elemental learning

I received an email from Steven Volk a few days ago - he's a professor of education at Northeastern Illinois University who wrote an article entitled Why Go To School? In it, he speaks first on how today's schools treat students like widgets in a factory and are totally devoid of joy. Steven goes on to enumerate and describe the eleven elements that he believes are necessary for schools to do justice to their students:

1. Self; caring and empathy; peace and nonviolence; money, family, food, and happiness
2. Social responsibility; global awareness; environmental literacy; multicultural community; media literacy
3. A love for learning; creativity and imagination

This (with my ordering of his elements) makes for an interesting framing of what schools should teach. Makes a lot of sense.

School must provide a child with the ability to develop and build the atoms they will need to shape the molecules that will comprise their life. There are two kinds of atoms - basic and nuanced. The basics I've talked about before: the capacity to find information and sift through it; the ability to distill it into insight (which requires an understanding of the basics); and the skill to persuasively communicate new ideas. And the nuanced: we must help students know and embrace who they are; know and embrace the people and world around them as their own; and seek and desire the joy of learning and the pleasure of creating.

Let's say we make progress, and our high schools are able to graduate students with anything remotely resembling these atoms, what do we think will happen next? I ask because I also read this amazing article in the Chronicle of Higher Education. In a nutshell, it says that the advent of the Internet led (albeit with a longer fuse than anticipated) directly to the demise of newspapers. It goes on to say that universities may well suffer the same fate, quoting one of my heroes:

Thirty years from now, the big university campuses will be relics. ... Such totally uncontrollable expenditures, without any visible improvement in either the content or the quality of education, means that the system is rapidly becoming untenable. Peter Drucker, 1997

I totally agree. Tuition fees have risen dramatically, there is little oversight or cost control in the system (compared to a typical corporation), many professors are reluctant teachers, and in a model that celebrates anarchy (aka academic freedom), the concept of customer-centricity is largely foreign (exceptions include University of Phoenix, and it's peers). But this isn't their real problem.

Their real problem is that students entering high schools today are completely comfortable learning via iTunes U, or listening to Professor Walter Lewin's brilliant lectures at MIT Open Courseware. They may not all need formal university lectures to learn. Already university students increasingly attend electronic lectures. And when these students graduate, they will not look askance at students whose lecture bias was more electronic than personal. So the real problem will be compounded by the fact that employers a decade from now may be less interested in the academic accreditation when presented with a prospective candidate's e-portfolio, which so eloquently and persuasively demonstrates her work to-date.

It is then that the elements of learning will have reconstituted themselves. If the K-12 school system does its job well, and its graduates have been prepared with the atoms they need to create the molecules they will be, universities may end up holding a very different role in our society than they do now.

Perhaps this won't take a mere decade, and of course many universities will remain strong, but I believe the premise that is their undergrad cash cow will change dramatically. The elements of learning tomorrow will be very different from today. It's time to start preparing for this. University leaders should begin the retooling process now, or some may follow in the path of many of today's newspapers.

It's time to begin (re)creating the elements of higher learning.