How many years of formal education have you received in your life? 16? 18? 20? We like to think we are pretty smart, but what did we really learn?
The technological advances of the industrial revolution created huge demand for a certain type of individual: follows instructions, sticks to procedure, generates predictable results, easy to manage. The pedagogical practices of schools adapted to meet these demands. Think about standing in straight lines, sitting in rows of desks, or reciting things as a group. Ever wonder why?
Unschooling is essentially the idea that an educational system which is founded on the age of industrialism trains students to achieve in only a strict narrow focus. The lack of freedom in choosing the path of education and the constraints of focusing on what is deemed important by industry or society, squashes. Ewan McIntosh on edu.blog laments that the failure of a factory style, one size fits all education became “depressingly clear” when an elementary aged child expressed his sole learning goal was to “get a five” on a standardized test. Gone is the ability to express free thoughts or articulate a higher level goal for learning than to “get a five.” Proponents of unschooling argue that the output of our education is people unable to operate without strict regimens and parameters. In contrast, an education where students are free to create, find their talents and focus on what they enjoy and our naturally good at creates people who are more confident, creative and entrepreneurial.
So this got me thinking about organizational learning. If 70-80% of an employee’s learning occurs through informal networks and people do learn without a learning intervention, do we really need to put more structure around these informal networks? The corporate side of me wants to put a framework and structure around informal learning. After all, unfocused, misdirected learning is a road to inefficiency – right? Or wrong – is it actually a road to discovery, creativity, and self confidence? Should we unschool our corporate learning and how much do we unschool it?
In business we like to say we give freedom to team members; set them loose to identify creative solutions; “think outside the box.” However, getting outside the box at work has risks associated with it. When you step outside the box you may come against deeply ingrained corporate culture. You risk ridicule, even failure. Is the message people hear more like … think outside the box, but don’t go too far outside the box, at least be anchored to the box?
If I think about applying structure and framework to informal learning, am I really saying to put a box around it, so that everyone feels safe, but little is actually gained? Where do the entrepreneurial ideas come from if people aren’t confident in expressing new ideas or they aren’t free to discover things on their own?
How much structure is the right amount? Is the best thing we can do for informal learning to just get out of the way? What is the best path to effective learning without inhibiting discovery? Considering the drastic shifts we have seen in the economic landscape, perhaps it is time to allow ourselves to step off the assembly line and back in the sandbox, free to imagine and create.
Unschooling … I hear you on this. Clearly, formal structured education limits free and creative thinking in many situations. The goal has become a very narrow window that only few find success in.
You’ve posed many questions here for organizations to consider when thinking about employee learning. I immediately thought of empowerment and how we often want employees and team members to be empowered in independent decision making, but this is extremely risky and does not yield a pre-measured predictable result … like a factory. The organizations that are willing to take the risk will find themselves applying more structure to other areas such as executive structure. This way, an organization can position people for controlled chaos.
Unschooling … I hear you on this. Clearly, formal structured education limits free and creative thinking in many situations. The goal has become a very narrow window that only few find success in.
You’ve posed many questions here for organizations to consider when thinking about employee learning. I immediately thought of empowerment and how we often want employees and team members to be empowered in independent decision making, but this is extremely risky and does not yield a pre-measured predictable result … like a factory. The organizations that are willing to take the risk will find themselves applying more structure to other areas such as executive structure. This way, an organization can position people (managers, approvers, so on) for controlled chaos.