The reason for these paradigm changes is that each wave of change creates different ends and means – different purposes for education and different tools for education.  During the industrial age, manual labor was the predominant form of work.  We did not need to educate many people to high levels; rather we needed to separate the future laborers from the future managers and professionals by flunking them out.  We needed a system that could sort the students – that would leave the slower students behind.  So we invented time-based student progress, norm-referenced testing, and letter (or number) grades.

 

The one-room schoolhouse was the predominant paradigm in the agrarian age; the current “factory model of schools” in the industrial age; and the learner-centered paradigm (which only exists in about 1% of schools in the U.S. so far) in the information age.  Bela Banathy wrote about the “evolutionary imbalance” that has resulted from society evolving into the information age while our educational systems are still in the industrial age.  This evolutionary imbalance poses a severe threat to our country, our society, and our individuals.

 

But in the information age, knowledge work is becoming predominant, so we need a system that is focused on maximizing every student's learning – one in which no child is left behind – one  in which student progress is based on learning, not time.  The hidden curriculum in the industrial-age paradigm includes compliance and tolerance for boring tasks, which were important preparation for the assembly line but are counter-productive for knowledge work.  Now we need a hidden curriculum of initiative, problem solving, and collaboration

 

Personal Considerations

One of the few things all people agree on is that students learn at different rates, yet our current paradigm of education tries to teach a fixed amount of content in a fixed amount of time.  So the current structure, by basing student progress on time rather than learning, is designed to leave children behind:

• It forces slower students on before they have mastered the material (so they accumulate deficits that virtually condemn them to flunking out), and

• It holds faster learners back, demotivating them and squandering their sorely needed talents.  

 

For personal considerations we must transform education so that each student moves on only when s/he has learned the current material, and as soon as s/he has learned the current material.  Until we do this, all changes we make will be inconsequential, and we will continue to leave many children behind, especially those who are disadvantaged.  

 

Of course, customizing student progress like this requires fundamental changes throughout the entire system: the instructional, assessment, and record-keeping subsystems; the roles of teachers (from sage on the stage to guide on the side), roles of students (from passive, teacher-directed to active, self-directed), roles of parents (from cookie bakers to partners in their children’s learning), and roles of technology (from tool for the teacher to tool for the learner); and much more.  It requires paradigm change.  The nature of the changes needed is described in The New Paradigm.