the shift of time - (part of introduction)

Learning Schools, Learning Systems was first published in 2000, it was conceived in that latter end of the 1990's and was part of a commentary on the formulation of learning organisations that was emerging in organisational change literature. At the time, the ideas drew from new science, business and from the rapidly developing literature of ecology and ecosystems. The book advanced ideas that were intended to be both theoretically robust and practically operational. They were also critical of many of the established forms of school development which I maintained (and still do maintain) were overtly managerial and thus limited in their potential to facilitate creative responses to a period of rapid societal change. I also informed the earlier work from research that was emerging on learning theory, which initiated suggestions of learning networks and learning communities that assumed a collective and collegial effort across multiple school sites to forge new partnerships in pursuit of improvement in student achievement.

But time has moved on, it is quite clear that the context for education has fundamentally changed. Many of the challenges that education faced in policy and practice in the 1990's remain features of the landscape today, and despite a decade or more of persistent effort, we still have a situation where the achievement gap between minority and majority remains, where the attempt to use education to generate social equity has created in many countries the presence of both ghetto and elite establishments and despite a plethora of intervention attempts these considerable variances in equity and achievement remain. In many examples of earlier work, commentators and policy makers from around the globe have continued to persist with their focus on the singular issue of improvement of the educational standard. This pursuit is noble, heroic in many places but in the end deeply flawed. Flawed because this focus is simply not enough.

The context has changed, it has changed because the world beyond the school has not remained constant, and, as education has slowly tried to play catch up with rapidly changing environment it has simply got more and more disconnected from the reality of that wider world. It is not that education has not changed, it is simply that educators and policy-makers have failed to recognise that new and more pressing issues exist beyond the school gates than those examined in the standard curricula. It has pursued a world view that has been too readily tied to a belief that industrial growth will move us on to ever greater success, however, the era is over. It is now time to move on.

To paraphrase a past American President, Jimmy Carter,
'If we succumb to a dream world then we'll wake up to a nightmare. But if we start with reality and fight to make our dreams a reality, then we will have a good life, a life of meaning and purpose...' (Jimmy Carter - Remarks Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the 1980 Democratic National Convention in New York August 14, 1980)