Why haven't schools adapted to the needs of the society around them, and adopted useful technologies?

Almost 200 years ago, Henry David Thoreau asked the same question. He complained that his courses at Harvard were devoid of practical application, and not updated to match the progress of science and the arts. Of his course in navigation at the America's best school, he remarked, "why, if I had taken one turn down the harbor I should have known more about it." He concluded that learning "should not be one thing in the schoolroom, and another in the street." He longed for a clearer reflection of the world outside to find its way into the academy. You can learn more about Thoreau's educational ideas at The Web of American Transcendentalism.

The lag time in the adoption of new technologies by schools is nothing new. Schools by their nature slow to adapt to the world around them, and adopt new tools and methods that can support their mission. The book, invented in the days of Gutenberg (1550), and mass-produced on a wide scale 150 years later, was not widely adopted by American schools until 1850, with the rise of the McGuffey readers. Other fields such as medicine and law adopted the very useful technology of the book in half the time. A similar lag time occurs in the adoption of the pencil, invented in 1825, mass-produced 50 years later and widely adopted in the trades and business by 1875. Not until after the first world war did pencils begin to replace inkwells and nibs in schools -- a full century after their invention. Both of these technologies offered clear advantages to the schools' mission, but took twice as long to arrive.

Examples

The lag time between invention, mass production, and ubiquity of new technologies has been getting shorter over the years. The table below illustrates six information technologies that have found their ways into our lives over the last 500 years. Notice that in each case, the new technology takes twice as long to become commonplace in schools.

Explanations

Why does it take schools twice as long to adapt and adopt such evidently useful methods and technologies?

• Their implicit mission is to transmit the previous culture to the next generation, not to prepare them for a new culture.
• They draw the most conservative, risk-averse people to their ranks.
• Those people tend to go from school to college and back to school again, seldom spending time in the world outside where they might observe the technological changes taking place.
• Their diverse and public governance makes transformative decisions difficult to take.
• Their implicit mission is custodial and pacifying; new technologies are often disruptive to this mission.
• Their compulsory nature and public monopoly prevent market forces from forcing adaptation.
• The new technologies often threaten the power base of the people that run the schools.
• They lack the extra funds necessary to invest in new ways of doing things.

All of these explanations contribute to the lag time. These explanations applied in Thoreau's time as they do now, and none of them is insurmountable. The case studies in this book show many examples of educators who have overcome these forces to build islands of Education 3.0.

Thoreau's father ran a pencil factory. Henry David was an early adopter of the technology, taking it with him to Walden Pond and down the Concord and Merrimac rivers and along the beaches of Cape Cod. The portable pencil -- a nineteenth-century mobile learning device -- enabled him to write as he took his turns down the harbors and made his observations in the streets. With one foot in the academy and another in the street, Thoreau was able to transcend both worlds. He serves as a model for many of today's educators who are adapting their schools to Education 3.0. We'll hear more about Thoreau, his pencils, and his educational heirs later in this book.

But our next visit is to a student who has outgrown her pencils. If schools are slow to transform themselves into version 3.0, perhaps it's because they lack a clear vision of what school could look like if it took full advantage of 21st-century learning devices. The next chapter paints this vision as seen through the eyes of students.