TABLE OF CONTENTS You may remember the advertisement for an information services company that featured a water pipe, tied in a knot, over a person s head. A solitary drop of water dripped out of the pipe s open end. The ad s visual metaphor and accompanying text were about the removal of information blockages. A good information system, the ad seemed to suggest, will pour information into our heads, a bit like filling up a bucket.
Pipe-and-bucket thinking pervades policy that has to do with learning and education. The British government is even building a National Grid of Learning that will connect all schools to the Internet. It s a great political metaphor knowledge for all, just like water or electricity. But it s an outdated model of learning. Learning is a complex, social, and multidimensional process that does not lend itself to being sent down a pipe for example, from a website. Knowledge, understanding, wisdom or content, if you must are qualities one develops through time. They are not a thing one is sent.
Formal education is already crippled by too much content and too little time to think. By the early 2000s, no fewer than 270 different entities were in a position to send directives to English schools. The tap has been left running for so long that teachers and pupils feel like submariners in a disaster movie afloat near the ceiling, struggling to breathe. As Ivan Illich understood thirty years ago, when he proposed the de-schooling of society, [1] the...
