Thought Leaders Blog

Learning is critical to the future of our world.  New knowledge is at the heart of innovation, which drives economic growth and delivers new solutions to problems. Improved skills help us to better exploit new knowledge.  And a better understanding of ourselves, our society, and others promotes a better world and reduces conflict.

But much of the demand for learning goes unmet.  In our established education systems, achievement has tailed off, and systems that are struggling to establish themselves face an impossible task.

Some have concluded that bigger and more powerful schools and universities are the answer. But try as we might, we cannot meet the world’s insatiable appetite for learning with our traditional recipe.  We need to think again.  We need a Learning Society.

Climate change is coming to education.  Some have likened the pressures of globalization, technology, and demography to a perfect storm.  But life returns to normal after a storm, and this will not be the case in education.  As PA Consulting observed in their 2009 report, education is experiencing long-term and irreversible climate change that is radically altering the demand for learning.

Despite reform and investment, advanced education systems still fail too many people, reproduce inequality, and are inefficient. Because of their industrial scale, they often crush disruptive innovations that could help solve problems but challenge established methods.

Early Signs of the Learning Society

William Gibson was right. The future is here, it’s just not widely distributed.

§  Leading-edge learning practice, where innovation is cutting across the old divides of formal education and informal learning

§  The wider society, particularly in the adoption of new technologies such as social networking, edutainment, open source, and new trends in educational technologies

§  Disruptive innovations at the margins of established education systems and in extreme environments in the developing world

These emergent innovations help us to create a new vision—of learning as an activity not a place, open to new people with new ideas, of learners “pulling” learning toward themselves rather than teachers “pushing” learning out, and of learning systems that spread far beyond schools to involve learners and parents as contributors as well as customers.