Andy, these are huge questions; in fact whether century 22 exists for any children has seemed to us future historian guides around death of distance for the last 22 years at http://macrae-nets.blogspot.com and friends' networks to depend on all the people (cross-culturally, worldwide at every locality) standing up and demanding the right to do diverse deep contextual experiments (instead of all money going into education for government to standardise one lowest common denominator of exams) we need to get back some of the money, some of the timke in the community for these experiments; if that sounds like a revolution well mathematicians like Einstein and leaders like Gandhi were absolutely clear this is the sort of higher order system crisis that we cannot get to using rules, laws constitutions of the lower order system we (and every value building or destroying co-creation we link to) have inherited from when we were more geographically separated than connected
worse as we go up the food chain of individually separated nations we need either to take education away from the prime minister's /president's cabinet or demand that instead of having had one minute's attention on it in the last 5 years and most of the rest of te time on wargaming, 20% of all government time is spent on questioning education with the public
I have started this thread as I expect we have to fly below the radar and ungovern education rather than eg ask Bush or Blair for help in getting any of our nations' governments to give education systems from grade 1 to 40 the new open networking attention they merit http://scope.lidc.sfu.ca/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=210
Nancy, also regularly use a roundtable or camp fire model. However I ask each seat to choose a roleplay that may be in tense relationship with each other seat as regards the overall context. If we were to make a list of all the ways that education is served from individuals, to groups eg schools, to government to local community investments and all the demands that are made of education by pupils of every age, by parents, by government, by communities, by employers etc- could we develop a list of seats with one of these roles per seat; and then who would volunteer to play which role. Having a pairwise conversations between roleplayers to see if they can find win-wins or only conflicts in the way that learning systems connect them together is the way my roundtable conversation moves forward. Then we can draw green crossroads between conversational pairs who saw how to work each other's views within the overall human relations architecture and red crossroads where at least one side did not feel confident the known system works to connect both interests 24/7/365. The more green roads a map has the more the future of education is spinning well for all peoples; the more reds, the more the system is destroying everyone's lieftime potentials . This is - I would argue - the most relevant way of assessing/auditing wherther education is working. Odd, isn't it how extremely different it looks from the assessment that government or media typically does to how eductaion is going? One bit of goodnews: if you agree the roleplays and the pairwise conversation of a deep contextual conversation game like the above; then most of the interactions can be done virtually as long as we all share the pairwise voting and see the pairwise red and green crossroads that results. I believe one of the dumbest addages in the world is if a system aint broke, don't fix it. My addage is always see emerging conflicts or disconnects at earliest possible time as this is always the simplest and least cost time to resolve them. In other words use the system to learn. (I was taught by an engineer that the natural state of tense systems is to degrade unless your audit at each cycle is detecting the next emerging conflict or disconnect. His lifelong work had studied 1000s of tragedies that failed because of blindness to this most simple system stewarding role of true leadership)
We haven't truly stood back and made a complete map of conflicts in education since the invention of the printing press as far as I can see. Though if you have seen such a case since, let's study if a campfire map was made to reform the broken system, or what method worked.