Learning at the Edges of Education

Lately I’ve found my focus on systemic change in higher education dissolving. Not for lack of interest or devalued importance. Rather because it’s too limiting to isolate higher education and too myopic to concentrate on systems. Here’s what I mean.

As a term, higher education doesn’t adequately describe what’s happening now. It connotes a stage of education beyond primary and secondary level. We’d be better off considering all education, both formal and informal, to be learning and refer to it as such. We don’t have K-12 problems or university problems. We have learning problems. Changing our lenses, from education to learning, offers hope that some of the current pervasive problems will receive fresh thought and effort.

For me, anyway, the most interesting changes in learning aren’t happening at the system or institutional level. They’re happening in the grassroots efforts of people playing with new possibilities. For example, when an accomplished professional musician opens a school for banjo and teaches online with video personal attention. In this case, the model is one of a master artist teaching his craft.

That model might replicate in many areas. Whether it will, certainly I don’t know. But it illustrates people playing at the edges of what we call education. It’s here I see great hope. Where the focus is learning, play, fun, project oriented.