R. Graham Oliver in his reply concerning Schools as Learning Organizations
points out what is happening in New Zealand where Training is equated to
Education.
> A part of the brave new revolutions in New Zealand is the almost-complete
> official reduction of education to "school-to-work" training as you
> mention. In one of the reports there was the announcement that there
> should be no difference between education and training. The idea was that
> education (particularly university education) was elitist, and worked
> against job training. Thus education was to be virtually re-defined as
> job-training. Implemented on a national scale, this is pretty disastrous.
I recall a little book (in French) many years ago incorrectly entitled
BETRAYAL OF THE INTELLECTUALS in English. It seems to characterize the
thinking process which Graham deplores in present-day New Zealand. The
root of the problem is the process which is carried on by those who are
given the authority by law or by custom, or assume they have such
authority, for planning the future of a community, state or country. In
planning the future, such people are increasingly removed from direct
connection with those who are most effected or impacted by the processes
involved, such as education of the young.
It can be a caste system, a racial hierarchy, a religious leadership, an
"enlightened" aristocracy, or, as in the case of the book I mentioned, a
bureaucracy. While tending to its own self-perpetuation, the bureaucracy
will take what might be a new statute or set of policies and make of them
a "tradition", which is more difficult to break down in the future.
Moreover, it will tend in this self-perpetuation to take on new shades of
meaning to reinforce the stated objective. In the case of education, the
existing teachers unions can and do link up with governmental agencies to
mutually reinforce each other's positions regarding the expected outcomes
of the funded educational system. In New Zealand, it appears the vision
has been degraded to the point where no one can define what learning is,
absent the attachment to the job market.
It seems that economic development runs parallel to the job cycle, which
depends in turn upon the market potential of a given region and its
planned funding for new businesses. Thus we can have Intel receiving
massive tax benefits unavailable to other businesses over a period of
decades, with the "return on investment" being the building of a high
school, and an increase in the job market of several thousand highly
technical positions. Such positions, since they do not exist in the
present marketplace, must be imported and then home-grown by increasing
the level of funding to technical schools and colleges in the area, which
is in turn paid for by the tax dollars of citizens and the extorted
profits of gambling casinos and other state-sponsored gaming.
It may be that we have lost control of what was supposed to have been a
system for educating our youth, supported by clear thinking regarding what
education is, and what it is not, supposed to do TO our kids and WITH our
kids. If we must define progress or developoment as X number of new jobs,
without defining what the job content is, we are already lost. In the
learning organization, that problem does not go unnoticed, but instead
gets a great deal of attention and re-invested energy to help ensure that
whatever the outcome of the educational process, it is based on the
fundamental concept of HOW to think, not WHAT to think. The learning
organization rejects the doctrine of "training" in place of educating as
being fundamentally flawed, and a recipe for disaster.
If you can find the book, check it out, and check out the logic which
suggests that you can substitute basket-weaving for cytology on the
premise that tourists are out for baskets and not blood.
Pardon the length friends.
--Regards, John Constantine rainbird@trail.com Rainbird Management Consulting PO Box 23554 Santa Fe, NM 87502 http://www.trail.com/~rainbird "Dealing in Essentials"
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>