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6.06.2008

Delightful disenchantment

How can the dropout rates of students and new teachers be a good thing?
When unhappy campers endure their misery, they make everyone miserable. No good comes from putting up with so much dissatisfaction. People become disheartened, cynical and turned against exciting possibilities in their lives. However, when unhappy campers leave the campground, transformation of the system is imminent.

What's does the dropout rates signify from a systems perspective?
There's a saying that "it's easy to get Joe out of the trailer park, but it's difficult to get the trailer park out of Joe". When dropout rates soar to 50% of enrollment, it's a sign that "the trailer park is getting out of Joe". The parameters of the system are no longer the parameters of learner. The premises for getting value from education experiences are getting revised. A cultural shift is occurring that expects different benefits and outcomes from its educational systems.

How could such a difficult change come about so easily?
By introducing conflicting educations between formal and informal learning or between educational systems and cyberspace experiences. By causing learners to realize how much, how easily and how usefully they learn when they are not getting instructed. By juxtaposing satisfying successes outside the trailer park with the same old misery inside the same old endurance contest. By giving glimpses of freedom from the perpetual misery of unhappy campers.

What will become of conventional educational systems?
Some will appear totally useless to both students and their parents with their new frames of reference. The systems will refute the disenchantment by clinging to their system parameters and experience a near-complete evacuation. Others will evolve to offer the kinds of freedom, value and satisfaction that learners have discovered outside the legacy system. The unhappy campers will redefine what education is, what good it does and whatever it takes to realize those benefits -- by getting the conventional campground "out of their system". The transformed educational systems will served the disenchanted who have found more value beyond parameters of the system. The last row in the classroom becomes the top tier in the next system operating on the new parameters.

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