For starters, since it always helps to know where you are before you decide where you’re going, let’s first take a quick 30,000 foot look at the three economic paradigms, from the Agricultural to the Idea Economy.

Once you see where we’ve been, and understand the business models, methods, theories and approaches that were designed for the Agricultural and Industrial Economies, you will hopefully see why business models everywhere needs to change, why learning experiences need to change, and why the decentralized learning experience is so crucial to success in the this type of economy.

Economic paradigms are at the very heart of the way we live and have lived. They are a critical part of the Social Contract. They directly – albeit usually unnoticed – affect your life in every imaginable way. And the educational systems and programs are either in concert with the current economic paradigm, or they quickly become irrelevant.

The Agricultural Economy

Economists usually separate the last 300 or so years into three economic paradigms. They started when there was a break from things made on a small scale, when the things made and sold by artists, craftsmen, masters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, family farmers, merchants of handmade goods, etc. were replaced by things that were mass produced and mass consumed. The key point is that mass production is the cornerstone of all modern economic paradigms.

First it was food that was mass produced. So the first economic paradigm was the Agricultural Revolution.

For the first time in history, many people had enough to eat. They stopped worrying about food, did not farm their own crops nor raise and slaughter their own livestock. The mass production of food marks a turning point in history. It gave people something they never had as hunter-gatherers: free time. The ability to move about and travel, even live in new places. Leave the farms and come to what became the first cities.

Owning land became the key to wealth, since land used to grow food was the key to the Agricultural Economy. Land Barons were born. The landed gentry were created. Kings gave land as the highest boon for services rendered. Kings were kings because they owned all the land which is why they could give some of it away. Private property was born. My land was fenced off from your land. New nations opened up huge tracts of land because they knew that making that land productive was the key to prosperity. Rich agricultural lands were fought over and conquered, farmed and fought over again.

We managed muscles because farming was a hard, back breaking job, even for the oxen and horses.

The few existing and emerging educational models was still carefully controlled, managed and centralized. Very few people knew a little and most people knew only what they needed for survival. Reading and writing farmed no land and produced no food. Men were trained to be manly and women to be womanly according to the mores of the time. There was no need for mass education.

The Industrial Economy

Next up was the Industrial Economy. I believe it started with the printing press in the mid-15th century. I also believe it created a period of transition – much like the Incunabula – that has occurred every time there is a new economic paradigm.

The incunabula was a period in which the church still controlled the written word and, until the printing press was invented, ‘books’ were in limited supply. The idea of providing the masses with unfiltered ideas was heretical. So the church decided that it would use the printing press for God’s work, and take the illuminated manuscripts from the scriptorium in the monasteries, where all bibles were created, and print out the words and send these first ‘forms’ back to the scriptorium for illumination.

So the monks took the forms and added colorful pictures of devils and angels, ivy and floral scroll-work, visual ‘job aids’ for learning about right and wrong and what happened to you if you strayed from the path of righteousness. The pictures were important because most people alive then could not read. These first printing press books are called incunabula. They represent a paradigm shift that ultimately affected everything – your work, your play, your family, your thoughts, your life.

Once the Industrial Economy really started to steam ahead, again it was all about mass production, only this time it was the mass production of things. We managed hands.

The first things to become ‘industrialized’ were farming tools – cotton gin, land tillers, tractors, and more. A clean bridge from one economy to the next. Other things began to become mass produced as well. Cars. Trains. Ships. Typewriters, a personal printing press when you added carbon copies (the origin of cc).  Stuff people believed they needed and bought out of the Sears catalog. You didn’t need to read just look at the pictures and send in the money. We not only became consumers of food but simply consumers.

The capitalist world was all about moving capital around to further the production of things (including the industrialized production of food) in order to create wealth. The wealth of nations, as recorded by Adam Smith, was built upon an educational system that led to a culture and political system supporting the mass production and mass consumption of things.

Owning the means of production was the key to wealth. The great wealthy dynasties of the industrialized world were created at this point in time. If you look at America, you see Ford, DuPont, Getty, Rockefeller, and Kennedy ad infinitum, owning the means of production and becoming the kings of this era.

It also meant we needed to make sure the culture of mass consumers was healthy and working. According to John Taylor Gatto, public schools were created for this very purpose. We did not want a critically thinking, independent population focused on anything other than acquiring things. Work to spend. Spend more and work harder. Make the rich richer while you enrich your life with things. Towards the end of this economic paradigm, we invented the credit card, one of the greatest boons to mass consumption imaginable.

Since we had all the food we could want, and all the things we ever hoped for and couldn’t really afford, most Western countries were ready to move on into the next economic paradigm. But not everyone around the world was in lockstep. Many countries were slower to adopt and adapt and it turned out to be a good thing. Those countries has the disadvantage (?) of being stuck in the Agricultural Economy as we, for example, industrialized. We used to call them names. Third World, Underdeveloped, Developing, etc.. Until they realized that they could skip over 100 years of expensive, sweaty and generally nasty industrialization, and go right to the Idea Economy. To automate their new factories. To use cellphones and skip all the wires and poles. And most importantly to drive their new educational models.

The Idea Economy

The Idea Economy was born sometime in the late 20^th century since economic paradigms are not given birth on a specific time or in a specific place. In 1959 Peter Drucker  was prescient enough to see what was coming and named the people who labored in this new economic paradigm Knowledge Workers. What they mass produced was Knowledge. New ideas. Innovations. Know-how. They spent their days thinking, writing, communicating, meeting, disseminating, rethinking, researching, creating, innovating, designing, reading, listening to the ideas of others, sharing, collaborating. Later they added emailing, instant messaging, tweeting, texting, wikiing, blogging, commenting, tweeting, etc. We managed minds.
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Part One: Bringing Order Out of Chaos …

What you are reading was born as a simple post about elearning, and ended up taking on a life of its own…

I wanted to write about why it is of critical importance at this point in the history of human evolution that learning is becoming available to almost anyone, anytime and anywhere.

I actually had a philosophical “chicken-and- egg” debate with my self late last night about whether history somehow consciously provides what is needed to take the next step, or do we rummage about in the attic of history and find what we need to keep evolving? I’ll leave the question for my two favorite Radiolab philosophers Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich.

Here’s the point. If we are to continue to evolve from the treetops to the Savannah to wherever we are headed in the futures, we need to find a creative and innovative way to transfer knowledge and know-how. There’s just too many of us who need learning, and not enough people to do the teaching.

Here’s great story that illustrates the point. It’s from one of my earlier posts.

Daphne Koller is a computer science professor at Stanford, and a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow. She has been working for years to make online education more engaging and interactive.

“On the long term, I think the potential for this to revolutionize education is just tremendous,” Koller says. “There are millions of people around the world that have access only to the poorest quality of education or sometimes nothing at all.”

Technology could change that by making it possible to teach classes with 100,000 students as easily and as cheaply as a class with just 100. And if you look around the world, demand for education in places like South Africa is enormous.

Almost two weeks ago, at the University of Johannesburg, more than 20 people were injured and one woman was killed trying register for a limited number of openings. Thousands had camped out overnight hoping to snag one of the few available places and when the gates opened, there was a stampede.

Koller hopes that in the future, technology will help prevent these kinds of tragedies.

Up until this writing I was overwhelmed by the number of choices for learning technology in particular, and technology repurposed for learning in general. Chaos makes me nervous. So I have this need to find a pattern that provides order.

As often happens in my mind the pattern emerged while I was dreaming.

I saw my hand write the word “Decentralization” with white chalk on a blackboard. When I awoke, I wrote the word at the top of this post, realizing that everything was being driven by decentralization.

So before I take on writing about the decentralization of education I thought it would be a good idea to write a Part One about decentralization itself.

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