philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Disruptive innovation and education

People were quick to note two differences. First, children are not in any way similar to rebar steel or disk drives—some of the notable examples Clay had studied. And we shouldn’t treat or imagine them to be so.

But today’s education system all too often does just this. It’s not the fault of anyone in the system today, but patterned after the dominant factory model of the era in which public schooling scaled, our education system functions as though all students learn at the same pace and have the same learning needs, which we know is not true.

Second, others told us that the theories would be useless for education because K–12 education did not operate as a classic market; it was much more of a monopoly.

What I have learned, however, is that schools, as we have created them, do have underlying economic, or business, models. They are not naturally occurring arrangements in the world but rather more recent inventions; the way they operate is not preordained. Disrupting our K–12 schools or our public school districts is impossible today because there is no nonconsumption of education in this country, but helping our schools use disruptive innovation to disrupt the classroom—the way they arrange teaching and learning—is possible.

And what’s exciting is that there are plenty of opportunities to use the first disruptive innovation in education since the printing press—online learning—to transform teaching and learning to better serve each individual student within each school by personalizing and humanizing learning—and undo the factory-model assumptions that dominate our schools and treat uniformly students in the process. Because online learning is inherently modular, it can help the education system customize for each child’s distinct needs and create opportunities for more meaningful collaborative work between children and teachers. 

See the full story here: http://www.christenseninstitute.org/disruptive-innovation-and-education/?curator=MediaREDEF