I look forward to working with you to bring your ideas to this forum, Kim. Watch for an email soon so we can discuss how best to present them.

My challenge to you and all is how do we affect such change? Can we gain the attention of the President? Only a global mandate could overwhelm the two unions in the way: parents and teachers.

I would ask myself “What is it FOR?” Why do we educate kids? What is the point of it? I think we have lost sight of the answer to this/these question/s. In order to find the answer, we need to be speaking to people from all sorts of sectors currently not engaged in this discussion: corporate employers, university faculties (although they could do with a makeover, too), criminologists, psychologists, societal and religious leaders, etc.

Secondly, I would ask myself “What does the perfect school leaver ‘look’ like?” What is there profile? What skills do they have? How do they approach life and its challenges? In order to answer this question, we need to have the answer to the first question. Like everyone else, I have my own views of what the answers would be, but it really needs to be a collaborative process.

Then and only then do we start looking at how we can make it possible for the children of our society to reach that point. And we don’t adopt a one-size-fits-all approach, because kids are not made with cookie cutters and one size actually fits one (if you’re lucky!).

I have no intention of suggesting what the result would look like, since we have yet to answer the first two questions. Knowing the solution to an undefined challenge/project/whatever is what an ex manager of mine called ‘the zone of absurdity’. One thing I do know is that it would look very different from the model we have today!

One is that, luckily, I got to be part of a completely “rethought” school as a high school student — a school without age-based grades, without grading, where science credit came from interning in a city hospital lab or developing a small heritage farm in a city park. Where history credit might come from wandering Manhattan, social studies credit from re-envisioning a downtown or interviewing the homeless in Grand Central’s tunnels after midnight. See this for a pdf regarding a similar school in Philadelphia.

This taught me some key things: Kids bring the world with them into school. They bring their interests, passions, problems. “School” should be about leveraging that, not denying it. Schoolwork should be the safe place to experiment with the world – the place where we get to play and work out the details of our real learning, 99% of which happens outside of school.

School should never be a place of subject divisions – for some kids that heritage farm was science credit, for others history, for others both. Of course.

School should not be a place of time constraints. Periods, semesters… that’s stupid. Human interest and human learning does not stop and start when bells ring.

But I also know that I like schools as a physical place. It hasn’t always been “nice” for me, but even that free school really benefitted from our mostly empty “White Room” (an ex cafeteria) where we could gather, be safe and away from the world that had hurt us. I’m a massive fan of the technologies which smash the walls of school, but sometimes, those walls protect and defend. We should not lose them.

And I know that school needs to be a place focused on “what” not “how.” “How” disables – read this book this way, write this way, sit in this chair, come at this time. “What” enables – show us how you know? what u’ve learned? Do it your way.

Quick thoughts, but they’ve been bubbling up for decades.

Oh, some district somewhere will take the plunge and try to start fresh without any of the old assumptions. Let’s even assume that they can convince the teachers to go along with, better yet, be part of planning the renaissance. Imagine that, administrators, teachers, and maybe even some entrepreneurs working together and moving in a common direction; I can almost see the sun shining through brilliant rainbows and bluebirds chirping the good news.

But wait! We still have to convince the parents.

Parents, it turns out, are deeply suspicious of any major fundamental re-imagining of school. This is the main reason that charter schools, for the most part, are just more intense, sometimes more focused versions of your everyday public school.

It seems parents like the 10-hour schooldays because it provides that much more free childcare coverage for working moms and dads, but as soon as ideas like student choice and child-directed education start flying about the parents fly off the handle and out the door.

Okay, but this is an intellectual exercise, not a pragmatic one, right.

I repeat that because if it were a discussion of pragmatic reformations of education we’d have to account for all those pesky poverty-stricken inner-city kids who, while desperately in need of open space and access to nature, have little safe access to it.

It is, in fact, in the inner cities and, paradoxically perhaps, the rural areas where all discussions of education reform trip over themselves and fall.

In inner cities there are just too many kids to scrap the current system and start over. No one in their right mind is going to put the million or so school children in NYC out onto the streets whilst the school buildings are torn down to create new educational open spaces.

The rural areas have lots of space but not the concentration of students to make use of it the way it might be used elsewhere. That students who live in open space will need to be bussed to other open spaces for educational purposes is mind-boggling.

So, if it won’t work in inner cities and won’t work in rural areas, who will benefit from this re-imagination of education? Why, it’s the wealthier suburban kids whose schools, for the most part, are not the real problems we think about when we think about the problems of or caused by public education.

One can no more restart the education system than one could restart fire service, policing, sanitation services, the military or any of the other similar major social-service agencies.

Change in education, like in most aspects of life and public policy, is and will remain far more evolutionary than revolutionary.

Tis a pity, for sure.

Whatis not included in “check” are project plans, deliverables, timescales, cost/benefit analysis. This is command and control thinking, where you always must begin with a plan. Starting at “check” gives us a new place to begin.

Ultimately, we would disepnse of the old measures (usually financial and performance targets) in favor of new measures. measures decided by the purpose of the service from the customer’s point of view. This shift to purpose and measures derived from purpose allows the liberation of method in a service setting. Method is what needs to be liberated in any system and the people that we engage are the ones providing the service and are closest to our customers. Working from targets (present method) constrains method and worse creates more waste as the target becomes the defacto purpose of the system.

A fresh look would be in order for the education system . . . yes. Starting from scratch only in the way we approach the problem. I suggest systems thinking.

You can read more on my website and download understanding your organization as a system at no cost. We need to change our thinking quickly.