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The Future is Here

Education is a Time Machine

Our system of education is a time machine preparing students for yesterday. It has fallen prey to the rearview mirror syndrome, where familiar objects receding in the mirror appear more real than what is approaching in front of us. As vital as it is to understand our past, yesterday’s maps no longer match the territory emerging before us. As times change we are called to adapt to this new landscape. The San Francisco longshoreman and philosopher, Eric Hoffer, understood this dynamic clearly when he said, “In times of changes learners inherit the earth, while the learned find themselves equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”

Universal education was designed to meet the social and economic needs of the industrial revolution. The social, economic and civic realities of today and tomorrow are developing within a digitally networked society. Passive, rote and standardized learning aren’t modeling the kinds of creative and collaborative environments that students will be expected to work in. While digital tools are a cornerstone of the learning and working environments of tomorrow, they aren’t solely sufficient.

Flourishing in the future requires not only facility with digital tools but, perhaps more importantly, being digital. Being digital entails new ways of thinking and communicating. It requires new forms social organization. Technology may be a powerful driver of change, but it is only a more evolved social structure — the ways in which people interact within all facets of society — that can capture the potential of the technology.

Nicholas Negroponte, in his prescient book from the ’90s, “Being Digital,” writes about the power of digital technology to globalize society, decentralize control and flatten organizational hierarchies. He even speculates that digital technology is helping erode the power of the nation-state, which may eventually become an artifact of history.

In education, digital technology and 21st century learning have become quite fashionable. Schools that have the resources to integrate digital tools are eager to do so. But digital tools are only the beginning. They are intimations of greater changes to come. Integrating digital tools into an industrial paradigm won’t deliver the innovation the society needs. It will be the novel and creative ways that people interact using technology that will generate the innovation all sectors of our society are looking for. If flattening hierarchies and decentralizing control are previews of coming attractions, then what does that mean for education?

Let’s start with the classroom. Flattening hierarchies and decentralizing control would increase autonomy and augment network interaction. A flattened hierarchy would transform the teacher from an omnipotent silo of knowledge to more of a designer, coach and guide. This would enable greater autonomy for students to pursue what intrinsically motivates them within an environment shaped by design thinking and under the guidance of a teacher. Greater network interaction would emphasize collaboration versus individual achievement. With an Internet connection via a smartphone, tablet or laptop, a learning network would be rooted in the local environment but limited only by one’s imagination. Integral to this structural shift is the collapse of departmental walls and cultivation of multidisciplinary thinking.

Joichi Ito, the director of the MIT Media Lab, in a New York Times essay stated, “The Internet isn’t really a technology. It’s a belief system, a philosophy about the effectiveness of decentralized, bottom-up innovation. And it’s a philosophy that has begun to change how we think about creativity itself.”

Creativity is an exploration of the possible. It is a journey into the unknown that requires embracing uncertainty and failure. In times of rapid change, exploring the possible becomes an essential skill. We don’t have maps for the territory of tomorrow. As a result, all citizens must become explorers of this emerging world. The best way to prepare for the emergence of the future is to learn how to be comfortable with uncertainty. To be comfortable with uncertainty, one must remain fluid, receptive and creative — in a word: playful.

Beginning or end?

Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event.'

Jorge Luis Borges

We loved free bagels in the morning

We were fractious and overpaid. Our mornings lacked promise. At least those of us who smoked had something to look forward to at ten-fifteen. Most of us liked most everyone, a few of us hated specific individuals, one or two people loved everyone and everything. Those who loved everyone were unanimously reviled. We loved free bagels in the morning. They happened all to infrequently. Our benefits were astonishing in comprehensiveness and quality of care. Sometimes we questioned whether they were worth it. We thought of moving to India might be better, or going back to nursing school. Doing something with the handicapped or working with our hands. No one ever acted on these impulses, despite their daily, sometimes hourly contractions. Instead we met in conference rooms to discuss the issues of the day.

- Joshua Ferris

Contemplation

Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath, I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in a revery, amidst the pines and hickories and sumachs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness, while the birds sing around or flitted noiseless through the house, until by the sun falling in at my west window, or the noise of some traveler's wagon on the distant highway, I was reminded of the lapse of time. I grew in those seasons like corn in the night, and they were far better than any work of the hands would have been. They were not time subtracted from my life, but so much over and above my usual allowance. I realized what the Orientals mean by contemplation and the forsaking of works. For the most part, I minded not how the hours went. The day advanced as if to light some work of mine; it was morning, and lo, now it is evening, and nothing memorable is accomplished.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Patience

Do you have the patience to wait Till your mud settles and the water is clear? Can you remain unmoving Till the right action arises by itself? - Lao Tzu

#philosophy

Lincoln Memorial

#History

Where good ideas come from.

#innovation #creativity

The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play.

Friedrich Nietzsche

#play

Fantasy and Reality

In Buddhism, we express our willingness to be realistic through the practice of meditation. Meditation is not a matter of trying to achieve ecstasy, spiritual bliss or tranquility, nor is it attempting to become a better person. It is simply the creation of a space in which we are able to expose and undo our neurotic games, our self-deceptions, our hidden fears and hopes. We provide space through the simple discipline of doing nothing. Actually, doing nothing is very difficult. At first, we must being by approximating doing nothing, and gradually our practice will develop. So mediation is a way of churning out the neuroses of mind and using them as part of our practice. Like manure, we do not through our neuroses away, but we spread them on our garden; they become part of our richness.

- Chogyam Trungpa

#Buddhism #Meditation

Zen garden.

#Travel #Japan

Sit down and be quiet. You are drunk and this is the edge of the roof.

Rumi

#Wisdom

Visit Original Link

Delivering a sermon.

#stories

#37*

The Human Body

The human body is made up of several hundred different types of cells - muscle, blood, nervous, and so on. At any given time, approximately 75 trillion of these cells are working away in your body. In a very real sense, you are the sum of their actions; there is no you with them. And yet those cells are dying all the time! Thousands probably died in the time it took you to read the last sentence, and by next week, you will be composed of billions of new cells that weren't there to enjoy the reading of that sentence, much less enjoy your first step or your high school prom. Cells are dying all the time in your body - and most of them are being replaced at a tremendous clip. (Even brain cells turn out to regenerate themselves far into adulthood.) And yet somehow, despite that enormous cellular turnover, you still feel like yourself week to week and year to year. How is this possible?

- Steven Johnson

#consciousness

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