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The Shape of Things to Come
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One point of possible redemption
Saving grace:   there are things that classroom learning does which, for some time yet, can't be matched by distance learning even when we do finally persuade some provider into our system of modern Socratic method. One of the things distance learning cannot provide, even with our modern Socratic methods, is the little-noticed dual plane ratification of perceptions. That dual-plane ratification process is a major factor in the emergence of the conscious mind in young children, but most people — and even most teachers — don't even know that such a process exists. If schools don't play to advantage the several legitimate advantages which they do have, where will they be when the crunch comes?

O


What's needed right now
Urgency and scope are defined on one level by the human minds being wasted and destroyed, on another level by the fact that even before Saylor started to create the free electronic university and begin what will become a free public utility, sociotectonic theory had been predicting major socioquakes for the educational system, on much the same bases and along the same kinds of fault line that it had predicted the likewise sudden and unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union some years ago.

In any event, given the alternatives, what parent, and what taxpayer, and what legislative bodies, are going to want to continue paying for what society is now getting from its schools? At any moment — and most likely by the year 2012 or before — a sudden huge collapse will sweep away most of our schools virtually overnight. I say this in a time when schools are about as awash with money as they have ever been.

Can this collapse be prevented? I no longer think so. Individual schools may improve their work enough to be spared, but schools generally have shown no willingness to make substantive improvements. They instead use window-dressing reform to postpone pressures, with little substantive changing behind those showy windows. Thus matters have been throughout much or most of the past half century and so matters stand — precariously — today.

Can this collapse be delayed? Not even to get viable alternatives in place, though it would be very desirable to have them in place before the socioquake hit. Nor, given the ongoing human costs, do we wish to extend the status quo for very long.

Can this collapse be mitigated? That is, I think, our task.

  1. Getting individual schools to improve enough that they won't be immediately swept away in the quake.

  2. Getting viable alternatives up and running, to which people can turn instead of totally panicking when the existing schools are swept from underfoot. The key is to ensure enough positive alternatives to prevent that panic, and to prevent the existing good in schools from getting swept away with the bad.

  3. To waste as few resources as possible in this changeover, human and material. That is why it is important to anticipate where a new system of education is headed (the pending free public utility and its swarm of new enterprises accompanying), and what it will be doing. Some cannot be anticipated, any more than could all that is now featured on the Internet have been predicted in the mid-1980s. We can, however, anticipate some particulars —

    o Economies force us toward distance learning as a major component. For that to work, though, will require such focused interactive procedures as those of Dynamic Format and Project Renaissance, with multiple participants per terminal to process, with one-another, the program contents.

    o Conceptual understanding will again become the main focus, as it did in Socratic days before rote memorization came to dominate the scene. For that reason, something like the Project Renaissance methods will be very much in use, whether or not these methods or this organization specifically are used.

    o There will be an incentive reward system for the responsible professionals tied to the rate, quality, and extent of multiply measured gains made by students. Much of the funding for such rewards will come from private corporations and reflect changing values in the world economy; foundations will have a struggle to keep up on behalf of cultural values and issues.

    o In the Information Age, we no longer can afford to leave people behind as hewers of wood, haulers of water, middle management, and cogs in the machine. We have to draw upon all that we are as human beings. That, much more than any particular method or set of methods, will transform education out of all recognition from what is there today. The sea of passive faces will disappear in favor of service to individual clients. Agencies within the new public utility context will compete to provide unique developmental services in the most supportive way possible to them, because that is what will bring them the business, just as so many innovative companies compete today in that free public utility known as the Internet.

    o During the time of the quake and for a few years afterward, there will be a tremendous release of public energy, positive or negative, constructive or destructive, in the context of education and public education. It behooves those of us in Project Renaissance, in the International Alliance of Learning, in the Dayton, Ohio, Innovation Center and in the international Schoolworld Association, and in other positive endeavors, to get as many good projects together and going as we can for that moment, to channel some of that energy into constructive work.
O

Survival

Depending on whether the socioquake can be mitigated, some individual schools and some individual teachers may survive. Obviously, those who survive will be those with something special to teach.

Individual teachers will need (1) personal experience of what they are teaching, and/or (2) special knowledge — in that priority order — and (3) special or unique skills.

Some teachers may be co-opted into the new electronic public utility in various capacities. Indeed, as did the Internet, the new electronic education public utility will, for a while, need to employ a tremendous number of people.

Some teachers may make it into the new system as providers of unique products and services.

A few, a very few teachers may survive where they are by virtue of their being the main reason their (surviving) current school has anything special.

Whoever survives, as a teacher or as a school, can do so in the long run only by offering what cannot be provided electronically from elsewhere in the entire resourced world.

O


How can the individual teacher
survive the upcoming dislocations?
  1. Developing special skills, especially uniquely valuable ways of relating directly and in person to his or her students.

  2. Developing special skills and methods of teaching. For some that will mean special facility with electronic instruction media, which will let them jump into the new public electroned utility during that initial surge in employment demand.

    For all who survive, as in-person teachers or in the electronic utility, clear mastery of special techniques will be required. Indeed, what mainly will ignite the electromedia must be to acquire and use many of those same enhanced/accelerated learning techniques.

  3. Building a unique personal base of first-hand experience, whether relative to what one is teaching or generally. Following a curriculum guide and didactically teaching-about will no longer be an option. When you speak directly from personal, first-hand experience, you are powerful. When you have to speak from someone else's knowledge — especially someone else's second-hand knowledge — even all the tricks they teach in speech classes to simulate what happens from meaningful first-hand experience, will not suffice....even though most of today's teachers are precisely stuck in that weak, ineffectual role of passing along someone else's nth-hand information, with little personal experience relevant to draw upon.

  4. So far as we now know, basic Image-Streaming is the fastest and most convenient way to build a personal, first-hand experience base and facility, followed closely by use of the Portable Memory Bank. Actual working experience in what you are teaching is certainly among the more desirable ways of obtaining first-hand experience, but alas is not always available as an option.

    So special personal skills with students, special teaching methods, and building a strong base of first-hand personal observation experience are what individual teachers will need in order to survive past the coming socioquake in our schools. No ifs, ands, or buts.

    Of course, if a lot of teachers went ahead and developed these before the great socioquake comes, much or most of that quake would be averted or mitigated. But how likely is this to develop among many of our lemmings — er, excuse me, teachers?

O


How can schools survive?
What must a school or school system do to survive the coming socioquake?

Simply put:   even its worst teaching must approach the quality of what is now the best teaching in the best schools.

That sounds out of reach for schools now struggling to lift their SAT scores even a point or so, but it isn't. Nor is it expensive to do so.

First, a lot can be achieved merely by equipping its teachers with the best educational methods available (which definitely is not the same thing as the most accepted methods!) — and most of these best methods can be learned easily, with little or, in some cases, no cost.

At current reading, most of these methods are either Suggestopedic or Socratic — Suggestopedic as can be found through the International Alliance of Learning or as taught in Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, or in some regards at Cambridge College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Socratic such as in most of the various educational methods of Project Renaissance.

Second, install a positive incentive system based entirely upon results with students — their actual gains, across a sufficiently broad spectrum of measurements. This can be done without taking anything away from standard and poorly-performing teachers:   outside funding for such legitimate incentive systems can be found in the private sector.

Private sources very much want to help education, but have already deeply wearied of throwing their money over the wall and hoping for something good to happen. A solid results-oriented system, based upon student gains, should attract a lot of support ... so much, in fact, that such an incentive system appears to be the best vehicle for bringing the remuneration, of those who are worthy to be called educators, much closer toward their true value. (And would be even in normal times!)

O
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