Draft by Bill Ellis

Learning Future

Today America is in the era of a new beginning. In many ways this era parallells that of the 1870s and America's transition from an agrarian society to an Industrial one. By 1870 the heritage of the Pilgrims and the other early colonists was well past. The Daniel Boons and the Lewis and Clarks had explored nearly every square mile of this great land mass. Conastoga Wagons had carried pioneers and settlers to the rich farm lands and back waters of every acre of the midwest. New England villages had stabalized, Cattle Ranches were bringing wealth, praries had become wheat fields, and America was settling in to a homey and prosperous way of life.

But a few visionaries, like Horace Mann, saw even more for America. They saw in the railroads stretching across the country, in the water wheels driving New England mills, in the cotton gins turning out bales of cotton in the South, in the steamboats plying the rivers and canals, a new beginning for their times. They envisioned an industrial age in which factories and mills, banks and corporations would lead America into a new age of producing goods and wealth -- The Industrial Age.

To create this new America simple farm folk, homesteaders, and shop owners would have to learn new skills and new lifestyles. They would have to surrender the freedom and endless toil in their own shops and on their farms to accept a new responsibility to the the authority of industry. They would have to give up their lives regulated only by the weather and planting seasons to a life controlled by the assembly line and the factory whistle. In exchange these willing workers would be rewarded with steady salaries that would provide them with comfortable homes, material goods beyond their fondest dreams, and services to reduce the drudgery of their lives.

To bring these new Americans into being, a new education system had to be created. Mann, with a few strong supporters, set about to invent a new education system. Every community would have its state mandated schools. Teachers would be certified by Normal School and Schools of Education. Local governments, under state laws, would require every future citizen to pass through its school system to be made ready to take his or her place in the corporate/factory/industrial system. Every child would be trained to meet education standards imposed by the government

The success of this education/school/teacher system is well recognized. Not only did America become the breadbasket and largest supplier of manufactured goods in the world, but, its industrial/military complex, also made America the most powerful super power the Earth has yet known. The American school system was replicated by every advancing country..

Today America, and every nation of its world, face a new age of transition. Factories no longer dominate an industrial world. American laborers have been replaced by technology, and by cheap overseas workers. Today only 3 or 4% of Americans work on assembly lines. Even in its best days the industrial society left many Americans behind. Breadlines, homeless shelters, and sweat shops have always been a part of the industrial scene. Raising a family became the provence of women, while men earned a living out of the home. Perhaps even more relevant, the concentration on training for jobs suppressed people's natural curiosity and the joy of learning for its mere satisfaction.

Evolutionary Webs

Today's new beginning is starting from a very different base from that of the 1870s. America, and the world in which it is embedded, are at a new level of knowledge. Material wealth, technology, and human needs and desires, have created a different milieu for learning. A learning system for the future must come from a new understanding of why we learn, how we learn, and what we learn. These questions, why, how and what we learn, must be answered not only for society as a whole, as they were in the 1870s, but also for the person. The appreciation and love for life for all individuals is dependent on their grasp of knowledge of the world and the world of knowledge.

The emerging world is no longer the simple straight forward, father goes to work, mother keeps the home, and the children attend school, lifestyle. Today's world is more like a complex maze of ever changing networks within networks -- interlocked webs of evolution. Communications have made it possible for books like this one to be written collectively by people living thousands of miles apart and never meeting one another face to face. Each person, or node of the networks, is simultaneously enmeshed in a myriad of interlinked communities and virtual communities.

Parallel with the increasing complexity of social relations is the speed at which they change. Within the old social/economic/education system one could expect to learn enough in school to last for a lifetime. The concept of school was that all necessary knoweldge was known. The job of the school and the teacher was to transfer enough of it on to all students to make them able to obtain and hold a job for the rest of their lives. Graduation, from highschool or college, was one's passport for a lifetime in the world of work.

Education can no longer guarantee a person a secure lifelong place in this ever transforming web. It is not enough for schools to pass on the educational content needed for a job. The context in which that content is used is becoming far more important than the skills and knowledge one memorizes in school.

The learning system of the future must find ways to help people continually prepare for the continually shifting context of their lives.

Another aspect of the ever evolving webs of relationships that humans now share is the relationships themselves. Each strand of each person's networks of communications is a personal relationship. The days of being a cog in the manufacturing system have gone with the passing industrial age. Doing one's job on the assembly line or in one's cubbyhole assures one of neither a secure job for life nor social satisfaction. Society today demands attention to the interaction with other people. It is not enough to pass on a completed part to the next sage in an assembly line, nor a completed document up the chain of command to the next higher echelon. How you pass information, to whom you pass it, and your interrelation with that interpersonal contact is becoming of prime concern. Not primarily for social reasons but more to assure the content of information is not distorted in transfer.

As society becomes more involved in information transfer than it is in the production of material goods, the social relationship have a more profound effect. It requires an understanding of who develops and transfers the information as well as the content of the information transfered.

This view of the complex web of ever evolving social ties implies a new form of cooperation and community. Social relationship is becoming more and more an element of working relationships. Our interrelationships in the social world are not about just our economic well being. They are about the deeper more fundamental basic need of "belonging" -- of caring and being cared for -- of self respect and self actualization. These, the human aspect of our lives, are again emerging from the dark ages of the corporate/factory/industrial society. People are rising to recognize what it is to be human and not a cog in the industrial world, and not an unthinking animal just doing a job. Humans are again hearing that small inner voice that asks the questions such as "Why am I here?" "What is the purpose of life?" "How do I fit into this web of being?"

The Web Of Being

From the view of the individual, each one of us is a node in the web of being like a star reaching out from the most intimate connections to friends and family through mulitple branchings to other nodes to family, communities, society, and the natural world. As the branching stars get further and further away from the individual the links become ever weaker, and their importance to the indiviudal seems ever more and more remote. It is those nearest and strongest links that provide the the more important interconnections for the person.

This is the place of families and communities. The place where personal gain is sublated to the common good. Where economics and materialism come second. The place where we exist for one another and for the wellbeing of the whole. Where we gladly forego the luxuries of life for friendship, companionship, and the well being of others. The place where we "belong". This is the common definition of "community".

Communities come in many colors. Often the word is restricted to people living in a particular area, and/or people with a common interest. And certainly these charateristics help create community solidarity. Particularly in the age of instant world wide communications the forming of fraternal linking in virtual communities is becoming part of our social being. And for ages past humanityÕs basic need to "belong" has been met, in part at least, by nations, religions, and other forms of social relations.

The fact is that every person wears a coat of many colors. We are all members of many diverse communities. To many people even the family is of secondary importance to other communal ties. For far too many individuals the gang, the secret society, the cult or super-patriotism takes precedence over all other communal ties. If "belonging" is not met there, it breaks out in an individual's violence, often deadly violence, against coworkers, school mates, or others people. If society does not meet the need for belonging and community in socially beneficial ways, anti-social communties will rise to meet that basic need of humans. The need for community is a universal need.

Our emerging communities differ in many ways from the limited family based communties of the past. One important difference is the openness and extention of today's communities. The extended-family communities of the agrarian age and the industrial age were narrowly confined in-groups. Families and confined communities prided themselves on their clossness and independence. If these communities did not actually compete with one another, they considered their members as unique and separate. Ethnic values, celebrations, lifestyles and beliefs from outside the group were rejected and disparaged.

The communities of the coming age reach out in cooperation beyond the the limits of tribal, family, national, and religious differences. Ecumenicalism is not confined to religious tolerance and understanding. Differences in food, dress, ritual, lifestyles and values have become a fad. Communities reach out accepting and appreciating one another and welcoming the boundless and ever changing values of extended community. The web of being is interlocked enclaves of cooperation and mutual dependence stretching around the Earth.

It is this world of increasing reliance on human linkages and networked communities for which the learning system must prepare its future citizens.

The Future Of Learning - The Future Of Community

As Horace Mann recognized in 1870, and as modern science is telling us more and more clearly today, the earliest years in a human's life are the ones in which a person's life patterns are set. Schools that lock future citizen away from family, community, society and nature no longer meet human or social needs. The radically changing society requires citizens who can change with the times. The pattern established during and before one's school days determine not only what each individual will be, but also what society will be. As Mann recognized well, for his age agrarian workers had to be carefully prepared to become the operators of the industrial society. Crucial to the citizens of the future for our age, is the capacity to change and to continue lifelong learning.

What we must recognize today is that future citizens must be prerpared from their earliest days, and throughout their lives, to be the creators of the continually evolving webs of being and to be continually evolving and involved in their ever changing communties. The future of learning and the future of community are one. "Learning Communities" will replace government schools. They will be Learning Communities that know how to change with the changing times. They will also be places that provide learning opportunities for all of their citizens. Libraries, museums, parks, farms, factories, businesses, homes and the streets will be the milieu for learning. Learning Communities will also be network of learners who see gaining new skills and knowledge as their central pupose for being. Providing economic material luxuries will become of secondary importance to providing the social and cultural well-being.

Learning Communities

"Learning Communities" has many connotations. Three definitions are of significant concern: Communities that learn, communities that provide learning opportunities, and Communities of learners.

Communities That Learn

Most directly "Learning Communities" implies communities that are learning, evolving and continually moving into new eras. Today this connotation of learning communities is most relevant because all of society is in a state of transition. The EuroAmerican world evolved in the Dominator Paradigm. That is, with a mindset that held that the Earth was made for the domination and use of man, and that all else women, children, animal, plants and the physical universe were for man's use.

Science has revealed a different cosmos. A cosmos that evolves holonistically. That is, a world of interlocked and interdependent systems within systems within systems, or holons within holons. This new worldview we call the Gaian Paradigm. It conceives of humans as imbedded in family, imbedded in community, imbedded in society, imbedded in nature. The well-being of each individual depends on the well-being of the larger holons in which he is imbedded as well as the small holons that are his parts. Of most immediate importance to the individual is the family, and community (an extended family). The well-being of each of us is dependent on our evolving community. And the evolution of our community is dependent on the learning growth of each of us.

Communities That Provide Learning Opportunities

Another related connotation for "learning community" is a community that provides life long learning experiences for all its citizens. A community in which each individual is recognized and partcipates in the evolution of the community. And in which the community recognizes that every aspect of the community is part of the learning experience of its citizens.

Libraries, museums, farms, fields, forests, factories, businesses, parks, mountains, lakes, and the streets are where we learn. A Learning Community is one that recognizes, develops, and promotes learning opportunities for all of its citizens. Citizens of all ages are provided opportunities to increase their skills and their knowledge. Future citizens are not locked away in schools separated from family, community, society and nature. They are active parts of the every evolving community and participate throughout their lives in the affairs of the community.

Communties Of Learners

The third, and perhaps the most telling, definition of Learning Communities is as communities of learners or, more accurately communities of self-learners or autodidacts. Self-Learning is almost a tautology. We are "Learning All the Time" as John Holt put it. Or as modern brain research reveals every input from our senses is sorted by a function of the brain and harmonized with our existing memory in a single neural network that is distributed throughout the brain. This process implies that each brain, that is each learner, is a unique holon accepting knowledge in its own unique way. New knowledge cannot be forced into a group of different individuals at the same time in the same way.

Within this context learning communities provide systems of socialization. Not socialization in mere terms of companionship and meeting every person's basic need for "belonging." But more in the terms of forming society, learning about others as well as learning with others. The learning community is the rock bottom of all we are. It is a foundation on which the larger community and society is built.

Conclusion

We are at all times communities of learners. But seldom have we consciously created our own learning communities. Too often our learning communties are ephemeral without permanence. In the past decade or so there has been a rapid increase in grassroots groups taking their own learning into their own hands. Learning Circles, Book Clubs, Homeschool Support Groups, Learning Libraries, and many other forms of collaborative learning have proliferated across America and around the world. Civil Society has rapidly become a third leg of governance along with the nation state and the corporate network. Grass Roots Support Groups (GROs a subset of NGOs) are solving local problems with local skills and local resources.

All around us we see the decay of the old and the emergence of the new. The coming age requires a learning system that prepares future citizens for a world of interconnected ever evolving communities. It will be an age in which economic and material values are subsummed by the values of humanity, cooperation, and mutual aid. Creative particpation in that evolution will be the mainstay of the future of society. The creation of learning communties can be the key to the well-being of all.