Societal dissatisfaction with the contemporary performance of schools and students is evident throughout North America. In response to these often ardent public concerns, many educators are in the midst of major efforts to adapt to new circumstances. Progressive change may fail in part because the sources and targets of this dissatisfaction are complex, even chaotic. Amidst the vortex of forces that impinge on a system undergoing profound change, clear directions for productive restructuring are hard to discern.
In order to achieve a better perspective on this transitional moment in North American education, we need a coherent conceptual framework that encompasses the full picture of that transition. In this paper, I draw on current research in human development, education, and social change in order to describe one such framework. In simplest terms, this framework arises from a core question: What educational system works best to support the development of a learning society?
There are a number of key elements that require attention in constructing a conceptual framework to address this question. First we require a clear analysis of current concerns. This diagnosis must arise from a comprehensive view of the system rather than as a set of unrelated pieces, however crucial each of those pieces may be.
Second, we need to understand how the external environment for education is changing, so that we do not generate solutions to yesterday's problems instead of tomorrow's. Two patterns are central to understanding the context in which this dynamic is occurring (Keating & Mustard, 1993): the changing face of diversity in North American society; and the techno-economic paradigm shift that we are experiencing in response to global conditions.
One important outcome of such an analysis is the recognition that our perceived problems with schools are not attributable entirely to schools. We need to examine education in a broader context that simultaneously addresses family, community, and societal issues.
Third, we need a clear idea of where we hope to go if we have any hope of getting there. The notion of a learning society offers one valuable model, especially when it is viewed as an on-going process rather than as an idealized, utopian panacea (Keating, 1995; Task Force on Human Development, 1992).
Finally, we need to explore how to use this coherent conceptual framework to guide practical action in the everyday life of schools. In doing so, we become aware of how fundamentally we need to restructure education to serve our most important aspirations. In particular, we need to find ways to engage and integrate the contributions of a wide range of professionals and citizens. Indeed, transformation is a better metaphor than transition, as we gain an appropriate perspective on the challenges we face.
As Fullan (1991) has noted, meaningful social change in general, and educational change in particular, is difficult to achieve. A key condition for such change appears to be a shift in the core conceptual frameworks held by the participants. The current volume attests to the profound pressures for change affecting contemporary schools. A shared conceptual framework, based on the best current understanding of human development, broad social transformations, and the processes of learning, is essential to our ability to adapt. The notion of a learning society may be a useful and coherent conceptual framework (Keating, 1995, in press a; Keating & Mustard, 1993). In essence, a learning society has two goals: the improvement of population competence, coping, health, and well-being; and the effective coordination and use of human resources to achieve a broad range of economic and social aspirations. A learning society recognizes that innovation in specific social institutions and practices is required to adapt to broad socioeconomic and technological shifts, and that such adaptation must be self-renewing.
The rapid social and economic changes we are encountering as we approach the 21st Century present complex and unprecedented challenges to contemporary societies. (For a more detailed overview, see Keating [1995] and Keating & Mustard [1993].) These changes undoubtedly herald fundamental structural rearrangements. Societies now must cope simultaneously with global economic competition, the demand for new competencies in the population, the provision of opportunities for health and well-being across the population, and the maintenance of the social fabric for nurturing, socializing, and educating the next generation.
It grows more important to attend to the basic requirements for healthy and competent human development as the pace of social change quickens. How well these requirements are met forms the foundations for future population health and competence, and hence economic prosperity. The pace, magnitude, and complexity of social change are felt by many as overwhelming and uncontrollable. This perceived lack of control may in turn distort other perceptions, further diminishing our ability to respond and adapt to change. This core dynamic--accelerating change and decreasing sense of control--makes it difficult to engage in thoughtful planning.
A coherent framework for understanding these broad changes may be of value in breaking this cycle. Such an understanding might begin with a recognition of the fundamentally social nature of the human species, and thus the powerful impact that social environments have on human development.
Homo sapiens is a social species. We play, work, interact, learn, and reproduce in social groups throughout our lives. We develop in social relationships from the earliest period of life, and we remain dependent longer on being taken care of for our survival than any other primate. At our core, then, we need social groups to survive. The nature of our early experiences--most of which occur through social interactions--plays a critical role throughout life in how we cope, how we learn, and how competent we become.
The nature of the social environment in which we develop is thus a key determinant of our quality of life. These influences are powerful throughout the lifespan, but particularly so in early life. Diverse life outcomes--positive and negative--are closely associated with identifiable differences in social experiences.
In turn, the quality of the human social environment is a function of the competence that is available within the society. The nurture, education, and socialization of new members of the group depend on the skills and commitment of more mature members, and on social arrangements that facilitate high quality interaction between generations (O'Neill, 1994).
Although these demands are not historically new, we face additional challenges unknown to our primate cousins and to our own quite recent ancestors. We have much in common with our primate cousins, but humans are unique in having developed the capabilities of conscious self-reflection, cultural transmission of skills and knowledge through language and other symbolic means, cumulative technological development, and civilization. In evolutionary terms, these changes are quite recent (Keating, 1995; Keating & Mustard, 1993).
Large numbers are sometimes hard to grasp in the abstract, but we can get a better sense of time using a calendar year analogy. If we take 100,000 years as an estimate of the time elapsed since the emergence of fully modern humans, and place it on the scale of a single year, we would note that our species first moved into small urban centres, supported by agriculture, about the end of November, and started an industrial revolution on the afternoon of New Year's Eve.
Just a few minutes ago, we launched experiments in instantaneous global communication, information technology, and multicultural metropolism. This recency is further exaggerated if we start our hypothetical year with the appearance of the tool-making hominid line from which we derive, in which case the correct baseline is in the millions of years.
The origins and mechanisms of this evolutionary process remain controversial, but several important features have gained fairly broad consensus. To grasp the first feature, consider the social sophistication of non-human primates. Not all of our complex social arrangements and behaviours are a function of cultural experiences alone; other primates are also social strategists of the first order (Tomasello, Kruger, & Ratner, 1993). Much of our intuitive understanding of how to function in groups has a lengthy evolutionary history. We added language capabilities to this already rich social mix, yielding apparently infinite potential for complex communication. Language enables much more complex social communication, and perhaps initially arose out of a need to maintain cohesion in larger groups (Donald, 1991; Dunbar, 1992).
The larger group size may have contributed the economic benefits of organization and specialization of work, permitting more effective exploitation of harsh habitats and a primitive form of shared risk. The teaching and learning of special skills were also enhanced by language, and technological development ensued--first with stones, and then with transformed materials such as iron and bronze. This unification of instrumental and symbolic functions is apparently unique to Homo sapiens, and has been proposed as the starting point of fully human intelligence (Vygotsky, 1978).
We are different from other primates in another critical way. We drew on our increasing symbolic and instrumental sophistication (that is, language and tool use) to establish connections between troops and tribes. We can date the origins of this pattern to about 40,000 years ago (Stringer & Gamble, 1993), using as evidence the remarkable explosion of symbolic forms (particularly art) and the rapid spread of more complex stone technologies, which had been previously unchanged for a million years or more (Schick & Toth, 1993).
The accelerating pace of technological and social change is thus based on our unique penchant for collaborative learning across formerly rigid group boundaries. Our ability to encode and enhance this learning through progressively more efficient cultural means--oral histories, formal instruction, writing, and now information technologies--contributes directly to this acceleration. Changes in the means of communication have non-trivial consequences for cognitive activity--how we think, what we know, and how we learn.
A well understood example is the connection between the practice of literacy and the development of logic, argument, reflection, and metacognitive understanding (Cole & Scribner, 1974; Olson, 1994; Scribner & Cole, 1981). As literacy spreads, so do literate habits of mind. This combination of a new technology with a new set of capabilities in the population creates a potent new medium for discourse among previously isolated groups and indviduals.
In concert with changes in social communication (such as language, literacy, and information technology), we have continued to discover new means for extracting material subsistence from the earth. The agricultural revolution first made possible the congregation and settled existence of large groups of humans in specific places over a long period of time (that is, cities).
We know relatively little about forms of governance in prehistoric hominid or human troops (and may never know much), but we do know that large-scale human settlements were accompanied by increasingly formal arrangements for the distribution of work and its resulting wealth, and for the maintenance of social structures. The production demands of agricultural societies were such that a relatively large proportion of the population was needed to provide physical energy directly into the system. Various forms of strict social domination formed the most frequent pattern, including slave and feudal systems.
The next major revolution in social forms occurred very recently. The industrial revolution removed human labor from the direct energy loop required for material production, but created a demand for ever more complex arrangements for the division of labor. We see again that the technological innovations were dependent upon concomitant changes in social structures and practices.
These examples illustrate the on-going, mutually causal interplay between technological and social innovation. This may be difficult to visualize initially, as we are more accustomed to linear or main-effect models, in which an isolated cause yields a specific outcome (Keating, in press b; Senge, 1990). But as we trace four major transformations in our species' history, we can see that changes in technology generate demands and opportunities for changes in societal functioning, and changes in society generate demands and opportunities for technological innovation including the following:
Another such transformational moment seems to be upon us, arising from already existing information technologies--instantaneous global communication, unlimited knowledge storage and retrieval, sophisticated techniques for data analysis and simulation, and artificially intelligent design with robotic manufacture. An overview of some key contrasts affecting the current transformation are noted in Table 1. These comparisons are based on the presumption that we can build a learning society capable of generating and making effective use of human talent. More dystopic futures, with increasing social divisions and marginalization, are also possible, perhaps even more probable. The goal of a learning society may enhance the prospects of avoiding such dystopic outcomes.
| Industrial Age | Information Age | |
| Pedagogy | Knowledge transmission | Knowledge building |
| Prime mode of learning | Individual | Collaborative |
| Educational goals | Conceptual grasp for the | Conceptual grasp and | few; basic skills and algo- | intentional knowledge | rithms for the many | building for all |
| Nature of diversity | Inherent, categorical | Transactional, historical |
| Dealing with diversity | Selection of elites, basics | Developmental model of | for broad population | life-long learning for broad population |
| Anticipated workplaces | Factory models, | Collaborative learning | vertical bureaucracies | organizations |
Unique among species, then, we have created what systems theorists call an iterative feedback loop between our ways of using material resources and the ways in which we organize our social lives. This new pattern of cultural and social change continually reshapes the ecological habitats in which we live and work--and in which subsequent generations will develop (Keating & Mustard, 1993).
To deal with these issues, we will need to become learning societies. We will need to examine all social institutions in light of their ability to support human development, both individually and collectively. The role of education in this agenda is prominent, although we cannot view it as an entity separate from other social institutions.
In order to situate our discussion of transforming education in the service of a learning society, it is helpful to summarize the content of two current and controversial dilemmas, and to place them in their social and historical context.
The first focuses on how well we are doing as a society in developing the expertise and learning skills that we will need to be globally competitive in an economic sense. The striking differences between North America and Asia in mathematical achievement--a cornerstone skill of the new knowledge-based economies in the view of many observers--have been particularly troubling (Stevenson & Stigler, 1992). As well, the apparent downward secular trend in overall academic performance across successive cohorts of North American students in the past several decades has raised concerns about the apparent deterioration of educational standards.
Several legitimate criticisms forestall too hasty an acceptance of this broad picture. The validity of the measuring instruments themselves can be questioned; they may be capturing superficial aspects of educational achievement rather than more fundamental features. The scope for more complex thinking and problem solving is necessarily limited, and if we force everything through too narrow a window of accountability we may distort important educational and learning goals (Frederiksen, 1984).
On the other hand, one might make the case that a more comprehensive assessment could readily show the international and cohort comparisons to be worse rather than better. Traditional educational practices appear to be limited in their ability to generate conceptually grounded and critically aware thinking, as opposed to more algorithmic or rule-based learning (Keating & Crane, 1990). Also, the sheer magnitude of the differences in some international comparisons, including virtually non-overlapping distributions of performance indicators, preclude easy dismissal of this evidence.
An important piece of this puzzle is blurry, however. Because we do not routinely track educational performance longitudinally, we have few reliable indicators of how we are really doing, compared to how we have done in the past and where we want to be in the future. The dearth of reliable indicators of educational performance parallels the absence of human development indicators more generally (Brooks-Gunn, Brown, Duncan, & Moore, 1994).
Two opposing but equally simplistic solutions are often voiced in response to the observations about losing ground in either international or historical comparisons.
Back to basics. The first response is "back to basics." From this perspective, the culprit is the dilution of academic standards, which has come about in several ways: the inclusion of groups who are not well prepared for instruction delivered in the traditional way; the inclusion of topics involving personal or social life experiences, taking time away from academic fundamentals; and the resistance of educators to any form of grading or judging that could diminish a student's sense of self esteem, as in the promotion of students to the next grade for social rather than academic reasons.
Often this critique is paired with the belief that mainstreaming of special education students is a particular burden, both in how it affects classroom dynamics and in how it draws scarce resources away from children without identified special needs. The preferred solution in this view is to return to a perceived past in which educational practices were undiluted in these ways.
Nostalgia is understandable, but it is rarely a sound guide to productive action. The golden past to which this view alludes never existed in quite the way it is remembered. More to the point, however, is the reality that the world has, in any case, moved on. Merely maintaining the status quo is unlikely to be sufficient for future needs, not least because the substantive demands are increasing. Facility with rapidly shifting information technologies is an obvious example of a new expectation.
As well, our traditional educational system was built on the premise that we would likely need only a small elite with the skills to guide the efforts of the rest of the population which itself needed only a modicum of formal learning. Learning the relevant rules and algorithms is sufficient for following instructions, but it alone does not prepare people to be active participants in learning organizations.
The new economies may well depend on a much greater depth and breadth of population competence in order to function well. When limited skills were economically adequate, a high "discard" rate could be tolerated. Failure to develop our human resources as fully as possible in the future may hamper our potential to become an innovation based economy.
Standards as the culprit. The competing view sees schools as the core of the problem, rather than as any possible route to a solution. From this perspective, schools themselves diminish an innate desire for learning, through relentless messages of comparative failure. Historically, groups considered less powerful are systematically shown to be less competent, or even incompetent, relative to (mostly arbitrary) performance standards. Since the standards are themselves biased, according to this view, the sense of failure is largely illusory, and serves mainly to reproduce existing power relations in society. With this view, the core problem is too much emphasis on standards, not too little; too much emphasis on excellence and elites; and too little concern with equity and diversity.
From the perspective of the learning society we hope to build, we can recognize the legitimate concerns of each view. We can go a step further, however, and explore ways in which excellence and equity are complementary rather than competing pressures. This is assisted by a revised understanding of human learning and development. Such a revision would focus on the developmental supports for learning that each child requires, and on the fundamentally social nature of learning that affords collaborative learning opportunities to individuals at different levels of expertise (Keating, 1990, 1991).
Assuring equity in the face of population diversity is historically the key theme of the special education movement. Recall that the special education movement has its roots in the broader movement to include all members of the society, whatever their physical or skill limitations, in as normalized life situations as possible. To achieve this in educational institutions, the effort has quite sensibly been to oppose exclusion wherever it occurs, and to address the issue of skill or physical limitations through supplementary means--enhancing physical access and use of facilities, additional instructional resources for compensatory efforts, and so on.
Quite understandable in hindsight is the continuing dynamic that this effort set up. The continuing tension between inclusion and exclusion is one key indicator of this tension. In an earlier phase, extending educational participation often meant establishing segregated facilities to cater to those with special needs. In a later phase, children with special needs were brought inside the regular schools, but again usually in segregated settings within them.
The effort to mainstream more fully has encountered resistance for several reasons. It is partly due to society's continuing perception of the world in terms of normality and deviance, "us" versus "them." Fortunately, these public perceptions are changing, albeit slowly. The resistance is also partly due to the belief that excellence and equity are in fact contradictory goals, and that the undermining of regular education is too great a price for the value of accommodating diversity. Another part of the resistance is the belief that there is little that we can in fact do to assist students who have special developmental challenges, and thus we are devoting scarce resources to well-intentioned but fundamentally futile endeavours.
So long as the discourse remains locked in this historic dynamic of the tension between exclusion and inclusion, we are unlikely to make progress toward either excellence or equity. We will remain locked in this futile discourse until we place it in a broader conceptual framework, such as the one outlined in this paper. Unpacking the history of this dynamic from a learning society perspective may be helpful in recasting the core issues.
This is not the first occasion that society, confronting a large and difficult issue, has charged schools with the responsibility to cope with it. This often happens when the task is too challenging for society to cope with directly. To be clear, the task is of how modern societies can accommodate diversity and the legitimate demands of the population, who wish to share the social and material benefits that are generated by the work of the people in the society. But the models of both society and education within which we now operate were forged in an earlier era, to cope with the demands of the industrial age, not the information age. These outdated models focus on selection and exclusion, creating barriers to the building of a learning society.
A further complication of this picture is the nature of the organizational structure within which special education evolved, particularly in North America. The vertical bureaucracies that emerged within educational institutions were similar to the factory and corporate organizations that emerged at about the same time. To deal with the demand for accommodating diversity, it was necessary for schools to do so within their existing structure.
This forced marriage of a fixed organizational structure with a movement aimed at meeting individual needs has had numerous unintended consequences, some of them unfortunate. We can start with the necessity of setting rules for entitlement to special educational services, because they required additional resources. To administer this entitlement method, a separate, powerful, and massive bureaucracy emerged within educational institutions. At the same time, it became evident to parents that access to needed resources was most readily accomplished not through serious reform of education, but through laying claim to special educational services. As with all self-organizing systems, new bureaucracies are driven to expand, and this one made common cause with parents who were demanding additional categories through which special education resources could flow.
Because the model was based on a categorical assumption--normal children are assigned to regular education, children with deficits to special education--this expansion could take only one form. More and more categories of exceptionality needed to be created. Parents lobbied to have their children identified as possessing a previously unknown deficit. This phenomenon may be otherwise difficult to imagine, but is rendered obvious given these historical circumstances. Similarly understandable is the enlargement of quasi-judicial procedures for the review and appeal of special education decisions, which have further eroded scarce educational resources.
The political process of defining and adjudicating categories of exceptionality has rendered the system resistant to the intrusion of new knowledge and conceptual frameworks on the problems of learning. At the core of the system is the requirement that problems in learning be seen as internal to the person--otherwise, why should there be an entitlement to special resources?
Furthermore, access to these resources requires finding the diagnostic category into which the child falls, generating a contradiction whenever the locally available educational program associated with that category may not be the best for the child. The consequent, deliberate mislabelling to serve the child's best interest is both offensive and violates professional ethics. Children who are having difficulty in learning for whom there is no categorical diagnosis receive less attention. Finally, the focus of educational attention is entirely on intervention with individuals, rather than prevention for broad groups of at-risk children.
As the kinds of diversity increase in society, the creakiness of the traditional model becomes ever more burdensome. Many children are not getting what they need in order to develop optimally. If we continue to regard all these cases as defects to be diagnosed, we will miss the point. We need to restructure education so as to accommodate diversity in a productive way, and simultaneously to elevate the overall population outcomes in terms of educational quality.
A restructuring that can accommodate the demands for high level competence and the demands for dealing with the full diversity in the population will require a new perspective on the nature of human development and diversity. In particular, the normative and selective model of education will need to be replaced by a more coherent developmental model.
How can we best understand the nature of the diversity that we are encountering in schools? Several kinds of diversity are commonly referred to, including:
Although these are often seen as different kinds of diversity, they in fact all share important common features. One is that the developmental history of the individual is paramount to present performance and to future growth. For example, we used to imagine that the prospects for Down syndrome children were extremely limited, and most of them were institutionalized at an early age based on this premise. We have learned that many Down syndrome individuals can acquire significant life and social capabilities, and are likely to do so when their early social environment is highly enriched (Cicchetti & Beeghly, 1990).
Similarly, many children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds do not experience a learning environment that fosters quantitative understanding, as do their more fortunate peers. In the absence of early intervention, this is likely to create subsequent problems, such as limited educational and career opportunities. With appropriate intervention, it appears that they become capable of learning from regular instruction in these quantative domains (Griffin, Case, & Siegler, 1994).
A second common theme is that there exists for all children a set of circumstances that will promote their competence at any point in development. For some children, these experiences are the normative ones of traditional schooling. The proportions here may be changing as a secular trend with the social changes described above. The estimated population rates for all mental health problems or dysfunctional learning are quite high, at 25 percent or higher (Offord et al., 1994).
For other children, the requisite experiences may be highly specific and quite daunting to provide. The original goal of special education remains a sound one: the establishment of an appropriate learning environment for each child. This task is rendered far more difficult when we fail to enhance the quality of the general social environment. For this and other reasons, advocates for both regular and special education need to collaborate better with other child-care providers and with the broader community to improve and protect the quality of the social environment (Keating, 1993).
The key point is that we need to attend more closely to the developmental needs of each child, regardless of an identifiable diagnosis or categorical label. This understanding offers a realistic way to achieve educational integration of all students. When supplemented by the exciting work on the linkage between collaborative learning and networked learning environments, the prospects for emerging from unhelpful dichotomies, such as regular versus special education and excellence versus equity, begin to seem more realistic.
Earlier I identified several key characteristics that distinguish the developmental from the categorical model of education (Keating, 1990). These include the recognition that there are multiple pathways to the development of expertise, not just one; a shift in focus away from underlying cognitive abilities and toward understanding the fundamental cognitive activities that we engage in as we acquire expertise; an appreciation of the importance of domain-specific expertise as well as more general habits of learning and thinking; and a shift in assessment from a primary goal of categorical placement, toward a guided attempt to adapt instruction so that it is maximally relevant to the child's development at that point in time. This problem is exacerbated by the frequently poor fit between classification and programming (Ysseldyke, Algozzine, & Thurlow, 1992). Elsewhere, I have described an example of how this might be applied to a particular sector of students who have been poorly served by both the regular education and the special education model, namely, gifted students--or in our new terminology, developmentally advanced students (Keating, 1991).
In light of the preceding discussion, we can link some of these key distinctions with the broader social forces within which education is embedded, in a comparison of educational perspectives that evolved in the industrial age with those that may serve us better in an information age.
Information technology, especially computer networking, reduces the absolute value of acquired knowledge, because it is so readily available (Keating, 1995). The advantage accrues to those whose goal is knowledge building (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994). This is further enhanced when the knowledge building is collaborative rather than strictly within the individual. The goals of course are quite different. In an industrial era, only a few people were required to plan and innovate (the "heads"), whereas the masses were expected merely to execute repetitive tasks (the "hands"). An educational system for this model would ideally function as an honest selection mechanism, to assure the best and brightest become heads. This never worked well in practice. As part of society, schools tended to reproduce social class distinctions based on nonrelevant factors, especially social class.
In any case, this selection mechanism is far less relevant in an information age, where positions in bureaucracies are far less stable, credentials are less of a guarantee of status, and the nature of work is changing at a frantic pace. The recent decimation of middle management in both the private and public sectors is but one example of this.
Enterprises and organizations that are capable of adapting to rapidly shifting conditions will become more dominant in the future, and to support this we need to expand competence more broadly and deeply throughout the population than we have been able to do previously. In this regard, the tension between regular and special education takes on a new character. In effect, we need to incorporate key principles of special education throughout education more generally, and we need to base all education more explicitly on a developmental model.
In a previous discussion, I summarized the core conceptual distinction in this way: Those individuals who give evidence of being best adapted to current social and educational practices, revealed in test scores and school performance, are defined in the categorical model as most generally adaptable (that is, intelligent) due to a more optimal underlying design. A consequence of this conflation of two quite different meanings is the assumption that educational difficulty is legitimately explained as a failure of adaptability of the student.
From a developmental perspective, we would recognize that success in a particular ecological ... niche is not necessarily a sign of adaptability to a wide range of niches. Moreover, we are more likely to look for ways in which the instructional environment has failed to adapt to the developmental diversity that differential histories inevitably generate. By shifting the onus from a lack of adaptiveness in the child to a lack of adaptiveness in the setting, we can begin a close examination of the ways to design better learning environments, rather than simply demarcating presumed design flaws in the child. (Keating, 1990, p. 264)
It is far from unusual for schools to be the focus of serious social criticism for a range of perceived shortcomings. For those who have devoted their careers and their intellectual and emotional energy to the field of education, this criticism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, we are understandably defensive in response to such critiques, especially when they are launched by those who have not invested their energies in this pursuit and who claim to have instant solutions to what are properly regarded as extremely difficult, if not intractable problems. Some may be inclined to ask from what basis these outsiders speak so authoritatively, particularly when some of the criticism does not correspond with teachers' and students' everyday lives. On the other hand, we are tempted to join in even the most damning choruses of criticism, because with an insider's experience, we know how deep the problems actually run.
I take it as part of my task to argue that neither response--defensiveness nor despair--is warranted. I propose instead that the particular nature of current concerns about schooling in our society offers a unique opportunity to make substantive changes. Even more, I argue that the current alignment of social pressures and growth in our conceptual understanding represent a transformational moment in the role of education in society. How we approach this opportunity is likely to play a significant role in the outcome of that transformation.
I make this argument with full recognition that many believe the inertia in the institutions of schooling to be so great as to eliminate any chance of positive transformation. If we were to base our judgment strictly on probabilities, we would necessarily side with that view. Past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour, generally speaking.
But two considerations are omitted from the merely probable view. First, complex, self-organizing systems--of which social institutions are one example--are stable under normal conditions. This is why the past, in general, predicts the future quite well. But we also know that such systems occasionally undergo rather dramatic reorganizations over very short time periods. Such transformations are by their nature hard to predict, but we can identify some of the critical conditions that make them possible.
Many of the critical conditions are present in the case of contemporary schooling. These critical conditions include a deepening awareness among educational practitioners that the institution is not functioning well, and that more than small changes are called for. Also critical is a growing recognition in the larger society that successful schools, and thus successful students and graduates, are fundamental to the future well-being of society, including its ability to generate wealth and maintain our relatively high standard of living. The mere presence of these setting conditions does not assure that a transformation will occur, but it does make it possible.
The second consideration is less theoretical. It is in fact a call to action. The reality is that we need schools to work well for society to prosper. They represent an enormous collective investment in the social infrastructure for developing human resources. Dismissing this investment and starting from scratch is not only not feasible, but also wantonly wasteful of the abundance of talent and commitment that already exists among professionals involved in and committed to education.
This is not to argue for complacency, nor to suggest that the debate over schools should be limited to insiders. It becomes increasingly apparent that major transformations are necessary, amounting in effect to reinvention of the institutions of education. Some recent simulations of how large and complex systems do change suggest that a widespread perception of the necessity for change is itself a substantial contributing factor to the likelihood that change will occur (Fullan, 1991).
Several of the key conditions for transformational change thus seem to be present: strong external constraints arising from changing societal demands of what we expect schools to accomplish; and internal constraints arising from the perceptions of those who work within the system that fundamental difficulties exist, and are growing.
Even if it is the case that dramatic changes are possible in the near future, there is of course no guarantee that the direction of change will be socially desirable. Particularly as a response to a perceived crisis, we may make choices that are counterproductive in the long run. In particular, there is a substantial risk of recreating even more rigid social structures, featuring a "cognitive elite" and a large proportion of marginalized members of the population. Finding ways to make use of the full population's competence is the key to avoiding this, and of building a learning society.
As noted above, a coherent conceptual framework from which various ideas and proposals can be evaluated is essential. In a period of rapid change, many possible choices are advanced, with varying degrees of credibility. How are we to judge them? Armed with a coherent conceptual framework of what is needed and why, we are in a better position to see what possibilities are realistic, and desirable.
If our educational goals are focused on building a learning society, we can identify a number of key themes that will likely be important as we move forward.
A step in the right direction would be to devise ways in which schools and school boards can themselves become learning organizations, harnessing the diversity of professional expertise in a collaborative effort to enhance the learning of all students. Historical forms of educational leadership that preserve a hierarchical distribution of power are likely to impede this effort.
Cutting across these solitudes to create horizontal arrays of information flow and mutual support is an important task for a learning society. The design and building of learning networks, supported by emerging information technologies, affords opportunities for linking community resources and for diffusing best practices more rapidly across communities.
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Last updated: June 25, 1996