The Danger of Creative Disruption as a School Reform Theory | janresseger

The Danger of Creative Disruption as a School Reform Theory | janresseger:

The Danger of Creative Disruption as a School Reform Theory

Posted on June 30, 2014 by janresseger

According to The Economist, “Higher education suffers from Baumol’s disease—the tendency of costs to soar in labour-intensive sectors with stagnant productivity.  Whereas the prices of cars, computers and much else have fallen dramatically, universities, protected by public-sector funding and the premium employers place on degrees, have been able to charge ever more for the same device.”

Clayton Christensen’s business-school theory of creative disruption, adapted from Joseph Schumpeter’s 1942 economic theory of disruptive innovation, developed as a way to explain the role of technical innovation in the rise and fall of companies.  Christensen’s theory of creative disruption emanated from the Harvard Business School as the story of the tech companies that developed mainframe computers, floppy disks, compact discs, I-Phones, and apps.  Today the theory of creative disruption is also being prescribed in education as the cure for the supposed stagnation of the status quo.  And, suggests The Economist, the answer is clear for higher education. MOOCs—Massive Open Online Courses—will “offer students the chance to listen to star lecturers and get a degree for a fraction of the cost of attending a university.”

Jill Lepore’s recent and provocative  New Yorker essay, The Disruption Machine, asks us to examine some of the assumptions of those who promote creative disruption in the business schools and those who advocate applying theories of disruption for the sake of innovation to other areas of our common life.

Lepore is a professor of history at Harvard University.  She writes: “Every age has a theory of rising and falling, of growth and decay, of bloom and wilt: a theory of nature.  Every age also has a theory about the past and the present, of what was and what is, a notion of time: a theory of history. Theories of history used to be supernatural: the divine ruled time; the hand of God, a special providence, lay behind the fall of each sparrow…  Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic.  It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.  Most big ideas have loud critics.  Not disruption.  Disruptive innovation as the explanation for how change happens has been subject to little serious criticism, partly because it’s headlong, while critical inquiry is unhurried; partly because disrupters ridicule doubters by charging them The Danger of Creative Disruption as a School Reform Theory | janresseger: