I have been reading Clayton Christensen’s Disrupting Class.In it he proposes that education, like all industries of a certain vintage, is ripe for disruptive innovation. He proposes that this will come about because technology provides unique opportunities for individualization in untapped markets like early childhood education, boutique classes offered online, and home schooling. I think he misses the mark with his application of his theories about innovation to education.
I agree that education is ripe for disruption but I don’t think it will come about because of technology.
I have come to the conclusion that education is an entirely human endeavor and not necessarily adaptable to the laws of commerce that so many business models encourage us to adopt. I think the future disruption that Christensen proposes will come about…. but only from and by the hand of teachers.
Teachers taking more and more leadership in the process of education would constitute a true innovation. Changes to education in the past have come from influences outside of education like technology. As teachers embrace their creative capacity as professionals they will push education past its current state to become another entity and that technology will only be the tool for that disruption.
Teachers are currently creating disruptions in areas like:
- how schools are created, run, and funded with models like Avalon Schools
- how curriculum is developed and distributed with services like We Are Teachers
- how instruction is delivered using Web 2.0 tools
Dr. Christensen, you have made some excellent points in your book but I think that perhaps you might have committed the classic academic researcher’s mistake by seeing what you were looking for and not necessarily the reality of the situation. Education will change but, it is the people who will change it, not the tools.
Image from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers
