Edubook Review: Catching the Knowledge Wave?

Gilbert, Jane (2005). Catching the Knowledge Wave? The Knowledge Society and the future of education.

“We can more usefully think of schools for the knowledge age as organic systems that, in the context of a clear understanding of what it is they are trying to achieve, will constantly evolve, experiment, evaluate, and change what they do to reach that goal.”

In a post-modern "knowledge society," an industrial-age schooling system is inadequate. Catching the Knowledge Wave? argues that we live in a post-industrial-age, post-modern society, which emphasises "difference, diversity, and plurality over homogeneity and sameness." An analysis of practices and demands of this "knowledge society," Gilbert suggests, is "deeply unsettling our one-size-fits-all, assembly line style of schooling that, by offering every student the same pre-packaged knowledge, in the same order, at the same time, aims to turn them out as clones.” The paradigm within which most schools operate is out of date, and it is crucial that we re-evaluate the most basic concepts within the discourses of education. Previously unambiguous (unquestioned?) terms like knowledge and learning, which are at the foundation of our understanding of education, says Gilbert, need to be regarded as evolving and multifarious. Knowledge, suggests Gilbert, should be presented to students "not as something monolithic, fixed and finished, but as something organic, something that is always developing and always in process."

How can this be done? The discussion of this question needs to be ongoing among educators, politicians, academics, families, students (this, partly, is the point of the book). While she leaves the question open, Gilbert suggests starting points, and contributes her own ideas towards how this might look.  

Drawing on Dewey, Gilbert proposes that we need to create authentic problem-solving scenarios for students. Dewey, says Gilbert, suggested that, "The activity of problem solving is what expands the mind, not the acquiring and storing away of existing knowledge." The problem in the implementation of this concept in schools is that the problems students are given to solve have not been authentic - they have, typically, been problems with definite solutions, which the teacher supplies at the end. Gilbert then suggests that Carl Bereiter's concept of schools as places of "knowledge creation" - places where genuinely new knowledge is built in collaborative research teams, not where knowledge is downloaded by students for later use. (I'm interested in reading a bit more on the details of just how Bereiter sees this working; Gilbert, understandably, quickly glosses over this. A quick Google search shows that Bereiter is now a proponent of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning).

Interestingly, Gilbert also critiques the sloppy implementation of ICTs in schools. She suggests that the real potential of ICTs lies in the domain of communication, relationship building and collaboration, not in enhancing the old, industrial-age model of "content delivery." This is food for thought. I have scratched the surface of using some social media (like Edmodo, Twitter), and collaborative online documents (Google Docs), but there is awesome potential here that I have not even begun to exploit in my teaching, and we really need to get together as educators to figure out how we can make the most of it!

This is an inspiring and intriguing read, both for the historical and philosophical context it gives for the present condition of education, and for the vision (however fuzzy and uncertain) it provides of the future of education. Certainly, it suggests that change in schools needs to be a priority if we are to become a socially cohesive, flourishing community within the global knowledge society.