Focusing on education

A complex process, with symbiotic relationships between various ITOs working at different scales.

At the scale of the system as a whole, high School education can be viewed as an ITO (input - transformation - output). The inputs are adolescents or pre adolescents, the outputs are young adults. The transformation process is the complete set of activites that are education. Social capital in the form of people, money, time and space must be managed to make this transformation as efficient as possible.

Adults are defined as individuals who can relatively successfully predict the consequences of their actions in various changing situations, and produce activity outcomes that will result in appropriate outcomes. At best, they are active, effective people who can successfully earn a living, be useful members of civil society, and make appropriate responses to deal with the challenges of being secure and happy.

At the scale of the individual, a high school student can be viewed as an ITO in their own right. Their inputs come from the personal exposure to a continuous flow of reality. They filter this reality into a continuous evolving personal transformation engine that emits outputs in terms of observable behavior. Learning could be described as increasing sophistication of the student's transformation capability.

At the scale of a classroom, the inputs are between 15 and 30 students, the transformation are embedded in the activities of that classroom, the outputs are a move forward in each students development, as defined by the skills and content that are proscribed by the overall education strategy. The transformation process is managed by the classroom teacher.

How to measure efficient output?

Since learning, in this sense, can not be directly observed. The student's outputs - in the form of activity and object creation - have to be used as indicators of the state of learning that has occured.

The rates at which this transformation ability occurs is different for every student, but there are general patterns that can usefully describe definable groups of students.

In general terms, students who grow in poorer space/times are slower to internalize appropriate transformation functionality. Appropriate, in this context, is taken to mean to be able to (1) access available resources, (2) transform them into functionalites that will then allow them to (3)efficiently create outputs that will increase their wealth and and security. To make the problem more difficult, many students have histories that include elements in their history of activity space/times that are invisible to many teachers and the administrative practices of traditional school systems.

The students have developed innovative and resilient transformation functionalities that produce outcomes that deliver proximate rewards within their unique activity space/times. But these historically effective transformations will not deliver proximate rewards in the emerging space/times which have the greates chances of creating wealth and security over a lifetime.

Some problems grow out of the fact that time and space frames of children are normally much more undifferentiated than those of adults. In rich activity space/times, the transition to adult time and space horizons tends to be accompanied by healthy stress, that more naturally leads to positive changes in POV, Transformation Abilties and Appropriate Outputs.

In less rich environments, this process is made more difficult by the fact that limited space and time horizons, coupled with generated inappropriate responses in school ecologies, can lead to the growth of POVs that are replete with negative and dysfunctional "meanings" to the self defintions of the individuals. Since the "self definition" is so critical to the growth of a healthy POV, this way of looking at it might yield more efficient interventions to deal with the problem.

For individuals who have developed POVs in rich activity space/times, the ability to assimilate new inputs is much easier, and therefore sub optimal educational practices lead to acceptable results in most cases. Generated outputs in school were appropriate given the risk reward structure of 20th century education. Sit quietly, show up on time, do well on required tasks.

As measured by the standard indicators of the 20th century, the outputs of the education ITO seemed ok.

For most individuals who developed POV's in poor activity space/times the inability of the education ITOs to create acceptable outcomes did not enter the activity space/time of policy makers because of a number of factors. Primary among them was the lack of political power of the groups of those individuals.

In the 21st century, the activity space/times of policy makers have changed. Individuals who act in poor activity space/times have increased political power. In addition, the change in the economy has moved the emerging wealth creating activity space/times of most urban dwellers from physical transformation activity space/times to symbolic transformation activity space/times.

Perhaps most important as a driver of change, the need and technological ability to measure outputs at a more granular level in much faster times, has made new inputs available to education policy ITOs.(state governments, school boards, etc.)

This combination has put new stresses on the incentive structures of everyone in the educational systems. It helps account for the new focus on a relatively old problem -"the crisis in education".