Learning Rather Than Schooling

Schooling was designed to sort future workers to meet the needs of an industrial society. We are no longer living in an industrial society but the essential design features of our schools remain largely unchanged. Success, whether of students or schools, continues to be assessed by a narrow range of easy to measure outcomes. The international movement to improve schooling remains underpinned by economic drivers and is focused on the application of strategies generally determined at a government or system level. It requires convergence on a particular outcome; my experience is this places principals and teachers in an uncomfortable environment of control and compliance in a time of complexity and uncertainty.

There is an urgent need to apply a new mindset to schooling. The world has and will continue to change, and the cost to humanity for attempting to maintain our current system can't be sustained. The growing teacher shortage crisis in many countries should be the canary in the coal mine.

New understandings about learning including exciting breakthroughs from fields in biological science, neuroscience, and medical imaging have led to a stark realisation: If we were to design today and from scratch a system to educate our children, the result would not be schools as we currently know them.

Educator Carol Black’s observation resonates here: ‘Collecting data on human learning based on children’s behaviours in school is like collecting data on killer whales based on their behaviour at SeaWorld.’

There are many (educators and others) who acknowledge this proposition to be a truth and countless, mostly small-scale, initiatives across the world attempting to address it. The message is clear: Education must be about learning not schooling. The sunk cost of our existing model is substantial; the challenge is how to reimagine education from within. Our best chance for success will involve harnessing the meso level of leadership in profound ways – a topic I will return to in the pages ahead.

When we shift our mindset to ‘Learning rather than schooling’, we acknowledge that the focus of our efforts is a child's identity as a learner. The measure of success therefore, is for each learner to understand more about themselves in a way that increases their Confident Courage and brings about Deep Learning.

Next: Rhythm, Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose, Safety