, this collective journey would include errors, lack of good information, and false starts—a process of which Socrates would approve. Because teachers are knowledgeable about the learning process, they could serve as capable guides for their students, all the while promoting the requisite 21st century thinking skills of critical reflection, empirical reasoning, collective intelligence, and metacognition.

Organizing this new learning model is the work of the 21st century. Just as the industrial age developed a particular form of organizational life, the electronic age is developing models of organizational life that are more atomic in their structure than they are brick and mortar. When Einstein shocked the

world by suggesting that energy equals mass multiplied by the speed of light squared, he gave us a new way to think about our world.

There has never been a time in human history when the opportunity to create universally accessible knowledge has been more of a reality. And there has never been a time when education has meant more in terms of human survival and happiness.

What Would Socrates Do?

At the beginning of the 20th century, the world’s population was 1.6 billion; at the beginning of the 21st century, it is roughly 6.6 billion. To meet the education needs of this rising tide of humanity, we must think outside the box of conventional schooling.

To start, we must overhaul and redesign the current school system. We face this great transition with both hands tied behind our collective backs if we continue to pour money, time, and effort into an outdated system of education. Mass education belongs in the era of massive armies, massive industrial complexes, and massive attempts at social control. We have lost much talent since the 19th century by enforcing stifling education routines in the name of efficiency. Current high school dropout rates clearly indicate that our standardized testing regime and outdated curriculums are wasting the potential of our youth.

If we stop thinking of schools as

buildings and start thinking of learning as occurring in many different places, we will free ourselves from the conventional education model that still dominates our thinking. Socrates did not teach in a conventional classroom; his classroom was wherever he and his students found themselves. His was the first “personal learning network,” and he taught with the most enduring teaching tool of all time—the purposeful conversation. He called himself a citizen of the world because the questions he asked were universal.

Even though Socrates was a philosopher, he did not hide in an ivory tower. He used knowledge to challenge the status quo. I think Socrates would embrace the new learning era with all the energy he had. We need that same embrace today to move beyond the false dichotomies and empty arguments of our tired education disagreements and to joyously engage with the future. ^L

References

Huff, G., & Saxberg, B. (2009). Full immersion—How will 10-year-olds learn? Education Next, 9(3), 79–82.

Iyer, B., & Davenport, T. H. (2008, April). Reverse engineering Google’s innovation machine. Harvard Business Review.

Peter W. Cookson Jr. holds the Katsuso Miho Scholarship in Peacemaking at Yale Divinity School. He is the author of Sacred Trust: An Education Bill of Rights (Corwin, forthcoming) and a board member of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills; peter.cookson@yale.edu.