By David Price

If you were only to listen to politicians and policy makers, you could be forgiven for harboring two delusions: first, that the sole purpose of schooling is to create the workforce of the future; second, that the only place that our students learn is at school. If you believe that preparation for work is at least a part of education’s function, at what point do educators have a responsibility to face the radically changing employment patterns facing our students? And how can we re-think schooling to complement, not compete with, their informal learning?

My argument, here and in my book, OPEN: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn in the Future, is that the discourse surrounding formal learning is becoming ever further detached from the lessons we see when learning happens outside formal boundaries. The grades that individual students receive for their school projects matter little compared to the comments found on their blogs, or their Vimeo accounts. Rising numbers of parents, frustrated by the worksheet culture of their child’s classroom, are self-organizing and co-creating local home-learning networks.

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