6. Techno-politics: The New Reformation
Before even considering the political and other actions needed to accelerate the reformation of learning, we need to be clear about the responsibilities for leadership of the effort. In general, the most important leadership must come from the business community, in alliance with employees and families ── the consumers of learning services. If business won’t lead the formation of a profitable learning industry, who will? As I noted earlier, business has the organization, resources, and political clout to overcome the resistance of the education establishment lobbyists. The other key reason for a central role for business leadership: The new hyperlearning enterprise needed for the twenty-first-century economy must be run as, not simply like, a major business. In the U.S. setting, the reformation effort will have to be focused mostly at the state and local levels. And the leadership of this reformation movement also must include far more people with solid experience in science and technology than has been typical of education reform.
A political coalition is needed to represent learning consumers. “Learning consumers” includes employers, families, and children and other individuals who seek the benefits learning opportunities can provide. In the politics that govern our current national education and training system, the voice of the consumer is almost completely unheard. The practices of conventional schooling are designed to instill the notion of the student as servant ── or at least passive object ── of the educational provider, rather than the normal economic relationship of the service vendor as servant of the consumer. As a result, students and their employers are the most passive and least organized class of consumers in our economy.
”Partnerships” and “consensus” settings that put business leaders, parents, and other consumers into interdependent roles with education/training producers can be useful under the right circumstances. But such arrangements are counterproductive substitutes for independent coalitions empowered to enforce the political and economic interests of the consumer. The only forums where consumer demands can be assured of parity with vendor self-interests are open markets and honest legislatures or courts.
Consumer empowerment is a necessary condition for the growth of hyperlearning technology markets. Even if consumers become far more widely aware than they are now of the prolific power of modern technology to serve their needs, vendors will find little increase in effective demand for their products as long as the learning consumer remains politically and economically disabled.
In America, the major focus of the new reformation has to aim at the state and local rather than federal levels. *** This is not to say that the federal government is irrelevant ── the federal role can be highly influential in forging a new national learning enterprise. But the nitty-gritty work of replacing education with new institutions and enterprises will be mostly local. Even in other countries where the central government can form and implement national policies, the necessarily decentralized nature of the new free enterprise of learning the knowledge age demands will require a lot of local entrepreneurship.