A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Systemic Reform: Perspecitives on Personalizing Education--September 1994

A More Personal Education System: The Future

The eight papers in this volume speak eloquently to the need to focus more of our attention on the individual in the education system. Just as current learning theory has begun to understand the importance of students' being able to bring their own perspectives and experience to the learning moment, we are beginning to understand that all actors in the education arena must be free to bring their own perceptions and experience to education. This freeing up of individuals will ensure the kind of creativity and energy being demanded by new reform constructs.

The idea of a system based on personal perspectives seems, at first glance, a contradiction or at least an effort to push our understanding beyond what is currently acceptable. The provision of education in the United States is rooted in the "factory model" that emphasized the strengths of the "system' rather than the individual. The individual, whether student or professional, was considered a generic creature that was "treated" by the system in order to meet the goals of the system. This way of approaching education in this country is at the heart of current reform efforts. In each of the papers in this volume concern is shown for the inability of past efforts to consider the individual and give voice and meaning to individual perspectives.

As Fullan and Stiegelbauer rightly point out, there must be more balance between the directiveness of the system and the flexibility of the individual. But the path to reaching this end is far from obvious. As the following three papers, by Cambone, Wohlstetter et al and Little, reveal there are deep and, perhaps, abiding difficulties in reshaping how education is done in this country. The image of the substance and process of education that each of us carries around in our heads is part of how we think about not only education, but ourselves and the world in which we live. The paper by Cambone probably tells this story as well as any, by taking us on a whirlwind tour of the many ways a teacher must recalibrate the day depending on which context is operative.

How do we personalize not only the system but, surprisingly, the people in the system? The idea that resonates through all these papers and, indeed, through much of the reform literature, is that the people in the system often behave as part of the system rather than as individuals. The task of making a personal system is to free the people in the system to realize their own individuality in a circumstance that traditionally has resisted that individuality.

The strength of any reform effort will be the ability of the individuals to shape their own individual reforms in the context of a larger reform. To do this will require such things as aligning the context of learning with new paradigms for learning (for students and professionals), increasing collaboration, flattening organizations, developing networks and other non-school connections, using technology effectively and embracing diversity.

This approach to reform is radically changing our ideas of what a system is and what we need from it and what an individual must be in this newly evolving system. While the outlines are still somewhat indistinct, fundamental assumptions of who we are, what we do and how we do it are subject to investigation now as never before.
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