Do your educational assumptions include alternatives?
It is our assumptions about what education is, where and when learning and teaching takes place, and how education, school districts, and school sites should be organized that control the current organizational face of education. We have built what we assumed is the best organization and model for delivery of instruction to a population.
What, however, if those assumptions are wrong?
Have you ever considered the fact that the assumptions you make about what education is and what is should be are wrong?
As O’Toole puts it, “Remember, it was once widely assumed that no airline could trust its employees to decide how best to serve customers—until Southwest did. It one was assumed that no company in the discount retail industry could succeed while paying its employees decent salaries and offering them full benefits—until Costco did. It was assumed that poorly educated blue-collar workers in old-line manufacturing firms could not be taught managerial accounting and then left to be self-managing—until SRC Holdings did. Once the conventional wisdom was that employees must be closely supervised and governed by rules—until W.L. Gore proved otherwise. And it was assumed that the first thing a company must do in a financial crisis is to lay off workers—until Xilinx discovered alternatives.”
Are there alternatives to our current model?
Does education have alternatives? Are educational leaders willing to honestly explore them? Will teachers, union leaders, parents, and politicians allow for different assumptions to be pursued? William A. Foster said, “Quality is never an accident; it is always the result of high intention, sincere effort, intelligent direction and skillful execution; it represents the wise choice of many alternatives.” Is what we have built the "wise choice of many alternatives", or is it simply what we have ended up with?
Archibald MacLeish once said, "What is freedom? Freedom is the right to choose: the right to create for oneself the alternatives of choice." Wil education and those in it ever have the freedom to develop and create alternatives to the current model. Will we be free to pursue the The High-Involvement Company or the Global-Competitor Company, as described by O' Toole, or a hybrid of the two, or even something not yet discovered?
As O’ Toole says, “The statement ‘I have no alternative’ is one of the surest indicators of leadership failure.”
