America’s role in the coming age: Our place in the world economy, in the emerging global community, is no longer “the industrial giant.” That much is certain. The days of blue collar middle class America are over (for the most part). While there will always be exceptions, there are now cheaper and better means of creating stuff in the world.
America has a cultural identity which emphasizes individualism, creativity, and innovation. As a nation of immigrants, we are all descended from people who did not settle for “business as usual,” and who took serious risks in order to re-create, and re-invent themselves in the “land of opportunity.” We are the land of opportunity because we have a culture that celebrates trail-blazing.
We are also blessed with an incredible diversity of perspectives. Few places in the world boast such an amalgam of cultures, such a lack of a dominant social reference frame. Ironically, our unity can be derived from our respect for this diversity.
While we are also endowed with wondrous natural resources, these 2 characteristics of our population (fearless trailblazing and cultural diversity) are our greatest assets. They must be the focus of the new America: a nation of innovation, a solution-generating engine, and a global leader of creative enterprise.
While production will always be instrumental (though it will change), ideas are the greatest economic product in the coming age, and if we are to capitalize on our social and cultural resources, we must do all we can to encourage the free exchange and exploration of all that could be. We must focus our attention on producing an environment with the fewest possible restrictions on the exchange of ideas. That means that we must, wherever possible:
1. support collaboration
The problems of the coming age are far too complex for individuals to solve. Indeed, the problems of the past have proven too complex as well, as indicated by the unexpected consequences of most “solutions” from the past hundred years (and more). Many of our past errors could have been avoided through greater interdisciplinary collaboration. We can only find solutions to modern challenges through collaborative efforts across and between disciplines
2. engage in transparent enterprise
To facilitate collaboration
3. reduce the presence of counter-information - false claims meant to favor specific ideas at the expense of truth
To eliminate the unnecessary burden of re-proving what is already known
4. model open-mindedness at all levels
To encourage inclusion and consideration of ideas based on their merit and not the personal traits of their originators. Values ‘trickle across,’ but especially ‘down’ since prominent figures are seen and heard most
5. model intellectual risk-taking at all levels (honesty and vulnerability)
All innovation requires some amount of personal risk; at the very least, there is a risk of rejection. Learning, similarly, requires risk-taking
6. model inclusion at all levels
To get the most from our phenomenal diversity, but also to counter the perception of others as “others.” This has dramatic positive national security implications as well as educational ones
7. remove policies which favor specific demographics
de-emphasize individual accomplishment in favor of collaborative achievement to reinforce the value of joint enterprise and thus, finding worth in all
8. minimize the stress of finding and maintaining access to basic necessities for survival
to liberate the minds of citizens for the more important work of problem solving and innovation
-security
-personal
-public
-health
>nutrition
>care
What part does education play? Public education, perhaps America’s greatest institution (as it is intended), is more important than ever in the coming age. Learning, as a value, is the cornerstone of the new America. This is not a stretch for us. As mentioned above, we are a nation of trail-blazers, and that sort of pioneering risk, combined with an appropriate amount of discipline, is exactly what is necessary for good learning. We need to put learning at the front of every aspect of society.
With education happening everywhere, our public schools will increasingly serve as moderators and facilitators, as well as the purveyors of those abstracted ideas not so directly accessible through practical application (but which are essential to much of the ‘cutting edge’ of development).
This will be our mantra: The quest for understanding is riddled with treasure, and there are infinite paths to travel.
How can schools best support this mantra? Learning must not be about absorbing what is known. While existing knowledge is a valuable scaffold on which to stand, what’s much more important is the ability to address challenges not yet encountered. Further, history shows that much of our most valuable insights occurred when people challenged the very foundations of our understanding, pointing out structural weaknesses in that scaffold. For that reason, learning should be a personal journey of inquiry, where meaning and purpose is drawn from within each of us, and fed by the ideas of our companions and our predecessors. Questions must lead the way, not answers. Answers are the end of the road.
1. Recruiting and retaining excellent educators: The tools for a productive and successful educational experience in any environment, and for any student, exist. Lack of access to those tools and/or willingness to learn to use them is usually behind any failure to produce desirable results. Such a commitment can be daunting, as it is a career commitment (at least multi-year), and thus merits appropriate incentives. While effective teaching is inherently rewarding, becoming and remaining effective is generally very difficult.
If we are to recruit, train, and continually develop the best we have to offer (teachers should be the creme of the crop), we must make teaching very desirable.
A priority, even before cosmetic features of schools and some instructional materials (within reason), should be funding faculty and administration adequately as to recruit dedicated innovators willing to do what it takes to create a successful educational environment.
Lovely facilities are wonderful, but the best educators can turn anything into a learning experience.
Further, funding must be sufficient to provide teachers with time and space to collaborate, and collectively develop as professionals.
2. Developing Exceptional Teachers: Channels of communication and cooperation within and between schools is also key to success. Schools should be research facilities - research into instructional innovation - and that research must be available to interested parties.
And pay structures should incentivize continual development (commitment, leadership, effective innovation), and hold instructors accountable for their gains not through the test scores of their students, but through vetted academic research. That is, instructors would be expected to share their experiences (through co-teaching and peer observations), produce reports outlining their instructional experiments, innovations, and gains (and failures!), direct staff training sessions when new techniques are shown to be effective, and support colleagues’ implementation of strategies that they champion.
3. Schools must be inclusive: All of the most effective schools, in any environment, pay respect to the members of the community that they serve. We should go a step further; schools should welcome all members of the community to participate in some way. This is not always easy, but if we are to model cooperative enterprise in education and society, it needs to take place at every level. And for every challenge there are at least as many benefits.
Every community has a wealth of skill and perspective. Professionals can offer valuable resources and insight not available to teachers, as well as providing context for learning experiences (demonstrating a connection between what is being studied and what exists outside the classroom). In this way, schools can cater to the specific needs of their unique communities without sacrificing rigor.
It invigorates the community for constituents to feel they have value to the coming generation. It empowers and involves parents and neighbors to feel connected to the education of the children.
4. Learning must be relevant: Why, after all, must we construct an artificial environment in which to learn, when there are countless resources that are practical, urgent, and impactful, all around us. Granted, there are a number of ideas that are fundamental to much of what is practical, but which cannot be approached without some amount of modeling and/or purely cognitive exercise, but even those skills and ideas are, indirectly, connected with something real. And why would anyone learn unless the learning is relevant?
The answer is artificial incentive structures. Up to this point, we have relied largely on artificial incentives to motivate students, whether parental pressure, grading, competitive college application, or “permanent records.” Each of these may or may not have value to certain students, and even when they do, it is by some amount of deception that they are effective. Why not allow natural inherent human incentives to guide learning? Our minds are wired to learn and, indeed, it is nearly impossible to prevent it. Our social needs are among the most powerful and urgent of any motivator, and if we are immersed in a culture which values exploration and discovery, it is only by a challenging up-river effort that we stall our own learning. This, coupled with a clear set of goals - for the school, the community, and each student - provides a focus which brings into view the purpose for most, if not all, educational experiences. And there are clear and present issues that need to be dealt with in our communities and in our society - and which can be the framework of our curricula.
Conclusion: America would benefit from a paradigm shift in the direction of collaborative idea-generation. This applies to entrepreneurship as well as production and maintenance within our communities. To do this, we need to reform our educational policy such that learning becomes a universal value. Public education, as it was originally intended, should become a community resource, but it should also become a machine for driving integration, innovation, and collaboration. Schools can be innovators in the way that we wish our citizens to be innovators, and communication between members of institutions, and between institutions, can model the sort of collaboration that will bring about real solutions to pressing social challenges. Finally, schools can once again be resources for the communities they serve, and at the same time benefit from the resources within the community. These changes will not be easy. We need to offer sufficient incentives to teachers such that the profession is as desirable as it is valuable, and make teachers accountable for their instruction in a way that not only encourages experimentation and continual, collaborative development, but models those values for students and society.
