Future-focusing education: embracing and transcending Information Age models

Dr William Spady Breakthrough Learning Systems Dillon, Colorado, USA

Fifteen years ago I heard the most radical presentation on educational change of my entire 40-year career as an educational reformer. The speaker was Lewis Perelman, author of the 1992 blockbuster book School’s Out.  The essence of Perelman’s live demonstration and message to an audience of a thousand secondary school educators was that we, in the modern world, already (then in 1991) had the technologies that would soon put schools and teachers as we knew them out of business.

His extremely informative and hard-hitting presentation left the audience bordering on hostile and I was literally the only one in that packed auditorium who clapped at the end!  With one seeming ‘silver bullet’, Perelman turned the very structural/organizational/ institutional core of traditional schooling into what looked like nonsensical rubble, and his message was just too ‘far out’ and alienating for his audience to accept.

Well, if you think that was the bad news, you should have been me.  Not only was I already conspicuously guilty of having clapped for him, I was the next speaker!

An open system or a closed one?

As I was almost dragged to the podium to face the livid mob, I desperately scribbled some key things on two overhead transparencies that were clearly not part of my prepared speech. One of them I titled ‘Perelman’s Information Age Delivery System’.  The other I called ‘Industrial Age School’.  At first glance, their physical appearances were identical, but their words were paradigms apart.  The first one, I pleaded, was my understanding of what Perelman’s amazing demonstration of technology had just shown us; namely, that the communications tools of the day had already made it possible for anyone to learn anything from anywhere, at any time … and from worldwide experts, to boot!

As an organizational sociologist, I instantly saw this as the ultimate embodiment of an ‘open (access) system’ in which technology could swing wide the gates to a literal customer-friendly, learner-responsive ‘learning opportunity heaven’.

The other overhead summarized Perelman’s forceful message of a ‘closed system’: the assembly line, and the ‘archaic obsolescence’ of standard schooling.  It said: ‘specific students must learn specific things in specific classrooms on specific schedules’ … and I orally added the ‘from specific teachers’ part as well.

In other words, Perelman was arguing that schools were ‘boxed-in’, constrained and ‘closed’ in all the ways that modern technologies, if wisely used, could be used to make them ‘open’. 

Expanding the ‘expanded opportunity’ principle

For decades, I had been advocating that educators endorse and apply an operating principle in their schools I called ‘expanded opportunity’.  Now, suddenly, with these two hand-scribbled transparencies, I had a far more powerful way of explaining what this learner-centred principle actually could mean than previously. 

Real ‘opportunity’ wasn’t just about time and schedules; it was about access, content, location, methods and agents – to name the obvious ones implied in the two diagrams. So I enthusiastically showed this stark open system – closed system/Information Age-Industrial Age/expanded opportunity – constrained opportunity contrast to anyone who would listen, describing the inherently future-focused, learner-responsive, personally-empowering nature of Perelman’s message. 

Confronting the grip of institutional inertia

And, with today’s 20-20 hindsight in this era of the ubiquitous and increasingly versatile internet and related technologies, Perelman was absolutely correct: anyone can learn anything from anywhere, at any time, from worldwide experts – as long as they’re not a student in school.  Apparently, the rules of the Information Age learning game don’t apply beyond the schoolhouse door.  In most schools, specific students must still learn specific things in specific classrooms, on specific schedule, from specific teachers, as they ‘always’ have, even though most of those classrooms probably have computers in them – which, by itself, probably doesn’t warm Perelman’s heart. 

So, ‘school’ is not really ‘out’, as he predicted it would/should be by now because education has drawn on the powerful influences of ‘institutional inertia’; its many familiar Industrial Age symbols, and, most importantly, its monopoly on diplomas and credentials to resist becoming the ‘open’ learning system Perelman envisioned.  And this leaves today’s 21st century learners boxed-in by a 19th century ‘delivery structure’.

Getting beyond one-dimensional learning

But the dilemma and challenge of really changing education don’t stop there. These two revolve around an equally constraining paradigm of learning that is actually fostered by the very advances that Perelman foresaw and advocated.  Please note that anyone can learn anything from anywhere, and so on, only as long as that ‘anything’ is content and information – and, most often, as long as it can also supposedly be ‘measured’ on a paper-pencil test. 

So while the technologies that Perelman lauded can dramatically expand access to an information base that itself is radically expanding, and under 24/7 conditions, the actual nature of what can be learned in this way is largely traditional and one-dimensional.  That is, it’s primarily ‘left-brained’, IQ-oriented, cognitive information that lends itself to right-wrong, paper-pencil testing and assessment.

But as soon as we expanded our notion of learning from the traditional paradigm of ‘know and understand’ to ‘do and perform’ – which is the essence of real competence – or even beyond that to complex decision-making and interactions in authentic work and social situations, the Perelman/Spady syllogism loses its utility.  In simple terms, this defines the profound difference between acquiring and memorizing the information necessary to pass the written test to get a pilot’s license, and the ability to land a plane safely at an unfamiliar airfield under adverse weather conditions. 

21st century performance essentials

To illustrate this point further, let me share the elements of a framework I initially developed and refined in the mid-90s as my colleagues and I worked with business leaders in the US. Our broad, open-ended motivating question to them was: 

‘What are you seeking in a top-flight employee who’s going to be successful and a real contributor to your organization?’

We thought that their answers would provide educators with a sound starting point for preparing their students for the challenging career world they would be facing once leaving school. The answers we got consistently matched up against our ‘successful role performer’ framework, namely:

We observed again and again that only quite specific aspects of the role performer abilities in the left column could be facilitated directly from standard information-based, online sources.  Those that did reflected the more IQ-oriented, technical nature of these roles. But the abilities required to carry out the roles in the right column were so interpersonal, interactional and EQ-oriented that there was no way they were going to be acquired or developed by having individuals sit at computer screens or pass paper-pencil exams – even if they could do it from anywhere, at any time.

With this framework in hand, my mantra became: ‘Learning is more than knowing, and human beings are required’ – to demonstrate, model, explain, assess, and mentor these complex and ever-evolving interpersonal role performance abilities. Moreover, my work on future-focusing with educators now revolves around one key question: ‘What kind of human beings are we committed to developing for the challenging tomorrow they face?’

The answers people generate inevitably include the key elements of this framework and embrace both its IQ/technical abilities and its EQ/interpersonal ones. After all, the Information Age is fundamentally about … well, just information and the tools that help us generate and process it. 

But future-focusing involves much more: it’s we human beings envisioning the world we want to experience and using the multiple gifts we’ve been given to realize it!