I’d rather start by anticipating a certain air of paradox that will strike future historians looking back at the evolution of education policy in these last decades of the second millennium. These historians, I believe, will be struck and puzzled by the fact that in the decades immediately before the most momentous megachange that had ever come to the practice of learning and of education, we see major governments in the world seemingly attempting to undo those changes that had come about prefiguring the megachange to come.

The element of denial in much educational policy in this fantasy period is reflected in an advertisement that I recently saw in a Timeseducational supplement placed there by a company called Research Machines that I suppose most of you know about as, I believe, the foremost purveyor of equipment for educational technology in this country.

This ad had two faces. On the one hand, by trying to sell computers and connecting services to schools, it was catering to their desire to belong to what is most modern, to belong to the digital age that everybody knows we’re entering. On the other hand, the ad takes pains to reassure teachers that this will not disturb the essential elements of the status quo. The ad says, "You will not have to change how you teach; they (presumably meaning the students) will not have to change what they learn."

This evening I’ll be presenting a diametrically different view of the significance for education of digital technologies. The ad sees the technology as a means to improve existing practice while changing it as little as possible. I see the technology as tending to render obsolete almost all features that we regularly would associate with the structure of school.

Among these features, I mean to include such well-entrenched ones as the segregation of children by age. I think it bears thinking that we all take for granted that in school, but onlyin school, we think it appropriate to put seven-year-olds in one room and eight-year-olds in another room. If I were to ask you to segregate yourselves by age, I am sure you would laugh at me or certainly wouldn’t do it. You’d think I’d gone even crazier than usual. Why is it that we do this in school?

I think there’s only one reason. That reason is that this is production-line organization of the product of school. It is like the production line in the [original] Ford factory: the car moved along and at each station an additional change was made, a piece was added, something was checked, an exam was given. This is a model of education that I think was appropriate in an earlier period for a number of reasons. One, we didn’t know any other way to do it. And I am going to be elaborating on that by talking about ways in which we can do things very differently because we have another technology of knowledge now.

In addition to segregation by age, I think the idea of the linear curriculum is itself another manifestation of a production-line mode of organization. As the child moves through on the seventh of May in his third year he will learn this; and on the ninth of April in his fifth year he will learn that. In the extreme, it is all spelled out. In practice, of course, it’s not quite as rigid as that. But in principle, the way that school organizes the dispensation of knowledge follows this production-line model. I am going to attribute this to the same causes. But I am also going to argue that in order to take advantage of the new avenues of learning opened by digital technology, we are going to be obliged to give up this linear curriculum mode of dissemination of knowledge. We will be obliged to do it because I think that the major difference that I see between the way education has taken place up to now and the way it will take place in the future is captured by my title of this lecture--"Child Power." I am going to give a number of different meanings, a number of different aspects to the concept of power there.

First, I am going to be talking about giving the children power to control their own learning process. And if they’re controlling their own learning process, this is in radical contradiction with the idea of the set curriculum, the linear order and the arrangement of learning by age-segregated grades. I am also going to use the term child powerto refer to another aspect and that is to the political power of children as a major force in producing educational change.

I opened by referring to what looked like a pessimistic sense of what is happening in educational policy-making. I anticipate megachange in the way children learn. When we look around us we see not only an absence of megachange, we see a number of ways in which policy seems to be designed to prevent the megachange.

The attitude expressed in the Research Machines ad that I quoted shows this in a general way. You see it in many specific aspects of current educational discussion. I’ll mention two. In our country, as I believe in yours, there has recently been a mounting pressure for standardized tests to be applied to students. The reason given for wanting these tests is couched in terms like we need to impose standards, education is deteriorating, children are emerging from school illiterate, ignorant, bereft of moral values. And in many ways people look around and see that the school system, at least for many members of society, seems not to be working. What to do about this?

I think what we do about it depends on your answer to the question about whether the problem is that school is changing too much or school is changing too little. I think we live in a society in which a rapid and accelerating change in social life and the economy and the kind of work that people do is transforming the need for knowledge. And I think this is pretty widely accepted that knowledge in the 21st century is going to be very different. The need for knowledge is going to be very different. You can capture this by noting that even today a very substantial proportion of people are engaged in work, in jobs that did not exist when they were born and that number is increasing.
So the model that says learn while you’re at school, while you’re young, the skills that you will apply during your lifetime is no longer tenable. The skills that you can learn when you’re at school will not be applicable. They will be obsolete by the time you get into the workplace and need them, except for one skill. The one really competitive skill is the skill of being able to learn. It is the skill of being able not to give the right answer to questions about what you were taught in school, but to make the right response to situations that are outside the scope of what you were taught in school. We need to produce people who know how to act when they’re faced with situations for which they were not specifically prepared.