50 years ago, Peter Drucker, management visionary and guru, forecast a massive shift in the kind of work that would be done in our economy – a shift from industrial work to knowledge work.
Industrial work has boundaries. It has limits. It has superiors telling inferiors what to do, how, and by when. It has clear-cut rewards/punishments for meeting clear-cut goals and targets. Industrial work is quantity-based.
Knowledge work has no boundaries. The most critical task in knowledge work is deciding what needs to be done to reach the goal. And, in many cases, one needs to identify what goals need to be reached before he/she can decide what needs to be done. Knowledge work demands constant and ongoing learning. It’s self-paced, self-regulated, and quality-based … not quantity based.
This was described in 1959. It’s now 2009. And I have to ask myself, “Why aren’t schools waking up to this? Why are we still packaging learning for industrial work?”
Think about it. Most states/provinces require their schools/teachers to guide students through chunks of information packaged in what we call a course. The boundaries are clear (be able to do/recall this, this, and this by the end of this course) and we attempt to calculate results with equal clarity (especially with the standardized testing movement of the last 15 years). What needs to be learned and reached – and why – is predetermined for students, and teachers too. It has industrial work written all over it.
Sure, the state/provincial tests we use measure quality of mastery … but by and large they measure the quality of mastery based on the prescribed quantity … which, in essence, can be reduced to “quantity of mastery.” The ubiquitous Advanced Placement Program epitomizes what I’m describing here. I know. I taught an AP course. I had to ask my students to chug, chug, chug information and churn, churn, churn it out on test after test after test in preparation for the big test. Industrial, industrial, industrial.
What we should be doing.
If we want to prepare our students for knowledge work, our educational focus has to change. We need to teach our youth how to determine their own outcomes and how to identify what they can or should do with a chunk of information instead of memorizing it for the sake of recalling it. If we want to get serious about knowledge work education, standards should focus on presenting students with real-world scenarios and/or problems, asking them to identify their own outcomes, and challenging them to reach them.
Why it’s tough to change.
I’m going to offer some practical ideas and suggestions on how we can tilt the focus of our educational delivery towards knowledge work/learning in future posts (I can’t wait actually), but I end this post with some comments on why – I think – our system continues to package teaching/learning for industrial work when we all know it’s not what we should be doing, but I’m sharing these realities because I get frustrated with too many people’s 5-minute solutions to the education problem when they ignore just how steeped it really is:
1. Efficiency. Let’s face it, teaching and testing industrial work is efficient. And efficient is cost-effective. One test can be written for an entire nation of students to take. It should also be noted that when you offer something to the public for free (i.e. public education), it has to be cost effective.
2. Licensure. Although schools are, by their nature, factory-like, what’s more significant to their perpetuation of industrial work/learning is the fact that they’re part of a world-wide licensure system. My wife recently was cleaning out her university binders and asked, “Why did I have to do all this stuff? I’m never going to use any of it again.” Answer = licensure. She did it to get a teachers license, just as a doctor takes courses/tests to get a doctor’s license, or any of us take much shorter courses/tests to get a driver’s license. Licensure focuses on ‘quantity mastered,’ not on a learner’s ability to grow and progress continually.
3. Tradition. This is the big one. Most teachers received an education that focused on industrial work, and then find themselves teaching in the same system that’s oriented towards industrial work. It’s difficult enough trying to do something different that what the system expects you to do, but it’s even more difficult when that’s all you know. It takes a lot more work to unlearn than to learn, and given the over-burden most teachers face, it makes sense to do what takes less work. Thus, industrial work/learning perpetuates.
Just some thoughts. What do you think?
p.s. I’ll revisit this topic in the weeks to come, offering some constructive suggestions on what we can do to fix/change this.
