One of the cornerstones of "good business" is to create consistent, predictable outcomes. Customers value it, Wall Street values it, it's basic MBA theory, and most employees value it as well. As leaders grow and shape their companies towards this outcome, there is a natural excitement attenuation effect - 'mundane' is rewarded more frequently than 'exceptional'; and 'different' is just plain discouraged. Keep at it long enough and creativity turns into procedures, and breakthrough turns into incrementalism. The final step is commoditization, margin pressures and, with an ironic twist, eventual demise - all in the name of "good business."
Seth Godin wrote Why ask why? today - it struck me as an interesting variant on this theme, not just in the commercial world, but especially in education.
'Progress' demanded the same "consistent, predictable outcomes" of education as it did of business. The Industrial Age needed a massive influx of skilled workers and education was scaled up to respond. In the interests of standardization, they distilled curriculum into 'core' knowledge, and in the interests of efficiency, all teachers focused teaching 'core,' to the exclusion of almost everything else. One result is the suppression of students' ability to ask "why?"
A few years ago, the "new" idea of 21st Century Learning became vogue - a lot of .orgs were formed, a lot of companies intent on social responsibility set up programs to support it, and a lot of edu-cognizanti heralded 21st Century Learning as the basis for education reform. IMO, there is no difference in the essence of learning in the 18th century versus the 21st century; content, method and tools may change, but the fundamentals remain the same. Ironically, while these proponents all think that inquiry and creativity are new skills, most want to mechanize their teaching.
We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. - John Keating from the film Dead Poets Society.
Seth argued that not being able to ask "why?" prevents improvement; I think not being able to ask "why?" also leads to the suppression of our essential poeticism - the very thing for which we stay alive. When you walk into a great school, there is a vibrancy that sparks a need to channel Thoreau (with my emphasis and also from the same movie): "I went to the woods because I wanted to live deliberately. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life." It's why as adults we wish we were that young again, to have that passion, and be immersed in that place.
Even in Dead Poets Society, Keating was forced to succumb to the school authorities, and extract the passion and marrow out of his class in favor of consistent, predictable and conventional outcomes.
I am convinced that size does matter, that overemphasizing predictability leads to the starvation of passion and excitement, and when the original wave of innovation dissipates, we are left with emptiness. The bigger a company or a school gets, the more likely it is to lose its mojo - there are exceptions - High Tech High comes to mind, but I can't think of many others.
Business has the luxury of bankruptcy and acquisition and start-ups and venture capital to achieve renewal - education doesn't. When education goes under, it takes futures with it.
While there are many federal and state programs in America aimed at investing in education, the one common denominator is consistent and predictable outcomes. I'm not saying this is not required, it absolutely is; but today it seems that the winners of the grants and prizes and awards have to be mechanical right from the get-go, and there goes our mojo.
As I've written before, I think it's absolutely appropriate for schools to be funded federally, but that the feds don't get to tell schools how to teach, theirs is to define the outcomes they expect for their investment.
The schools in turn must treat their students as customers, respect them, and create an environment that allows them to wildly exceed the federally-designated outcomes, and most critically, experience the joy of learning.