Alex Steffen describes a tension between the unthinkable and the unimaginable in his presentation of past, existing and future worlds. Unthinkable because the challenges facing humanity are on such a scale, and in many cases of our own making, that it is easier to pursue business as usual and hope it will go away, unimaginable because the fabric of a new way of living on the planet is as yet too ill defined to capture people’s imagination.
To understand the possibilities of how this will play out in the education sector we need a new frame of reference, a new paradigm. The current paradigm is failing to provide a sufficiently coherent overview any more, driven as it it is by an assumption that organisations such as schools are rationally functioning places that seek and require equilibrium in order to define and practice successfully. This is a double ‘whammy’ - it is both a false interpretation of school and learning, and it is incredibly misleading of reality. Much of the problem that we encounter with schools in most developed westernised systems are the result of the failings of this paradigm, it is time to attempt a new world view.
The paradigm is not strictly limited to education. It is in fact a dramatic shift in general terms about the ways in which human beings make connections between thinking and their everyday reality. Recent events such as the financial market collapse and the increasing awareness of rapid depletion of critically required resources such as oil are serving to underline the need to attend to the practicalities of change. The ‘thought world’ (Douglas 1986 Douglas, M. 1986 How institutions think. Syracuse.NY Syracuse University Press) that we create is known to subsequently define the worlds in which we live - a dominant operational narrative, or, as Wittgenstein commented ‘words create worlds.’ We need to find new words in order to transform our thought world and embed it into our daily lives.
A decade ago I made a first attempt at creating a conceptual framework to help me in my work where I was focusing attention on the ways in which schools might attempt to enhance their overall operational performance in response to this challenge. The central feature of the framework was a shift from the mechanical interpretation of the operation of the school and process of education, to a living systems interpretation of school and education that was rooted in deep ecology. This framework subsequently made me draw into question the appropriacy of managerialism as a device that would enhance educational improvement, founded as it is within a contrasting world view from that of living systems, where order, predictability and accountability form the basis of operational practice across both the management and development of the educational journey.
Over the last decade I have come to realise that the organisational thinking frame - the thought world plays a huge part in the likelihood of profound change taking hold. People do not, and indeed cannot, base their practical day-to-day decision making on knowledge alone. Having a well conceived theoretical framework in itself might help us to interpret the reality of the school in a new way, but it hardly serves as a way of scoping human activity to lead towards operationalising a new paradigm. I have seen schools grapple with the desire to create a learning community and at the same time be locked into the hierarchy and routine of a managed model, accountable to a wider system that holds to a different set of guiding rules and principles. The duality of perspectives, one that looks towards understanding the contextual challenges they immediately face and the other which seeks to change the way of doing things in response to these newly defined challenges emerging as society and environment changes places teachers and headteachers, students and parents in a constantly colliding series of situations, these can interfere with each other but fundamentally they are working from different paradigmatic frames. As a result, the dominant thought world prevails, and school communities find that they are not making the change to a learning community because the managerial thought world impedes the transition.
So a decade has run by and during that time I have worked closely with networks of schools to explore ways in which they can help themselves to move towards a style of working, shaped by a thought world of function as learning communities. I discovered that my ideas generated better understanding and provided the context for initially reinforcing but ultimately self-defeating processes of change. Indeed I now think that I deluded myself into thinking that the ideas espoused in Learning Schools, Learning Systems were in any way a radical break from the pack. I was attempting to shape and redefine a discourse of change from within an established, dominant world view. Little surprise then, that frustration has triumphed over euphoria.
Despite the failings and frustrations, I have remained closely aligned to the central tenet of the theoretical framework. That is, that we need to make a profound shift in our ‘thought world’ and take it from the mechanical to the quantum. In so doing we embed deep into the functionality of any newly posited design, the fundamental truth that we are a part of nature, not apart from nature, we are living beings pursuing our lives within a living system.
Recently, and continually during the last two years, I have begun to find ways in which this simple issue, can be realised and I have watched and participated in a movement that is fast gaining recognistion and influence in my local community. Whilst I am now far more realistic of my own role within this, I feel it is time to say something more. At its simplest, I think we can safely say that the existing paradigm is best defined as a deficit model of education, where schools, students and professionals all adhere to a thought world where success is defined by knowing, and that the ‘knowing’ is something that is more often than not defined by someone else, somewhere else. The resulting ‘catch up’ of those charged with providing the educational service within this knowledge framework is perpetual, it will never resolve the problem because the ownership of the knowledge is beyond the self or the resources of the organisation of the school. This I think serves to compound small successes, and doubly disempowers those who are struggling to deal with existing demands. Second, the entire system that serves to manage and improve education is premised on the first assertion. So we have inspections, national curricula, state mandates, off-the-shelf solutions which schools become ever more obliged to use in order to at least show some semblance of effort to keep in line with the direction of the flow. It is initially reinforcing, people see success, they are reported as improving, they receive adulation, they then buy into the idea that it is the only game in town, and once they do this the likelihood of introducing any alternative design is impeded significantly. What we see in educational reform is a repeating pattern, as Seymour Sarason (1990) reported ‘a predictable failure’ lies deep in the managed system, a prevailing misconception about change. For more than a decade this situation has limped onwards, with educational systems across the western world squeezing ever less and demanding ever more from the managed model. I maintain that this is no longer sustainable, there are too many externally pressing challenges for business as usual to prevail. It presents us with some significant challenges, one being the very question of whether we really need schools in their current form any more if their capacity to make the leap to a new paradigm is a practical impossibility.
This book tries to expand upon these basic ideas. It is conceived as both theoretical and practical because both theory and practice are part of a system and closely connected, it is work in progress because, as I have begun to learn, that is all we ever have in the emerging, living system.
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