Executive Summary

During the Nineteenth Century, industrial production was the leading source of the generation of new wealth, and the public education system was built to equip Canadians to work in that economy. Today we still have essentially the same educational system and structure that was developed over a century ago, however the major generation of overall wealth has shifted to the services sector (68%), and the generation of new economic growth and wealth is in sectors that require skills in knowledge management and innovation.

‘One of the few institutions that have escaped relatively unscathed by the disruptive technologies of the past 50 years is “school”. By and large schools have avoided change by ignoring, banning, or trying to co-opt new technologies. Only the personal computer and the Internet are now starting to have an impact. The fact remains that our great-grandparents could walk into most of today’s classrooms and recognize almost everything they see.’
David Thornburg, The New Basics, 2002

This new era of economic development is known as the Knowledge Age. (KA)

At the same time, Canada has been transformed by waves of immigration that have transformed our cities into global villages. However, our schools were designed for homogeneous populations of largely British origin outside Quebec. Immigrants were expected to assimilate. That has changed and we now embrace cultural diversity. We must harness these new multiple energy sources - new immigration, and the generation of new wealth in the emerging economy - to reach new levels of quality of life for Canadians. But the schooling system has not transformed itself to meet the challenge.

As a result, in six major categories, the educational system is hurting rather than energizing the growth of new wealth creation and Canada’s prospects of maintaining and enriching our quality of life. These six areas are:

• a modern organizational structure;
• an embracing of our cultural diversity;
• a curriculum that is designed for the Knowledge Age;
• an architecture, a physical learning environment in which to learn
• a generative Web 2.0 technological support common to modern, thriving enterprises.
• a green and thermal energy base for responsible ecological practice

A new form and structure of schools will nurture into a powerful new engine to keep Canada in a top-ranking position globally in terms of quality of life. As with the original investment in education for the Industrial Age, there is similar need for that investment for this age. The potential rewards are huge.

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Summary of Recommendations

The first step is to consolidate the executives in the Ministries and Boards into autonomous organizations. Since schooling is a public enterprise, there must be a balance between popular consensus and strong, informed leadership. An analogy to a crown corporation is tempting as a board organization model. There must be a means of having the directors of the system and the teachers' and staff unions working as collaborative partners in the process, not as mandated adversaries. The directors have the mandate to lead and manage the vision, mission, values, goals and budget for the organization.

The teachers, then, organize and deliver the program, and they must have the decision-making power to do so in their schools within the organization’s mandate. They must be supported beyond salaries by remunerated and enhanced professional development for the new process.

The operating process must shift from ‘teaching subjects to classes’ to ‘helping students to learn’. This will involve both teacher and student teams organized not by ‘classes’ and ‘timetables’ - 'cells and bells' and herding from class to class, but through working teams with managed/appointment-based schedules in studies, resource studios, labs and centres.

Very importantly, we must remodel the physical structures and ambience of the schools to better accommodate our modern, culturally diverse society. The schools must be welcoming, accepting and engaging learning environments for people from all cultures.
We must restructure the curriculum so that core, basic literacy is largely mastered by the end of Grade 6, the transitional new curriculum for the KA by the end of Grade 10, and the preparation for further learning by the end of Grade 12.

Finally, the whole process must rest on a comprehensive information and knowledge base to support learning, collaboration, continuous reporting and feedback to students, parents, teachers and boards, and general administration.

To kick-start the process, we should begin with a pilot at the earliest possible date.
This whole paper is really an executive summary itself. Each of the topics would rate whole chapters in a detailed proposal. That is neither practical nor desirable at this stage, so while many of the details have, in fact, been researched and worked out, this paper outlines the essential, bare-bones concepts and practical recommendations.

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1. Organization – The Present State of Education

During the Industrial Age, our educational organizations were designed and developed to educate and train individuals who could work effectively in the key industries and institutions of the time (e.g. the foundries, factories, telephone exchanges, and the offices of the age). We now live and work in the Knowledge Age, which is dominated by businesses in sectors such as information technology, Internet services and products, innovative designing of new services and products, computer-assisted processes of all kinds, and the biomedical industry. To meet the needs of this new economic era, we must transform our schooling practice and curriculum.

In any business or public organization, success comes from identifying the key engines of production and service and subsequently training well-qualified people so they can be managed for best outcomes. Public systems, such as schools, both provide and support the workers necessary to fuel those engines of production and, when these systems are complementary, the whole of society benefits.

That complementary relationship between schools and the engines of the economy was firmly in place until the end of WWII, a relationship well-equipped to provide Canadians with the skills needed to work and thrive in the Industrial Age. What was new and energizing about the Industrial Age schooling system? It provided compulsory, free, public, universal schooling to ensure the population possessed the basic skills in the 3 R’s – reading, writing, and arithmetic, which allowed them to read instructions and follow orders. Many students left school after Grade 10, and only 6% went on to university and two-thirds of those graduated.

Today, however, it is difficult to find a job without at least a college certificate, and businesses require high school and/or college graduates to fill promising positions. Specifically, Canada now needs 90% of students to graduate with solid skills from Grade 12 with 70% of them prepared to go on to further learning for work, college or university.

Increasingly, our current manufacturing base (the driver of economic growth in the Industrial Age) is moving to offshore factories that offer cheap labour. While it is still robust in many areas, manufacturing contributes less than 21% to Canada’s GDP, mining and natural resources 8%, and agriculture 2%. By contrast, the services sector accounts for an impressive 68% of GDP.

The problem is that our schooling system has been set up for a largely industrial economy - even following an agricultural calendar. But today, we live in a world where the new wealth and improving quality of life will come from innovative ways we can identify and solve complex problems.

Governor General Michaëlle Jean in comments delivered at her inauguration, September 27th, 2005, and on the topic of youth violence on February 22nd, 2006. made these points:

‘We must give our young people the power, even more, the desire to realize their full potential’.
‘Education is part of the solution. We must give Canadians the tools to thrive in the knowledge economy.’
‘…we must eliminate the spectre of all the solitudes and promote solidarity among all the citizens who make up Canada today.’

To solve those problems and build new wealth, students will need to graduate from educational institutions or work place training with the ability to collaborate, solve complex problems, deal with intensely individualized corporate and personal products, and understand what developments of technology have anticipated this shift – best illustrated by the new Web 2.0 technology and processes (explained below) . What we need is a school system designed to support it.

We do not have the appropriate structures and our schools are languishing as a result. Like many resourced-based organizations built on the old economy, our public schools are unable to produce balanced budgets. They are losing students due to population changes and dropouts. They are also losing young teachers. They are facing rising costs despite the falling enrollments; and struggling tentatively, e.g. zero tolerance, with completely new demographics; and, as higher levels of government watch, slashing services that once made them competitive with the very best private schools.

What happened? The Knowledge Age is what has happened, and schooling for the Knowledge Age is an exciting new story -- one that needs telling.

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What is the ‘Knowledge Age’ and where does it lead?

Whereas the market for the Industrial Age was the demand for more goods and products, today, the market demands that ideas be turned into productive services.
This new age is called the Knowledge Age because it is now becoming possible not only to store numerical data in huge electronic banks, but to store, classify and sort people’s ‘knowledge’ in specific topics: thoughts and ideas of what they ‘know’ about people, processes and information.

Today, the source of the new wealth is in the creative analysis of this ‘knowledge’ from combined information banks reconfigured into a new product, largely in the services’ sector. For example, IBM and BP are companies that started as icons of the former age, nearly failed and re-invented themselves, IBM from computer manufacturer to business services, and BP into an organization of many self-directed sub-units. Its re-branding from British Petroleum to Beyond Petroleum is a classic. The Big Three American auto manufacturers still grapple with the challenge. The leaders in the redefined Web-information sector include Google, with its drive to be the knowledge base for nearly everything, (e.g. Google Earth, Google Trends, and the complete electronic library of published and video works), Yahoo, Amazon, eBay and, yes, newspapers!

The goal of the KA organization is to transform from a provider to an accommodator. The foundation for this is a unique, open and compelling data and thoughts bank.

DNA of Knowledge Age Organizations:

Decision rights: dispersed to the functional bases

Information: gathered, analysed and shared through complex technology used to build innovative practice

Motivators: flexibility, engaging working environments (some out-of-office), participation and rewards for thinking and contributing knowledge to the base.

Structure: customer driven, team managed, Theory Y directed.

Present day leaders require the skills and qualities that establish the organizational climate and mandate. Thinking workers, the new wealth builders, now require the ability to think critically and to find creative and innovative ways to execute that mandate. Hence, they all need to be armed with the traditional basic skills and knowledge plus those new ones now critical to wealth growth in the Knowledge Age.

The problem is that the system that should be providing the skills helpful to living in the new age has not kept pace. To operate successfully in this new age, students will have to have a whole new set of skills and attitudes in whatever they will do. The structure and operation of schools must change to mirror the new reality. If we invest in these changes, we have a major chance to achieve our main social goal -- to maintain and enrich our quality of life.

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2. Culture – Anchoring a Strong, Diverse, Collaborative Society

Canada has come to official multiculturalism very recently. While we have always had communities based on very different cultures, they have traditionally been expected to assimilate into the dominant English or French societies. Even though they were here first, Canada’s Aboriginal population has faced the same attitude, and accommodating that fact is an important part of the new challenge.

On what is an already complex cultural base, we now have recent and rich, diverse new cultural communities predominantly from the Indian sub-continent, Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa. With minimal discussion or collaboration with the provinces, the federal government has left the municipalities to cope with the consequences: new programs needed in the changing social fabric, unemployment, poverty, language acquisition, gang disputes and new crime.

While the great majority of immigrants have coped remarkably well and our cities have been transformed into global villages, the effects of immigration on public schools have been dramatic and, unfortunately, not positive.

The point is that the senior levels of government’s lack of understanding that social change incurs additional cost coupled with education’s systemic inflexibility has seriously undermined our students’ learning prospects.

In Ontario, schools were designed for homogeneous populations of largely British origin. Of course there was a rich multi-cultural community already. In a typical Grade 13 class at Jarvis CI in the 50’s, there could be 25 different nationalities represented among the 35 students in the class. They were all expected to assimilate into the predominant British culture. Most of them did.

Now we need to find a schooling model of common values and goals that goes as far as possible to accommodate and conserve the diverse, multi-cultural communities while educating them all for the new age. Prominent features of these school environments include: A welcoming and respectful school and staff; teams of students working in a problem-based curriculum and grouped by personal learning profiles, personal interests and goals; a rich school community life; reflective spaces for individual thought and contemplation; attractive and spacious common meeting places; strong student leadership and community service, in and out of the school; a basic behavioural expectancy of ‘do no harm’ as set out in the system’s mandate; respect built on skills and helpfulness; and viable options and interventions for students in distress.

At the core, our students should expect to gain solid academic achievement and to have the means for all to achieve it. They should expect to participate in school and community life; they should emerge from the end of their schooling with the skills they need to succeed; and they should expect to adhere to Canadian laws and constitution.

Of course there is an investment involved in transforming the schools (read more), but to have a system in which the vast majority of students have both the confidence and the means they need to build a productive future, a common future, and one in which the teachers have the restored pride and confidence that they are leading the team – that will be the best investment possible.

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3. Curriculum For the Knowledge Age

We have known for some time that our curriculum has been out-of-date, but the reforms have all sought to restore and test the old standards rather than to set new ones. The teachers have come under much closer scrutiny and have unfairly born the brunt of the blame for what has been almost totally a systemic failure leading to falling standards. At the same time, vastly different students with different needs and skills will not thrive in an environment that is insensitive to their futures. For example, English as a second language instruction, which should form the basis for helping new foreign students to integrate into classes, has been woefully weak.

There have been many suggestions as to what should go into a new curriculum. The Partnership for 21st Century Skills based in Washington, DC, has one of the most best-researched lists. Their ‘Results that Matter’ paper focuses on the following six key elements that I outline here.

Key Building Blocks of New Curriculum

Core subjects are the 3 R’s, with new R’s that include competence in the main computer applications, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and some programming. All this should be in place by the end of Grade 6. This would also include the key concepts of all the subject groups that middle school students will not take in their senior, Grades 11 and 12, years.

The new, 21st Century content also includes global awareness, financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy; civic literacy; and health and wellness literacy.
Critical to this new curriculum are the learning and thinking skills: critical thinking and problem-solving; communications; creative and innovative; contextual learning; and information and media literacy.

Information and communication technology (ICT) skills are discussed in the next topic of this section of the paper.

Necessary life skills to build into the curriculum include leadership, ethics, accountability, adaptability, personal productivity, personal responsibility, people skills, self-direction and social responsibility.

Finally, there must be a revised assessment model for this new curriculum. All five elements of the curriculum must ‘count’. They must be consciously built into the program, some with time and some in process, attitude and actions, and all be part of the overall reported outcome.

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4. The Coming of Web 2.0

In addition to those six core curricular elements, technology will be a major factor in the development of a new curriculum. One of the biggest disappointments in education over the past 20 years has been the complete failure of technology to inform core learning due to the confusion as to what role it can play in schooling. The big money went into computer games.

Our young people generally have a much better idea of what the future is bringing than we do. They're already busy adopting new systems for communicating (instant messaging), sharing (blogs), buying and selling (eBay), exchanging (peer-to-peer technology), creating (Flash), meeting (3D worlds), collecting (downloads), coordinating (wikis), evaluating (reputation systems), searching (Google), analyzing (SETI), reporting (camera phones), programming (modding), socializing (chat rooms), and even learning (Web surfing).
Marc Prensky, “Listen to the Natives”, Education Leadership, January 2006

While some improvements have been made (i.e., GIS, publishing, music labs, robotics - smart boards are in another category) it is clear that much more needs to be done to integrate technology into the learning modules.

In their own time and on the computers at school (if they can get away with it) students use new communications (e.g., instant messaging) and information technology for engaging and communicating with their peers, playing games, for entertainment, and for seeking information. At their level, they are already in the new age as citizens, but not as students. With some of the Web sites, they are able to communicate on common subjects of interest with hundreds of millions of others. That world is disconnected from school, but not from the lives of the students or workers out in the new economy.

The difference between the adult users of the conventional communication technology (e-mail, cell phone, Web searches, and online purchasing), and the younger users (YouTube, MySpace, IM, iPod, iPhone, iTunes, Wikipedia, MMO’s like WOW) has been explained as that of Web 1.0 thinking and Web 2.0 thinking. Web 1.0 describes traditional, personal computer and phone uses. By contrast, Web 2.0 describes a collaborative, creative, participatory community of users.

In the world of business and wealth generation, Web 2.0 works from a dense, unique and open database. The key is to identify the base (all goods in eBay’s case, and books and video in Amazon’s), and to then find the broadest clientele possible. Customers are the main source of wealth, not because they buy your software application, but because they visit your site, use your data base, perhaps for a per item hourly cost, and added to that, advertisers pay per viewer.

What Web 2.0 systems do that Web 1.0 did not do is to vastly expand and make accessible the number and particularly the form of data ‘objects’ go into the electronic knowledge bank. The traditional data banks stored numerical or electronic data or lists. Web 2.0 is based on ‘thought’ knowledge: what customers know; not just what they ordered, but what they might like in the future. It is anticipatory.

Every organization can benefit from building these knowledge banks. How could this thinking and practice transform schools? Just imagine a school where all of the students and teachers have, at their finger tips, the information they need already personalized for their learning and working styles and lives along with the templates they need for complex problem-solving. These school problems include schedules, reporting (on demand and with relevant, personalized suggestions for consideration), and a rich base of tiered problem sets and interactive lessons and simulations that form the base of the curriculum. Students are active and engaged, and teachers are supported in providing the personal attention to the students and parents, time that now goes into stressful former age planning and administration.

The Web 2.0 model fits completely with the whole KA system. It is a key component for enriching our quality of life. Which environment do we want our students in?

The Top 10 game rentals boildown to 3 genres: run and run, boxing, and battling guns. The Japanese games are different and not from America.
Dan Bradbury, Backbone, May 2006

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