61: One of the powerful predictors of how children will fare in school is the educational attainments of their parents. This predictor holds across cultures, languages, races, ethnicities. It poses a difficult challenge. In populations where the educational attainments of parents are low, how can their children achieve educational excellence? To answer this question, we need to ask another. Why is parental educational attainment such a powerful predictor? The reason is not obscure. Parents with significant educational attainments have better insight into the processes of formal learning and the strategies for success at it, and they are more likely to surround their children with intellectual resources that will prove supportive. In a myriad of subtle ways they pass their experience to their children. Parents who have not been successful in formal schooling may pass on other kinds of knowledge that largely go unrecognized by the school culture. The challenge before us is to find a way to bring these ways of knowing together and to empower parental influence for all children in the processes of schooling.[Note 34]
62: Use of networked technologies, combined with a strong community of people learning together, will alter this cycle of failure that our educational structure, inadvertently perhaps, has helped to arrange. Throughout the 20th century, educational and social services have been highly segmented and specialized. Elementary schools serve children, aged 5 to 12, dividing them up according to annual age cohorts. So too with the numerous other segments of the learning society--high school, adult education, job training, college, counseling, and so on. Schooling and other community services all occur in separate spaces because the information resources and specialists necessary for each function required a distinctive location and deployment. The information technologies of the 21st century change these conditions, and make ubiquitous the resources needed to sustain numerous different educational functions.
63: We hypothesize that this ubiquity of diverse educational resources will permit educators to break the cycle of reproduction in educational attainments. Parental empathy with the learning processes of their children will be greatest if the parents are fully engaged in learning themselves. So, too, with teachers and the surrounding community. We think that school should increasingly take on the characteristics of a learning community, comprising children, their parents, and professionals, all of whom are engaged in serious efforts to extend their education further and to participate in the common intellectual enterprise. As a prototype for this kind of learning community with the potential to break the cycle by which patterns of educational attainment reproduce themselves from generation to generation, imagine a digital learning community in which all members--students, teachers, administrators, and parents--continuously work in collaboration with each other to pose difficult questions and to set about answering them with the full intellectual apparatus of the culture. Through networked technologies and continuing involvement with other learning communities, universities, and public interest groups, each should have access to the resources and assistance to make headway on such goals.
64: Advanced information technologies make construction of integrated learning communities far more feasible. The ideal of parents and children, teachers and community members joining together in the shared nurturing of their human potentials is not new. It has been a difficult ideal to actualize, for the resources that will help the child differ from those that will help the parent or the specialist or community member. Networked technologies make it possible, through a single location, to engage a diversity of people with challenging learning scenarios, providing each with appropriate resources and useful intellectual tools.
65: Let us put aside the traditional image of the educational ladder, with children clambering, rung by rung, up the sequence of grades, some falling off as dropouts, some scaling the whole way to college graduation, walking thereafter the plateau of middle- class affluence. Let us imagine instead a learning community, with its youngest children entering at its very center and then moving outward as they grow, through a series of concentric circles, with parents, teachers, and other adults ringed around them, with lines of interactive electronic communication linking all, from the center of these circles out, to the full range of cultural institutions and specialized resources of the society.
Next: [Conclusion]
Previous: [Reconstructing the Educational System]