For the past decade or more, American workers have quietly been fomenting a revolution. Through the downsizings of the ’80s and the boom of the go-go ’90s, stockbrokers, PR flacks, dot-com geeks, meeting planners, and many more white-collar folks have broken away from 9-to-5 corporate gigs to have a go at it on their own. These 'free agents,' as Daniel Pink calls them, now include more than 30 million—one in four—American workers. They have changed the landscape of the American economy. Now they may be sparking a similar revolution in public education.
'Imagine how we’d prosper if we began educating our children more like we earn our livings,' Pink writes in the libertarian monthly Reason (Oct. 2001). In other words, imagine the creativity and energy we’d unleash if America’s public education system embraced free agency and let students follow their interests rather than keeping them leashed to rigid curricula and standardized tests. Imagine how well prepared these kids would be for the real world if schools gave them the kind of flexibility the workplace increasingly gives its workers.
It may seem far-fetched to imagine such a revolution in the public schools, which have resisted fundamental change over the past half century as no other American institution has done. 'How many other places look and feel exactly as they did 20, 30, or 40 years ago?' he asks. 'Banks don’t. Hospitals don’t. Grocery stores don’t.'
In fact, Pink argues, compulsory schooling of the sort America has practiced since the 1920s is an aberration in our culture. We are, he notes, a country that prides itself on promoting personal choice: No one is forced by law to vote, or to work, or to serve in the military. Yet parents have been compelled by law to turn their children over to an education system for 12 years of their life. There they have learned how to 'obey rules, follow orders, and respect authority.'
Such lessons were important to children growing up in an economy that relied heavily on factory workers and middle managers, Pink allows. But the new free agent economy requires a different sort of worker, with different skills and values. And it’s already changing the face of American learning.