Deschooling Society!

“The Time/Place Edge represents the destruction of the old view of education happening within the four walls of the classroom, Monday through Friday, 8 a.m. to 2 p.m., with some homework thrown in after school. Repeat for 180 days, 31 weeks. Take three months off for the summer. Repeat. That’s the old but persistent view of when and where learning happens. But when the world’s learning resources are always “on,” 24/7/365, the institution of “school” is gradually shifting to enable learning, “anytime, anywhere.”

- Education Nation by Milton Chen, p139

As a society we have confused learning with schooling and schooling with a very narrow definition of learning. Young people are forced to into passive roles and are instructed in discrete courses turning to math at 8am, history at 9am, English at 10am, etc... with each teacher offering them a different instructional style, assessment model, and level of engagement. As an educator, you teach the same lesson 5 times a day, or depending on your preps, three different lessons multiple times a week. For the most part, professional educators work in isolation, because there is little time built into the work week for collaboration and your colleagues each come to the classroom with their own philosophies of learning and personal experience.

School is one size fits all, but in reality we are each different shapes. We take what we can from formal instruction, but learn most through the social interactions, side conversations, bird walks, and hands on experiences we are drawn to. Our best teachers are the ones we choose from our peer group's, family, people we are casually exposed to (aka social network), books we read, movies we watch and music we listen to. We learn the things that really interest us, the stuff we need to get by or get out from where we are, and life has no grades.

I am an educator who never liked school, but always loved learning. I struggled fitting into a system I did not really believe in, but knew that if you want to have an impact you need to go where the kids are. I've participated in the Small School movement in NYC and gotten a taste of the International Baccalaureate model and the non-profit youth development world. Education reforms from the progressive to the conservative abound, but unless we fundamentally alter the one to many learning model of schools, and the way we reward kids for what they do outside of school (ie. family and community resources, homework, summer enrichment), we are never going to have an equitable educational system.



How do you transform learning to be more personalized, learner centered and real? I have spent a fair amount of time grappling with this question in the wilderness, meaning with kids and a small network of educators. I now see a whole cultural shift has taken place since I got involved in education in the mid-1990s. This shift has been brought about by the new cache for smart people to solve problems of equity and poverty. Education is no longer the isolated Cuban economy of the Cold War, the place for draft dodgers and do-gooders. No longer a profession of martyr's waiting to retire on our pensions, we are the home to market driven innovation, or at least have the potential to be. The influx of Teach For America data driven reforms, the Gates Foundation, and spotlighting 21st Century Learning are all changing the field. While many of my liberal friends want to keep education in the boxed-in world we grew up with, and the business class dismisses teachers as the problems, it is really the synergy of business, technology and educational entrepreneurs that are going to transform the system. Mobile digital media and new technological social innovations cannot be built by programmers and MBAs alone. It is going to take buy-in from educators to de-school society. (The kids are already there!)

Startl: November Design Boost!

"In an age when more youth are dropping out of school at alarming rates, yet research is consistently showing the high levels of engagement youth are exhibiting in various media platforms, it is incumbent upon educators to take notice and indeed redirect teaching methods to meet the needs and interests of students."

Design for Learning in the 21st Century, p 13

Last night I attended the Startl technology boost at the Hub Soma in San Francisco. Statrl, is an educational innovation incubator, distinct from the Race to the Top Department of Ed approach, in that they are working from the outside in, focused on the edge of innovation and not institutionalizing transformation. They are looking for ideas, new tech products, hybrid teams of educators/business/technology entrepreneurs that have the capacity to turn big ideas into pragmatic solutions. They have the support of non-profit foundations like Gates, Hewlett, Pearson and MacArthur and for-profit partners like IDEO, and DreamIt Ventures. This is the cutting edge and they have the money, or can at least create the space to bring entrepreneurs and funding together. Here's what I saw and what I didn't see at their November Design Boost.

The 10 mobile learning products in the competition crossed the spectrum from math, literacy, language, and the environment. There were some really cool innovations like Coursebook's use of "duration" to help learners filter for web content in a chosen interest area, and Motion Math's use of tilting, wii style total physical response for math games. Voxy focused on super sexy high interest media for language learning and Bygone has a concept to make history immersive by tagging stories to city blocks. Each is in its development phase, and is going to grow and change as long as they can drill down on their concept and find the support to keep going. Most of the teams came from university's (Stanford, NYU, UC Irvine), or established non-profits. A couple were for-profit start-ups.


I like where Startl is going with their approach to bringing new ideas to the market. Here is what I thought was missing:


Mobile learning is ultimately about connecting people. Hand held games that get learners interacting with software is okay, but ultimately empty. None of the business start-ups had any people on the other side. The only concept that had a real world social focus was Powershift. Without the social component this platform is not reaching its potential.


Cultural competency is a huge part of 21st Century Learning, and I did not see it in the products or the audience. The middle class, college bound student is doing fine in the current system. The 50% of urban kids who drop out of high school and the entire developing world are the real market for mobile learning. The story lines of most of the products were set for a generic white audience, when learning needs to be much more local and global. Focusing on I-phone Apps and Ted talks, the Western canon of fairy tales or the crazy engagement factor of technology and gaming is cool, but who is the audience for these products?

A social purpose is key to making learning interactive and meaningful. Teaching math or literacy in isolation, without a context, is not engaging. Problem posing education needs to be more than drilling discreet skills. It is about creating solutions to complex problems using interdisciplinary information, real people and real resources.


Implementation plans for how to get products to learners is a huge hurdle. I-tunes and the App store are good for a certain class of folks, but there needs to be another way to reach the masses. Expecting teachers or parents to be hip to the e-revolution, or pay out of pocket for innovations is not reasonable, especially when the digital divide means student access to hand held technology is not ubiquitous. Schools need to work on their tech policies for this revolution to take off, and companies need to continue to bring down the cost of signing on. Knowledge needs to be shared, and innovations institutionalized. If digital mobile technology is made with only the well resourced class in mind we will not close the achievement gap, but exacerbate it.



Digital mobile media is the technological tool that is going to break wide open the factory model of schooling. Young people now have tiny computers in their pockets that can connect them to the wider world. It's being harnessed in affluent pockets around the country, but this social innovation is not reaching the majority of young people or educators. Adopting innovations is not easy, and what's currently being offered does not do the medium justice, but it is only going to get better, especially if more folks join the conversation.

Interest Driven Work!

In the 3rd grade I remember learning how to write and multiply through wrote repetition. My memory is as an 8 year old kid, feeling like I was in prison, because I had no control over my own learning. I needed to complete worksheets or practice writing the same sentence over and over again. I drew a line down the page and added dashes to form the "T". I spent most of my time daydreaming or socializing, thinking of kickball or Star Wars. Because I was not as gifted as my older sister or other kids, they wanted to put me in special education. When I was older, I learned the game, and could complete the work without giving it my full attention. But that was only after I decided I would never judge my self-worth from a grade, because the stress I felt from the workload in middle school almost gave me a nervous breakdown. I kept my inner life rich through friendships and books, my family and imagination, bidding my time until I could make my own decisions about where to live, who to work with, and towards what purpose. My formal education was complete by the age of 21, but my real education was just beginning!

Work, the place where most of us spend our time, the activities that give us our status, that stretch or dull our minds and connect us to a wider world needs to be transformed. It should be more flexible, and purposeful, self-directed, and autonomous. Living is about mastery, not seat time. Rigor is about complexity not quantity. Success is not a number.

Everywhere I turn I read the same argument. Daniel Pink and Howard Gardner are writing about the kind of mind we need to be cultivating for the 21st century. People who can synthesize information, who are intrinsically motivated, and work collaboratively on real world problems will have jobs. Those that only know how to follow directions or draw inside the lines will be automated or outsourced.

Assembly lines are great at doing things fast in one direction. But if you need to make adjustments, if you need to think on your feet and adapt, assembly lines snap. We live in a world where the jobs of tomorrow have not been created yet, where we need to find opportunities and create our own value, and so many of our institutions are stuck in the pre-information revolution age, Skinner's behavioral modification model, Ford's factory. Too slow to react, people are stuck doing meaningless tasks, instead of discovering the challenging world around them.

How many people do you know really love what they do? I bet its the same number who get to create our own work day? Institutions are so scared of freedom because in a Hobbsian world people need to be controlled or they will not produce value. But what science is telling us, is what many of us have known all along. Curiosity, a desire for mastery, collaboration is self-organizing and needs no task master.

How do we transform institutions, like schools, so they actually facilitate innovation and collaboration, build off of learner interests and prepare youth for a world with no guarantees?

Gitanjali's Vision

I thought that my voyage had come to its end at the last limit of my power,- that the path before me was closed, that provisions were exhausted and the time come to take shelter in a silent obscurity.

But I find that thy will knows no end in me. And when old worlds die out on the tongue, new melodies break forth from thy heart; and where the old tracks are lost, new country is revealed with its wonders.

- Rabindranath Tagore, Gitanjali, XXXVII

When the heart most wants to hide, it must find a new way to be itself. When the mind hits against the walls of its thinking, it must find a way to walk through walls. Tagore is a poet and a teacher and a visionary who has no equal in the 20th century, and he was completely unknown to me until I visited India in August of 2009. I had no idea he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913, and was the first non-Westerner to do so, nor that he was a world class thinker in debate with Einstein, Gandhi, and other great writers, scientists, thinkers and feelers of his day. He established a school in his native Bengal at Shantiniketan, where he experimented with an educational philosophy based on direct experience and educated the children of India's political liberation movement. I admire him immensely because of his global vision, his marriage of East and West, his arguments against Gandhi's rejection of modernity, and his ennobling of learning. Together with Rumi, another poet with an expansive embracing of humanity, still relevant today, I am in awe at the beauty of the worlds they reveal with their words and wonder at the stilted legacy handed down to us today.

I never heard of Tagore until I spent time in bookshops in New Dehli, and I did not know anything about India, except the Christ like story of Gandhi and the wonders of the information revolution in Bangalore from the pages of the New York Times. I was never taught anything in school about Asia or Africa except through the lens of contact with Europeans. The language, geography, politics, literature, history, and contributions of billions were left out of my formal education. Cultural nuances that make up one out of six people on the planet were never discussed. I travel, I read, I teach. I love literature and I love history. I've been to 27 countries and speak a handful of languages. But when I arrived in New Dehli, and later arrived in Ghanali village in the Punjab, I was starting from zero.

My friend Christine Yap, had arranged a visit for a group of youth and educators to explorer her husband's homeland, and I jumped at the opportunity to immerse myself in a new culture. I love international travel and global education. I 2006 with Carlos Herrera I founded a non-profit, Education Without Borders Intl., because I believe in experiential, self-directed learning. While in Punjab, and later in Himachal Pradesh and Nepal I soaked up as much as I could. I read Amartya Sen, and learned as some Punjabi and Hindi... Me tori Hindi al Punjabi ati he. Muche chai acha lag ta he. I spent time with my new friends in Sikh temples, on the back of motor cycles, drinking chai, dancing banghara, and discussing culture. A world that no one in my life had every told me was valuable contained 1/6 of the world's population, is the fastest growing economy, one of the oldest centers of human civilization. It had never been on my cultural radar before. And despite the shifting sands of the Global economy, it is still not on the radar of most Americans.

In fact, most of the world is not on the radar of your average U.S. citizen, despite the fact that we are the home to the most cosmopolitan society on the planet. In the Bay Area where I live, or New York City where I was born, there is not a nation not represented, nor a language family not spoken by someone. As a people we are all new to this land, hybrids, and yet we are caught up in the cultural wars of the 19th century, the ethnic ghettos- balkanization- and Americanization response of the early 20th century, and the slick corporate homogenization of post-war America. Everyone is talking about the 21st Century, lamenting the ending of an American golden age, because the free ride of Manifest Destiny and American exceptionalism is running out and a flat world is catching up. Op-ed columnists bemoan the lack of optimism, economists the lack of consumer confidence, and everyone has someone to blame. I don't think complaining about George Bush or big government, the Harlem Children's Zone or teacher's unions, the Tea Party or the Oscar Grant verdict, or any of the old conversations are going to get us to where we need to be. As my mentor, Steve Jubb says, that's still fighting inside the box. We need to embrace the complexity of our history, of our politics, of our heterogeneous population and see it for the advantage it is. In an age of interdependence, where we recognize that humanity is part of an ecosystem, a living network, the United States is a hub that cannot fail. Diversity is a strength. Global connections are a strength. Life long learning is a necessity.

I visited a state college in Rupnagar, Punjab. In an English class I introduced myself and had a conversation with a handful of students, explaining my interest in their education system. I was curious because I know that in the near future, "China will be the world's largest economy, India the second largest, and the United States the third." A young woman, the daughter of one of the school's professors stood up and corrected me. "No, no, no. INDIA will be number one, China second, and the U.S. third." She left no room for doubt. And based on the growth of e-based business, the hunger of a growing educated class in the developing world, and the quagmire of American politics and institutions, the realignment will happen quicker than we know it. But why should that be scary? Why is permanent U.S. hegemony an ideal in a world where 1 billion are overweight, 1 billion malnourished? Why shouldn't the world's two largest nations, with two of the largest culutral heritages, not have the largest economies 80-90 years after the end of European colonization?

In this blog, the first time I have ever put my thoughts online, I hope to explore issues of complexity. Why is it, an educated fairly worldly person like myself had a stereotypical-romanticized view of India, when it is the home to so much wisdom, knowledge and human experience? Why is it history in the U.S. is so narrowly defined as the European experience? Why, as an educator on the front lines in the Bronx, and Pasadena, completely committed to innovation did I miss the e-learning revolution happening around me, in pockets around the country? Why does innovation travel so slowly in the field of education? Why do business people think educators are incompetent and why do educators think money is bad and the people who have it are greedy? Why do people like simple narratives for complex problems, and how does that keep us from solutions? How can we change from a monolingual nation, with a multicultural population, in a global economy to embrace the Global Capital of the Americas? And by that I mean the human capital that is the birthright of this hemisphere, home to all of the cultures of the world.