Open Course in Education Futures

Every day, there’s seems to be new voices joining the club of people calling out for new, innovative approaches to education. A real momentum seems to be growing.

Just randomly pulling out a few videos I've seen in the past 24 hours:

Ken Robinson

Jeff Jarvis

George Siemens

Add to this the slew of documents, including the OECD document on Futures in Education I read for this course, there are a number of questions I continue to grapple with, which for me define some urgent questions for which I hope to have more coherent answers during the length of this course:

These are all very different discussions and world views of course but all offer critiques of the modern educational landscape and its pitfalls.

Somehow, I find that these critiques usually don’t go full circle if they don't pinpoint the power structures on which this landscape sits and depends - which are the underlying reasons education looks the way it does ... There is continuous call for more innovation and more creativity within the educational sphere. Jeff Jarvis points out: "we're not in the industrialization age, we're in the Google age" ... Peter Ducker writes: "We will have to think through education--its purpose, its values, its content to meet the demands of the knowledge society"

Both argue that the current school model is based on the needs of the early industrialized economy which required millions of similarly packaged workers, while the economy of today requires ingenuity and innovation.

But … what does that mean? the market looks different today than it did 100 years ago - but we're still living in a market economy. So in the early 1900s, we designed schools to meet factory demand. Now we design them to meet Google demand? That is, they should still be based on a factory model - though the factory looks different now. We are still creating an input/output blackbox whose primary goal is to serve the market. The metaphor stands intact ... for all this talk of "change", it isn't change but the same old system in new packaging.

So can there be something fundamentally wrong with the way we're looking at this thing? And how does that affect how we look at education?

While the relationship between the economy, the state and education has been continuously debated, I don’t think these arguments or predictions (the one put forth by OECD, Ducker, etc) are often honest or clear about where this three way relationship should stand in their desired outcomes. There is a constant conflict between desired goals (what we would want education to be in an ideal world) and market driven goals (what education will look like given the practical restraints that exist in the world: the economy, politics, etc) and the arguments posed usually do not make this distinction clear enough.

Nowhere is that better evident than the OECD document which clearly states: “[the document] illuminates the ways that policy, strategies and actions can promote desirable futures and avoid those we consider to be undesirable.”

This indicates that we are speaking of desired outcomes, and not dictated outcomes. We are going to go out on a limb here and see what the best results could be based on the trends we see today. Now here, I am making a personal assumption. I take “desirable” in a utilitarian sense – desirable for the most number of people, for them to have a qualitatively better life experience. That is certainly NOT what the OECD document means however because shortly after they write:

"as OECD countries move rapidly towards becoming knowledge societies, with new demands for learning and new expectations of citizenship, strategic choices must be made not just to reform but to reinvent education systems so that the youth of today meet the challenges of tomorrow."

Here, we’re back to the factory model again: we're not talking about the power of education to create innovation or change, but one that meets expectations placed upon it from the outside world (input/output). This is also reiterated in Part II where they outline their underlying assumptions. There are vague notions in there like "reducing inequality" and "economic growth" – which, as Peter Victor has shown, can be generally conflicting demands on their own - and the relationship they have to education is certainly not a clear cut one in any way.

I’m not saying there is something inherently wrong with the factory model. We may have differing opinions on this. But it just seems to me that there needs to be an explicit, clear statement of goals. Is our goal to provide for workers for the economy, is it an input/output market driven system, or do we want to go beyond that? In this document I see a bit of this, a dash of that ... without any clear relationship model or acknowledgement that these goals can be often conflicting.

On a personal level, I’m really excited about open learning, as it seems to me the only possibility for undistorted communication we have thus far known as human beings - at least the only one I've known in my lifetime.

According to Habermas, undistorted communication must meet four conditions: 1)the symmetry condition (everyone has an equal chance to talk and listen); 2) the sincerity condition (everyone means what they say); 3) the truth condition (everyone discloses what they believe to be true); 4)the normative condition (everyone attempts to say what is right morally).

Such communication would make a free society possible in which the only force a free person must recognize is the "unforced force of the better argument". This is not just an elitist notion, since "in a process of enlightenment, there can only be participants." For Habermas, we should seek a balance between instrumental and critical reason, between science and the ethical and the aesthetic dimension that have been unbalance by power and money, state and economy. Open education seems to have the potential to go beyond all of that, to seek out Habermas's "participants" like no other instrument we've created so far, and that's what makes it such an exciting concept.