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 INTRODUCTION
The last decades of the 20th century saw countries around the world make
the dramatic transition from closed, state-dominated, economies towards
open, free-market, economies. The British Chancellor of the Exchequer,
Gordon Brown, captured the scale of these changes in a speech he gave
in the summer of 2000 when he noted, "Over the last 30 years, world trade
has increased from around $300 billion to over $5000 billions, a 15-fold
increase; the amount of international capital from around $600 billion
to over $8000 billion, a 13-fold increase. And foreign investment has
increased from around $10 billion to over $600 billion, a 50-fold increase."1
Among an increasing number of countries, economic globalization has led
to more economic openness. Today's most productive economies are open
to trade, international finance and economic competition. They are also
open to a constantly changing job market, and the insecurities this brings.
As Chancellor Brown noted, "reforms in Britain and Europe are built on
the new realities of the global economy - opened not sheltered economies.
International not national capital markets, global not local competition."2
These economic changes have been driven in large part by advances in the
technologies of information and communication, and the reorganization
of firms, industries and markets this technology has triggered.
The Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan, described the
situation in the United States, "While there are various competing explanations
for an economy that is in many respects without precedent in our annals,
the most compelling appears to be the extraordinary surge in technological
innovation that developed through the latter decades of the last century."3
Chairman Greenspan says the movement towards increasing use of ICTs, and
other technologies, in the 1980s paid dividends in the mid-1990s by making
businesses leaner and more flexible. He believes that more accurate and
up-to-date knowledge about market conditions means fewer workers are needed
to produce and deliver more goods and services, and this enables businesses
to work smarter than they were able to in the past. It also means that
today's workers are expected to work smarter. This article will explore
the impact that the shift towards a more knowledge-based economy has had
on Americans, and in particular on children's learning.
TECHNOLOGY & CHANGING CONCEPTIONS OF THE BRAIN AND LEARNING
The 21st Century Learning Initiative, since the mid-1990s, has written
extensively about the nature of human learning and brain development.
The story we tell about learning is vastly different to the one that was
told for most of the 20th century.4 A convergence
of findings from the cognitive sciences, the neurological sciences, the
biological sciences and even archeology and anthropology provide powerful
insights into the nature of human learning. The first point that needs
to be made about learning is that the powers of new technologies have
also impacted greatly on what science now understands about the brain
and how humans actually learn.
For example, non-invasive brain mapping technologies, such as fMRI and
Cat scans, have enabled researchers to watch learning occur as specific
patterns of activity within the brain light up on a computer screen. These
technologies reveal the brain to be a self-organizing open system that
is shaped by its interaction with objects and events in the world. In
adapting to events the brainŐs molecular mechanisms physically adjust
to its environment. What this view argues is that perception is colored
by experience. We never hear something in a totally objective form, but
rather our receptive processes are colored by those environmental stimuli
that have captured our interest in the past. We build knowledge on earlier
experiences.
The U.S. National Research Council captured the essence of these changes
when they reported in 1999 that, "Today, the world is in the midst of
an extraordinary outpouring of scientific work on the mind and brain,
on the processes of thinking and learning, on the neural processes that
occur during thought and learning, and on the development of competence."
The report continued, "The revolution in the study of the mind that has
occurred in the last three our four decades has important implications
for education."5
The contention that lies behind this article is that at the close of
the 20th century the citizens of developed countries find themselves living
and working in a far more open and dynamic economy than earlier generations.
"In the 'New Economy,' citizens are invited to take on more individual
responsibility for shaping their own destiny. They have the opportunity
to become more involved in their own decision-making that impinges on
their own economic and social environment. Governments must ensure that
their citizens are well equipped to assume these new responsibilities.
But the people they govern, too, have to become active entrepreneurs and
innovators. That means breaking down barriers in the mind, as well as
barriers to trade, competition and innovation. In the 'New Economy,' an
'open' society, in every sense of the word, is the key to a favorable
environment for growth."6
What this means for education and learning is that during the industrial
age, where brawn counted more than brains, we could get away with investing
only in some of the potential of some of our children. But in the new
economy, which depends on knowledge, ingenuity and innovation, on mobilizing
the talents of all - getting the best out of everyone - it is essential
to develop all the potential of all our children.7
Parallel to this economic shift, and the dramatic addition to educational
goals, is an appreciation that the brain is an open and dynamic learning
system. We now, in effect, have it in our power to design learning systems
that are in line with not just the needs of the economy, but also the
natural functioning of the brain. It is truly an exciting time to be alive,
but as is the case in all revolutionary times there is a darkside lurking
in the shadows - a society of gargantuan extremes. Consider the following
facts before going any further, "The world's 200 richest people more than
doubled their net worth in the four years to 1999, to more than $1 trillion
- an average of $5 billion each. Their combined wealth (the top seven
are Americans) now equals the combined annual income of the world's poorest
2.5 billion people. How much is $5 billion? If invested at 5.2 percent,
that's a steady income of $5 million per week."8
According to James Wolfensohn, President of the World Bank, "three billion
people live on less than $2 a day, and 500 million live under $1 a day,
absolute poverty."9
THE AGE OF ANXIETY AND INEQUALITY
"The shift from a factory-based to a computer-based economy is more traumatic
even than our great-grandparents' shift from a farm-based economy. The
Industrial Revolution extended over generations and allowed time for human
and institutional adjustment. The Computer Revolution is far swifter,
more concentrated, and more dramatic in its impact,"10
observes the eminent Harvard Historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. This shift
in economic systems has helped spawn an economic boom in the United States.
Yet, it must be noted, economic growth is not automatically synonymous
with the general welfare of all citizens. That said, consumption possibilities
are an important element in welfare. Money buys possibilities that poverty
does not allow. In a society with an expanding economy the questions become
how to make certain economic growth leads to rising incomes and improved
opportunities for all citizens, and how to make certain that growth is
not achieved at the expense of future generations? Anyone interested in
the learning of children must address these key questions.
The forces of globalization and "the new economy" may bring a higher
standard of living, better services and more choices, but they also require
"the continuous discarding of obsolete factories, economic sectors, and
even human skills. The system rewards the adaptable and the efficient;
it punishes the redundant and the less productive."11
It is at times brutal. It is especially painful for those who learned
the rules of the earlier system well, but who have now seen the rules
changed - a recent example is factory workers and miners in the former
communist countries of East-Central Europe.
In the United States the economic changes of the past two decades has
undoubtedly brought many benefits including 16 million new jobs since
1995 alone, but for many it has also seen life become increasingly synonymous
with work. In 1999 President Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers captured
the trend when they observed, "The nation's labor market is performing
at record levels: the number of workers employed is at an all-time high,
the unemployment rate is at a 30-year low, and real (inflation-adjusted)
wages are increasing after years of stagnation."12
Americans now "put in more hours on the job than their counterparts in
other industrialized nations. Americans work almost two weeks a year more
than the Japanese and 14 weeks more than the Norwegians."13
These economic good times have an inevitable cost, and the price is incurred
disproportionately by children who now spend far less time with those
adults who love them and more time in the care of professionals whose
job it is to educate them. Additionally, as a result of increasing economic
opportunities fewer children are being born in developed countries, especially
to parents who have more than a high school education.14
This fact helps to explain why in the United States "children make up
39 percent of the poor but only 26 percent of the total population."15
The new economy rewards those who defer child rearing, or have no children
at all, to seek higher levels of education. According to the U.S. Secretary
of Labor, "In 1970, college educated men earned about 36 percent more
than high school graduates. Starting around 1980, college educated workers
began to fare substantially better than less educated workers. By 1997,
the gap had nearly doubled to 62 percent."16
The most often cited criticism of today's economy is that it creates
increasing economic inequalities both within countries and between countries.
"Most economists believe that, while wages have improved in the late 1990s
due to robust economic growth, income inequality among workers has increased
since the 1970s. Moreover, the overall gap between rich and poor has also
increased in Europe and elsewhere. Despite continuous economic growth
and a low rate of unemployment, the benefits of economic 'good times'
in the United States have been distributed unevenly, and many groups have
been left behind."17
The American situation can be summarized as follows: from 1945 until
1970, all income groups experienced economic advancement, including the
poor. In fact, poor families during this period recorded the highest growth
in annual real income during that time, which meant that the poor became
less poor not only in relative terms, but in absolute terms as well. "Since
1973, however, the pace of income growth has slowed and income inequality
has increased. Whereas median family income increased 10 percent between
1973 and 1999, income in the highest income bracket (95th percentile)
grew more than a third while income in the lowest income grouping (20th
percentile) remained virtually unchanged or actually dropped, especially
for women. The real earnings of many low-wage and middle-class workers
have stagnated or experienced only modest gains, while the more wealthy
20 percent of American families have gained greatly. In brief, since the
1970s, the standard of living of many American workers has grown very
slowly, while income inequality has increased considerably."18
SOCIAL CAPITAL AND CHILDREN'S LEARNING
The reason for this brief focus on inequality is that it influences the
environment in which children learn. First, in the United States educational
funding is primarily drawn from property taxes. Consequently, rich communities
almost always have better schools than poor communities, and increasingly
in America it is only school districts in rich communities that have the
resources to recruit new teachers, and most effectively utilize the power
of information communication technologies. But, more significantly, and
this may surprise some readers, is the influence this economic inequality
has on children's out-of-school learning. Remember the brain is an open
learning system and much of what children learn occurs outside the 20
percent of the time they spend in classrooms. As long ago as 1966 James
Coleman's Equality of Educational Opportunity study showed that student
educational achievement was most strongly affected not by tools of public
policy, such as teacher salaries and classroom size, but by the environment
a child's family and peers create.
Coleman, clarifying his position in 1987, wrote schools can make a difference,
but they are greatly limited in their potential impact by factors relating
to the family and the community. Coleman wrote, "as the Equality of Educational
Opportunity report of 21 years ago first made clear, variations among
family backgrounds make more difference in achievement than do variations
among schools. This does not imply that 'schools don't make a difference.'
There is evidence that in the absence of schooling, children from whatever
background learn very little of certain things, such as mathematics. What
it does imply is that schools, of whatever quality, are more effective
for children from strong family backgrounds than for children from weak
ones. The resources devoted by the family to the child's education interact
with the resources provided by the school - and there is greater variation
in the former resources than in the latter. The strategy of career-and-income
oriented households in shifting burdens of child-rearing onto the state,
or onto the schools, and supporting those activities through taxes or
tuition, runs into this fact."19
Coleman's last sentence is an important one to reconsider in the year
2000. One of the byproducts of the recent economic changes is the fact
that almost everyone is working more hours. This includes parents of children.
What might less time with adults other than educators mean for children's
learning? Consider the question in light of the research from the 1997
Kellogg Corporation's Learning Now program: the "conclusion was based
on research conducted in Michigan, which compared the relative influence
that family, community, and other factors have on student performance.
Amazingly, it concluded that factors outside of the school are four times
more important in determining a studentŐs success on standardized tests
than are factors within the school."20
Such a research finding would not come as a surprise to anyone who appreciates
the fact that children are always learning. Their brain's are always absorbing
information and trying to make sense of it. The problem is that in today's
information saturated world much of what they learn is either worthless
or even downright dangerous. There are two ways of handling this: 1) keep
children in schools and daycare centers where it is easier to control
what they learn for longer hours, or 2) reconnect children's learning
to the activities of the larger community by making communities safe and
stimulating enough for children's constant exploration. The 21st Century
Learning Initiative is dedicated to helping create the conditions for
the second option, and we remain optimistic even though we understand
the second option flies in the face of current economic trends.
If we want our children to become responsible life-long learners then
we need to be as concerned about their time outside the classroom as we
are about their time in it. If we want children to function well in an
open and dynamic economy then it is imperative to expose them to open
and dynamic learning environments. Harvard's Robert Putnam has written
and spoken extensively about the concept of social capital, and why it
matters for children's learning. What he told a recent gathering discussing
the new economy at the White House is so important to children's learning
that I quote it here extensively:
The basic idea of the concept of social capital is that networks have
value...What I've been doing in the last several years is studying the
value of those social connections for communities. And it's quite clear
that social capital is one of the most important assets that a community
can have. I'm very impressed as an educator with the administration's
efforts to make investments to decrease class size. But the statistical
evidence is that the best predictor of the performance of a community's
schools, the best predictor of math scores and science scores, for example,
is the social capital in that community, even better than the class
size. The best predictor of the crime rate - negative predictor
of the crime rate - in a community is not how many police they have,
or how much they're spending on cops, but the amount of social capital
in the community. And by that I simply mean the number of people who
know one another's first name, the number of people who take part in
community organizations, the level of trust and reciprocity in the community...
Connectedness matters to our lives and to our community's health in
very many measurable ways. That's the first point: social connections
really matter in measurable ways. The second point, American communities
have seriously lost many forms of social capital over the last 25 years.
We're familiar, all of us in this room, with one index of this, which
is the decline in voting turnout. That's down about 25 percent. It turns
out that that is actually one of the least striking measures of the
decline in social connectedness. And in my new book, Bowling Alone,
I try to pull together a lot of evidence. I'm going to just highlight
a very few facts for you. The frequency with which families eat dinner
together has declined by one-third over the last 25 years - not just
for people who work at the White House, for all Americans - the frequency
with which you have dinner with your family - the frequency with which
families take vacations together has declined by one-third over the
last 20 years. The number of times you have friends over to the house
has declined by 45 percent in the last 25 years. Participation in clubs,
in civic organizations - not just the old-fashioned ones with the funny
hats, but even the new-age poetry groups and so on - adding all of those
civic, community organizations up, involvement in those has been cut
more than in half in the last 25 years...
So in many respects, communities all over the United States have seen
a serious erosion of this very valuable asset, our social networks that
connect us with one another."21
In conclusion Putnam noted, "Across time, across space, across the
American states, there's a very strong, positive relationship between
the degree of economic equality and the degree of social capital. The
places in America that have the lowest disparity of income are the places
that have the highest levels of civic engagement." It takes time and
trust to develop networks, to build organizations, and to raise children.
Yet, from the perspective of children's learning nothing could provide
greater rewards than a cross-section of citizens coming together around
the developmental needs of all its children. Parents understand this intuitively,
and many want to be involved in organizations that their children are
interested in joining. In fact much of the angst that parents say they
feel is directly related to juggling their need to work and their desire
to spend time with their kids. "Increasingly it is mandatory overtime
versus coaching my kidŐs Little League baseball team," more parents are
starting to lament.
REACTING TO THE TIME BIND
Despite the fact that the average family with children worked 14.5 hours
more a week in 1998 than in 1974 most parents want their children, especially
their very young children, to be raised by one or the other of them. According
to the New York-based Public Agenda, "At the most basic level, parents
of young children believe that having a full-time parental presence at
home is what's best for very young children, and it is what most would
prefer for their own family. The recurring, powerful refrain from the
focus groups and survey findings is that whenever possible, nothing beats
having a mother or father at home. Asked to choose among six child care
situations that might be appropriate for children during their earliest
years, 7 in 10 (70%) parents say the best is to have one parent stay at
home...By an overwhelming margin (81% to 1%), today's parents say that
children who spend the day with a stay-at-home parent are more likely
to get affection and attention than those who are in quality child care."22
"Over the last two decades, American fathers' time at work has increased
by 3.1 hour per week...for mothers, it's 5.2 hours. Employed fathers with
children younger than 18 now work an average of 50.9 hours per week; working
mothers 41.4 hours."23 Despite what most
parents actually want, their increased working hours means their children
are spending more time in the care of professionals.24
Remember that learning is an intensely subjective, personal process that
each child constantly and actively modifies in light of new experiences.
The more varied a person's experience the more perspectives that person
can bring to a new opportunity or problem. This is an important point
from the perspective of learning. The basic action of the human brain
is to link one event to another. "We make sense of present experience
by comparing it to previous ones; once we have found a match, we use our
previous experience to decide what to do next, to predict what will follow,
or simply to characterize it as another instance of something which we
are familiar. What this means is that we can really only understand -
and, hence, remember - situations we have been in before. Our memories
are really little more than the sum of stories we can recall and apply.
Part of knowing the right story to tell is having a lot of them."25
Economically, nations may gain in the short-term by getting parents into
the workforce as soon as possible after the birth of their children. Both
working parents and the professionals who watch children add to the gross
domestic product and they pay taxes. However, it has to be stressed that
as children spend more time in structured learning environments they,
not surprisingly, become successful in navigating and excelling in such
closed environments. They quickly learn the rules to success, and as long
as the rules don't change they do well. They feel comfortable in settings
where things are structured and controlled. In contrast, a more open and
risky environment intimidates them; they have learned to play life safe.
If this is indeed the case, then we are creating a potentially dangerous
disconnect between the learning environments we are providing for children
and the economy we are creating for them to enter into as adults.
Two researchers for the Board of Governors of the U.S. Federal Reserve
System captured the significance of this disconnect when they wrote for
the governors in 1997: "By identifying alternative means of accumulating
human capital, we are able to show that an economy in the early stages
of development may have too little education, but in later stages of development
may have too much education ... When entrepreneurial human capital is
more important than professional human capital in determining the level
of technology, the steady state will have too many professionals and too
few entrepreneurs. Thus, a reduction in direct formal education and an
increase in entrepreneurial experience could increase per capita income."26
Read this again: it says that a reduction in direct formal education and
an increase in entrepreneurial experience (activities in partnership with
organizations outside the school) could increase per capita income.
What this means is that in a developed country which has plenty of professionals
such as lawyers and doctors there is a greater need for a high number
of entrepreneurs (those people behind the new economy) to sustain or expand
economic productivity. Young people who have multiple opportunities to
flex their intellect beyond just the relatively closed environment of
the classroom are more likely to become such entrepreneurs. In other words,
for young people to thrive in highly flexible, changing environments,
they need to have grown up in open and challenging environments that stimulate
their ability to be creative and thoughtful. It is rare for such challenging
learning environments to coexist within institutions driven by a time-clock
or a mass of standard operating procedures.
Not surprisingly, these more open learning environments are very similar
to the same sorts of environments where adults thrive as well. Arie P
De Geus of the Shell Corporation has written that a company that seeks
short-term gains at all costs encourages lower employee loyalty and "reduced
levels of trust, which then require a management style based on stronger
hierarchical controls. Stronger controls reduce the space for innovation
and lead to lower learning abilities of the company as a whole. Lower
levels of learning in the post-industrial society reduce a company's life
expectancy in a world in which success depends on the ability to maximize
the use of the available brain capacity."27
CONCLUSION
This article will conclude by asking you the reader if you feel that
far too many children are becoming alarmingly deficient in generating
their own ideas and opportunities? If you feel that indeed they are, then
you should seriously consider what can be done to develop new models of
learning that would help all children take responsibility for their own
learning. Believe it or not humans are in fact predisposed to think for
themselves, and we are very good at it when given the proper upbringing.
If this were not indeed the case we would have disappeared long ago as
a species. There is a very optimistic scenario waiting to unfold and that
is one where the needs of the economy are actually in-line with the natural
functioning of the human brain. Yet, for this too happen, we must be careful
to balance the many opportunities of today with the learning needs of
our children. There is a real danger that we may be missing the opportunity.
We may, in fact, be creating an economy with endless possibilities, while
at the same time creating very few young people who will actually be able
to take advantage of them.
ENDNOTES:
- Gordon Brown. Lecture by the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the Royal
Economic Society on Thursday 13 July 2000. www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/press/2000/p90.00.html
- Ibid.
- Ibid.
- Refer to John Abbott and Terry Ryan. The Unfinished Revolution: Learning,
human development, community and political paradox.( London: Network
Educational Press), 2000.
- National Research Council. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience,
and School. (Washington, DC: National Academy Press), 1999, p. 3.
- Donald J. Johnston. "The New Economy." Secretary-General
of the OECD. (Paris: OECD), 2000.
- Gordon Brown.
- Jeff Gates. Democracy at Risk: Rescuing Main Street from Wall Street.
(Cambridge: Perseus Publishing), 2000, p. XIV.
- The World Bank Institute. "The Global Divide in Health, Education
and Technology." Special Report. (Washington: World Bank Institute),
Spring 2000.
- Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. "Has Democracy a Future." Foreign Affairs.
(September/October 1997), pp. 5-6.
- Robert Gilpin. The Challenge of Global Capitalism. (Princeton: Princeton
University Press), 2000, p. 3.
- Office of the Press Secretary. "1999 Economic Report of the President,"
Council of Economic Advisors. (Washington: The White House), February
1999.
- "What on Earth? A weekly look at trends, people and events around
the world." The Washington Post. (September 11, 1999), p. A15.
- An issue of demographics: Peter Drucker captured the significance
of an aging population when he wrote for the Harvard Business Review,
"The developed world is in the process of committing collective suicide.
Its citizens are not having enough babies to reproduce themselves...For
the next 25 years the underpopulation of the developed countries is
an accomplished fact and has the following implication...Economic growth
can no longer come either from putting more people to work - that is,
from more resource input, as much of it has come in the past - or from
an increase in consumersŐ demands. It can come only from a very sharp
and continuing increase in the productivity of the one resource in which
the developed countries still have a competitive edge (and which they
are likely to maintain for a few more decades): knowledge work and knowledge
workers." Peter F. Drucker. "The Future That Has Already Happened,"
Harvard Business Review. (September/October 1997), p. 20. What this
shift towards an aging society has meant in the United States is that
an increasing proportion of government spending has gone towards the
needs of the elderly at the expense of children. Currently the federal
government spends seven times as much per person on the elderly as it
does on its young. In fact, "government spending on the elderly by itself
now gives people over the age of 67 per capita incomes of equal to 60
percent of the American averageÉthe elderly make up about 13 percent
of the population, but they receive, excluding interest on the national
debt, half the federal budget." Lester Thurow. The Future of Capitalism.
(New York: William Morrow and Company), 1996, p. 104.
- Dr. Daniel H. Weinberg. "Press Briefing on 1998 Income and Poverty
Estimates." (Washington: US Census Bureau), September 30, 1999.
- Alexis M. Herman, Secretary of Labor. "Report on the American Workforce."
(Washington: U.S. Department of Labor), 1999.
- Robert Gilpin, p. 307.
- Ibid.
- James S. Coleman. "Families and Schools." Educational Researcher (August-September
1987), p. 50.
- Arnold Langbo. "The White House Conference on Early Childhood Development
and Learning." (Washington: The Office of the President), 4-17-97.
- Steve Farkas, Ann Duffett and Jean Johnson. "Necessary Compromises:
How Parents, Employers and ChildrenŐs Advocates View Child Care Today."
(New York: Public Agenda), August 2000.
- Robert Putnam. "Remarks by the President and Participants in
Final Session of the White House Conference on the New Economy."
April 5, 2000.
- Kirstin Downey Grimsley and Jacqueline L. Salmon. "For Working Parents,
Mixed News at Home," The Washington Post. (9-27-99), p. A8.
- A note about daycare providers: The term "daycare" itself encompasses
many arrangements. There are some arrangements that are highly innovative
and from the perspective of childrenŐs learning and the needs of the
parents worth studying. One example is a daycare cooperative where parents
take turns caring for othersŐ children on a reciprocal basis. Four or
five families may work together to provide support one anotherŐs children.
However, increasingly parents utilize the professional daycare centers
where activities are more formalized and controlled and the workers
are poorly paid ($6.89 an hour in the US).
- Roger Schank and John Cleave, "Natural Learning, Natural Teaching:
Changing human memory." In The Mind, The Brain, and Complex Adaptive
Systems. Harold Morowitz and Jerome Singer (eds.) (Reading MA: Addison-Wesley
Publishing Company), 1995, p. 178.
- Murat F. Iyigu and Ann L. Owen. "Risk, Entrepreneurship and Human
Capital Accumulation." Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System."
(July 1997), p. 2.
- Arie P. De Geus. "The Living Company: A Recipe for Success," The Washington
Quarterly. (Winter 1998), p. 184.
__________________________
21st
Century Learning Initiative
http://www.21learn.org
mail@21learn.org |
