This article was submitted by David Wolsk who has spent the past 45 years working in the field of education and research. Wolsk has worked for the Canadian, Danish and American governments, and as a consultant to UNESCO.

“Thinking is the hardest work there is, which is probably why so few engage in it” Henry Ford

“Science is rooted in conversations.” Heisenberg
Summary

1. Initial Premise: there are causal relationships amongst the multitude of inadequacies in the human management of our world and the workings of most of our educational institutions and the limited thinking processes, which characterise many graduates at all levels.
2. Most major problems cross disciplinary boundaries. This creates serious communication difficulties for policy development, problem solving and implementation.
3. A suggested long-term start on a “solution”: return education and schooling to its initial roots in reality; i.e., the direct exposure to and analysis of real world situations as starting points for self directed learning; or, experience first, books and lectures to follow. Also, in designing learning structures, take seriously our knowledge base on long-term memory.
4. Develop and finance an infrastructure for global education renewal that is responsive to both the lessons from past renewal activities and capable of surmounting the enormity and complexity and long time frame required to address the many challenges. This requires both top down and bottoms up, or grass roots, approaches.

I. Introduction

Two themes fill the non-fiction shelves of our bookstores: the sorry state of education and the sorrier state of our stewardship of this planet. There is an obvious relationship between these two, which has received much less attention. This paper will attempt to explore this relationship. The theme: unless we can fix the education deficits, we will fail to cross the many thresholds of long-term safety for human life upon this earth. An integrated, worldwide effort that spans pre-school to adult education is necessary. The major focus of it would build learning experiences from real world situations, using books, lectures and discussions as a follow-up. Once you start to think about the relationship between our messed up world and our equally messed up education systems, it hard to imagine how education has escaped blame for so long. It’s time to point the finger, offer alternatives and describe how to achieve what has eluded educational reformers since the birth and expansion of formal education.

This paper owes much to the books of John Ralston Saul. His first work of non-fiction, Voltaire’s Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West, 1992, provides abundant evidence of the separation of reality from organised societal activities. As he states it:

“Thus, among the illusions which have invested our civilisation is an absolute belief that the solution to our problems must be a more determined application of rationally organised expertise. The reality is that our problems are largely the product of that application. The illusion is that we have created the most sophisticated society in the history of man. The reality is that the division of knowledge into feudal fiefdoms of expertise has made general understanding and co-ordinated action not simply impossible but despised and distrusted.” p. 8

At an early stage of my work as a consultant and trainer, I was exposed to the books of Chris Argyris and his concept of “double-loop learning. He amply illustrated the danger of problem solving and seeking solutions ƒ.. the loop forward, without first looping backwards. That meant exploring what it was in the past that got us to where we are today. As applied here, it means trying to understand the complex forces that predisposed education to become more and more academic with new disciplines proliferating.

II. Background

Everything seems to be speeding up. Computers run faster; new technological marvels arrive at the stores only to be outdated within an ever-shorter time; a working life is now expected to include numerous career changes; the growth of the money supply is still on an exponential curve upward, etc., etc. Universities will not be left behind. The professors are busily creating new disciplines, new journals and textbooks along with internet universities, all with exponential curves.

THE CRUCIAL QUESTION: has this discrepancy between the need for rapid responses and the levels of competence for real-world problem analysis and management become dangerously large?

Is it possible that there is a direct connection from these phenomena to the disastrous world we fear we are passing on to our grandchildren? Especially with education: is it possible that the pattern of 20th Century educational development has produced a dinosaur, incapable of adjusting to the current global context of human life on this planet? If so, can we help it along to extinction? And, if we don’t, are we liable to be the species that becomes extinct?

The thesis of this paper is that the answer to all of these questions is “YES.” This leads to three themes for education change; 1) focus on learning approaches that reverse the usual sequence, that is, expose students to reality experiences BEFORE books; 2) develop a life-span education focus that encompasses both global and local change processes while continually looping back to reality experiences; and 3) assemble the leadership, money and muscle for a realistic plan of global educational renewal based on 1) and 2).

III. The Brain: balancing learning and long-term memory

Let’s begin with our brains: 250 million years of evolution of humans has not changed the basic nature of the learning process: we learn from experience and are most likely to retain what we have learned if it includes an experiential component. Although we are capable of memorising much that has no meaning to us, it is usual for disembodied memorisation to be lost when it may no longer be needed. Our brains are structured to control input. (Powers, William T. Living Control Systems, 1989)

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