At the Institute for the Future’s ten-year forecast retreat last month, I overheard April Rinne from Collaborative Lab use the phrase “shareable cities” during a break. My ears perked up because Shareable Cities is one of the five major disruptions that KnowledgeWorks’ Recombinant Education highlights as reshaping learning over the next decade. It turns out that Collaborative Lab provides advisory services around collaborative consumption, or the emerging sharing economy.
April clued me in on Jerry Michalski’s inspiring TEDxCopenhagen talk on the future of education, “What if we trusted you?” (Jerry co-facilitated the IFTF retreat and runs REX, which brings together corporate leaders to navigate the switch to a relationship economy.) The question of trust is a crucial one for those of us who want to transform learning because it gets at the heart of one of the fundamental assumptions upon which our current K-12 education system is built.
As with so many aspects of our culture, K-12 education is designed, as Jerry points out, around scarcity instead of abundance. Instead of organizing education around learning, we typically organize it around time. Jerry argues that this fundamental structure creates a scarcity of both time and meaning that gets in the way of young people discovering their life passions and teaches them to be obedient, compliant, and dependent. We perpetuate the resulting system because we fear chaos and want scale. Then, we attempt to fix it through overregulation, oversurveillance, and overmedication and end up doing things like teaching to the test instead of placing our first emphasis on learning.
For me, the challenge of acting from a standpoint of abundance instead of scarcity has been one of those recurring life lessons that seem to plague at least some of us. So I’m especially intrigued by what it would mean to design an abundant, trust-based learning ecosystem in which, as Jerry describes it, we could learn:
• At any time
• From anyone
• With anyone
• Anywhere
• Connected to real life
• About any object or question.
As our forecast on the future of learning also points out, we can already do all of those things and can expect to be doing more of them in ten years. Some people, such as the unschoolers whom Jerry describes, are already learning only in this way. But why is it necessary to opt out of school in order to opt into such rich learning?
What could it mean for more nodes in the learning ecosystem – especially today’s K-12 schools – to revisit the fundamental assumption of scarcity and design for abundance? In effect, to design for learning to flow naturally across a vibrant learning ecosystem in concert with learners’ curiosities and passions?
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