The World is . . . a Sisyphean Hill of Policy Smackdowns?
As a former teacher with a MBA, I read a lot of “business books.” And of the titles I’ve read over the past few years, none have characterized the future of public education more presciently than Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat.
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I read an Op-Ed in this weekend’s New York Times in which Friedman abandons the nascent non-hierarchical plains of the twenty-first century for the familiar twentieth-century terrain of command-and-control. Yet there it is – and there he is – writing about the future of school reform, and praising the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.
First, let’s recall what Friedman described in The World is Flat – the dawn of collaboration and the demise of top-down politics. As he wrote, “We are now just at the beginning of a massive, worldwide change in habits. . . from command and control to connect and collaborate.” In that world, “the most important ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to ‘learn how to learn,’” and the only way that sort of shift will come about is by
You can imagine my surprise, then, when I read an Op-Ed in this weekend’s New York Times in which Friedman abandons the nascent non-hierarchical plains of the twenty-first century for the familiar twentieth-century terrain of command-and-control. Yet there it is – and there he is – writing about the future of school reform, and praising the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program.
First, let’s recall what Friedman described in The World is Flat – the dawn of collaboration and the demise of top-down politics. As he wrote, “We are now just at the beginning of a massive, worldwide change in habits. . . from command and control to connect and collaborate.” In that world, “the most important ability you can develop in a flat world is the ability to ‘learn how to learn,’” and the only way that sort of shift will come about is by