e-Education - What is the Role of Compulsory Education in the 21C ? Colin Harrison

Position Paper for the SATW workshop on e-Education, e-Health, and e-Society Colin Harrison Page 1-2 26.11.2002

e-Education - What is the Role of Compulsory Education in the 21C ?

The great 20C inventions in media and communications - telephony, cinema, radio, television, and digital technologies of all kinds - have radically changed the way that people acquire knowledge and have brought about the emergence of economies based on knowledge and on services built around knowledge. This position paper asks how - in light of these changes - should we expect rich societies to change their systems of primary and secondary education and how will these changes emerge ?

In the coming years these rich educational systems must respond to several key changes :

• The need to develop a workforce that on average has a higher level of achievement in abstract skills, a greater sense of initiative and independence, and a far greater ability to meet new challenges in work by performing in-line learning. Generally we refer to these as 21C skills.

• The need to develop a workforce prepared to re-invent its skills multiple times over a working lifetime.

• The need to create an educational environment that more closely matches the knowledgeworking environment into which the students will be moving.

• The need to educate a student population of increasing cultural and ethnic diversity.

• The need to offset the declining valuation for education in the home environments of many students.

• The need to develop a modern teaching profession that is enriched by the benefits of the knowledge society and which can regain some of its creativity through the use of ICT skills.

These are daunting challenges, especially considered against the practical problems of administering and teaching in overcrowded and poorly maintained schools. Already schools are overwhelmed with expectations that they can cure social, medical, and behavioural problems whose origins lie outside their doors. Tom Bentley [1] has well documented the inability of schools to deal with late 20C changes in (UK) society. Schools play key roles in society beyond what we might narrowly consider to be education :

• Childcare - the modern pattern of work is predicated on both parents being free to work outside the home. Will the decline of centralized offices remove this need ?

• Socialization - key patterns of social norms are instilled through primary education. Is there any electronic equivalent of socialization ? How does this work in a multi-cultural/trans-national economy ?

• National identity - closely related to social norms - the nation’s sense of identity and its worldview are indoctrinated through primary and secondary education.

• Selection - the many formal and informal examinations serve to define initial or lifelong career paths and to balance society’s needs for various skills. How will these need to be adapted to 21C skills ?

• Social infrastructure - for many neighbourhoods, the school is a community centre, a voting station, a disaster shelter, and a facility for culture, sports, and guidance.

Viewed purely from the e-Learning perspective, we can speculate about the deconstruction of the classroom experience and its replacement by electronically mediated experiences. But these other roles - taken together with the enormous national investments in bricks and mortar - seem less susceptible to such transformation. What does this imply for the transformation of schools that is required to meet the changing needs identified above ? The culture of schools - among teachers, administrators, students, and parents - is already for many reasons quite conservative. European governments are exhorting their schools to respond to these new needs, but are they seeking to move more quickly than the institutions are able or are willing to adapt ? Beyond this exhortation, what forces are in play that will produce the desired outcome ? Can we risk applying Darwinism to transforming schools ? What -if anything - can e-Education provide to facilitate these changes ?

Auteur : Colin Harrisson