The Collapse of Public Education and What Will Comes After…
July 4th 2009
Public education, as managed and consumed in the United States, is broken. Citizens from all walks of life and stratus of society are persistently grumbling about the dysfunction of schools, districts, and colleges as costly, inefficient, burdened with contradicting agendas and failing to meet the unique needs of America in the 21st century. The grand experiment of public education all children ran in parallel to the revolutionary democratic experiment began some 200 years ago must be transformed.
The system is like an ancient oak tree, struggling each season to exist in a forest whose original ecology is no longer viable. “Free” education for all children has its roots in the early history of a pioneering, farming and later an industrializing nation. Such roots are knotted, twisted and constricted in soil the early founders of public education planted it. The system of governance fragmented by provincial interest formed for pioneer settlements, villages and cities. School boards are mostly bodies of competing political and status quo agendas not able to innovate with any risk. There is no longer a common resolve or vision that motivates and inspires excellence.
Most citizens of this nation recognize that something is terribly wrong with how schools from earl grades to high school are failing. The willingness to continually support through taxes such a defficient system is waning, while economic upheavals reduce funding and resources. The public remains cynical and resigned that is this wayit is and always will be.
I say that the age of regeneration is near and the emergence of new forms of public learning and skills development will emerge within a new ecosystem of technology and a flattened world. Such as the saplings of new growth emerge from the devastation of fire. This is what I call the PhoenX Event -the moment the old ways are devoured and a new creations emerges.
This site is a platform for a national conversation to design a future that is not more of the same from the past.
It is my intention to dive deep into why the system can not be reformed and in a few years the system of public funding and governance will be recognized as no longer sustainable. But even as the old tree dies it sits amongst an abundant new forest with new growth and new species emerging to takes it place. We as citizens can acknowledge what is so and clean up the illusion that any thing of significance can come from the old system but rather powerful new technologies in science and information systems will deliver a model that will cause a regenerated age of truly mass education. This will be known as the PhoenX event as seen from the middle of this century.
Ivan Prueitt
PhoenX Man
