Fast and Remarkable

In 1903 the first powered flight took place in Kitty Hawk, a small town in the United States. The Orville and Wilbur Wright story is folklore, and the story of flight illustrates human capacity to innovate with remarkable speed. Within four decades of that first flight, advances had enabled the production of the powerful, 700 km per hour, highly manoeuvrable P-51 Mustang fighter – it was an amazing and beautiful piece of human engineering.

However, the Mustang quickly became no longer fit for purpose because of the application of new knowledge emerging at the same time. That manifestation of new knowledge was the jet engine. The jet took flying to faster than the speed of sound within two decades and transformed international travel.

The adoption of the jet engine was transformational and the beginning of a new narrative for flight. No investment in attempts to improve the performance of the piston-powered, propeller airplane would match the potential of the new approach. The accepted technology had reached its peak performance and the status quo had been challenged. Focused Tinkering would only produce small improvements. The opportunity was in a new story for flight.

New organisational approaches that challenged the traditional formal structure of industry were also to increase the potential of jet-powered flight. Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works unleashed new levels of creativity and produced remarkable aircraft, even by today's standards.

Wilbur Wright died in 1948. He lived to see the transformation of powered flight including the development of the Mustang and the adoption of the jet engine. That transformation was fast and remarkable. The model of schooling we know so well reached its peak performance decades ago. The opportunity is in a reimagined approach to learning, not ongoing tinkering with old models of schooling. Changes in organisational approaches in education also have to move past the tinkering.

The significant investment being made to ‘improve schools’ is not producing the desired result, nor realising the potential inherent in new ways of thinking about learning. ‘School improvement’ as we know it is driven by an industrial age paradigm and we are now tinkering with a system that is no longer fit for purpose. Looking for such efficiencies is exhausting those trying to find the next incremental step up in performance, and frankly is falling well short of making the difference we desire. It’s time we appreciate how we got to the position we are now in, understand it's not what we know but how quickly we can learn that is important, and apply approaches that will greatly sped up transformation in schools.

Next: Frustratingly Stubborn