Ideas - the new creative advantage!
We are well beyond an age that depended on transforming raw material for success – the new capital of the future will be imaginative ideas. And these ideas, will spread and infect minds, changing people as they do.
Just as mass production led to mass education imagination will lead to personalised schools.
In education the ground is ripe for ideas to transform industrial age schools, still obsessed with transforming raw material, with out outdated thinking. In reality the ideas required are already available, lying as it were sleeping, awaiting innovative people to reactive them. The spirit of John Dewey is waiting to replace the efficiency of Henry Ford! It is becoming obvious that the current education system is educating people for a world that is fast disappearing. Few seem happy with what currently passes for secondary education. These schools are simply not ‘delivering the goods’ with almost a third of it’s ‘products’ not up to current standards.
The old school system, like the dinosaurs before them, are no longer flexible enough to survive the ever speeding change that has been created by modern information technology. And no end of tinkering will save them in the long run.
Of course we are talking mainly about the outdated factory like high schools – the ideas of personalized learning have long spread through the schools for younger students, even if they are not yet firmly established in all classes.
If we really want to ensure every students leaves with all their talents developed, and with the attitudes to live well together and to continue learning, we need to start creating pressure for the new ideas to ‘jump’ into secondary schools and infect all with a new sense of possibility.
‘Idea viruses’ have always been the way the world has changed and organizations and schools that want to lead in the future , or even survive, will have to become learning communities, continually attracting new ideas and talent, evolving as they go along.
New mindsets will be needed and many current schools and teachers, as with the dinosaurs, will become extinct. Already they are struggling to cope with students whose minds have been shaped by the new technologies – technologies the students take for granted. While schools struggle with linear book learning students live in a diverse multi media world. The power, one writer says is, ‘no longer in the cathedral but is now out in the bazaar!’
Schools need to organize themselves to take advantage of the new possibilities, optimize them, and make them happen. They need to be seen as being at the leading edge of change. Students are tired of being controlled by old ideas and ancient bureaucracies.
Schools who sense that change is in the air need to open themselves to new ideas and particularly to the ‘ideas merchants’ who are sharing them. Such people carry the ideas from site to site.
Ideas spread where the environment is ripe for change.In turn others spread them to their friends.Ideas can even jump between schools mutating themselves as they go. When enough people are infected the idea reaches a ‘tipping point’ and an unstoppable educational epidemic is underway.
When the epidemic dies down a new world will have been created.
3 comments:
Reckon it will take a while for ideas to break through the walls of the traditional secondary schools - easier to start new ones!
I think you are right. New schools need new imaginative minds. The government would be wise to help establish as many as possible - who know what might evolve!
Whatever, we have to, as Tom Peters' says, 're-imagine schools'.
All organistions and cultures are run by ideas - the trouble is that they are more often not articulated. To change any organisation they need to be made explicit and challenged.
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