| Post-Capitalist Society Peter F. Drucker Harper Business 1993 |
Page 186
Knowledge does not come cheap. All developed countries spend something like a fifth of their GNP on the production and dissemination of knowledge. Formal schooling – schooling of young people before they enter the labor force – takes up about one tenth of GNP (up from 2 percent or so at the time of World War 1). Employing organizations spend another 5 percent of GNP on the continuing education of their employees; it may be more. And 3 to 5 percent of GNP is spent on research and development – on the production of new knowledge.
Page 189
It is highly likely that centralized planning and indeed centralization in general will make knowledge capital as unproductive as it does money capital.
Page 190
“Centralization,” “decentralization,” and “diversity” are not terms of economics. They are management terms. We do not have an economic theory of the productivity of knowledge investment; we may never have one. But we have management precepts. We know above all that making knowledge productive is a management responsibility. It cannot be discharged by government; but it also cannot be done by market forces. It requires systematic, organized application of knowledge to knowledge.
Page 192
In learning and teaching, we do have to focus on the tool. In usage, we have to focus on the end result, on the task, on the work. “Only connect” was the constant admonition of a great English novelist, E. M. Forster. It has always been the hallmark of the artist, but equally of the great scientist – of a Darwin, a Bohr, an Einstein. At their level, the capacity to connect may be inborn and part of that mystery we call “genius.” But to a large extent, the ability to connect and thus to raise the yield of existing knowledge (whether for an individual, for a team, or for the entire organization) is learnable. Eventually, it should become teachable. It requires a methodology for problem definition – evenmore urgently perhaps than it requires the currently fashionable methodology for “problem solving.” It requires systematic analysis of the kind of knowledge and information a given problem requires, and a methodology for organizing the stages in which a given problem can be tackled – the methodology which underlies what we now call “systems research.” It requires what might be called “Organizing Ignorance” -and there is always so much more ignorance around than there is knowledge.
Page 194
A technological revolution – desktop computers and satellite transmission directly into the classroom – is engulfing our schools. It will transform the way we learn and the way we teach within a few decades. It will change the economics of education. From being totally labor-intensive, schools will become highly capital-intensive.
But more drastic still – though rarely discussed as yet – will be the changes in the social position and role of the school.
[the school] Though long a central institution, it has been “of society” rather than “in society.” It concerned itself with the young, who were not yet citizens, not yet responsible, not yet in the work force. In the knowledge society, the school becomes the institution of the adults as well, and especially of highly schooled adults. Above all, in the knowledge society, the school becomes accountable for performance and results.
Page 197
So far, no country has the educational system which the knowledge society needs. No country has tackled the major demands. No one knows the “the answers”; no one can do what is needed. But we can at least ask the questions. We can define – albeit in rough outline the specifications for schooling and for schools which might answer to the realities of the post-capitalist society, the knowledge society.
Here are the new specifications:
- The school we need has to provide universal literacy of high order – well beyond what “literacy” means today.
- It has to imbue students on all levels and of all age with a motivation to learn and with the discipline of continuing learning.
- It has to be an open system, accessible both to highly educated people and to people who for whatever reason did not gain access to advanced education in their early years.
- It has to impart knowledge both as substance and as process – what the Germans differentiate as Wissen and Können.
- Finally, schooling can no longer be a monopoly of the schools. Education in the post-capitalist society has to permeate the entire society. Employing organizations of all kinds – businesses, government agencies, non-profits – must become institutions of learning and teaching as well. Schools, increasingly, must work in partnership with employers and employing organizations.
Page 198
The new technology of learning will have its first impact on universal literacy. Most schools throughout the ages have spent endless hours trying to teach things that are best learned rather than taught, that is, things that are being learned behaviorally and through drill, repetition, feedback. Here belong most of the subjects taught in elementary school, but also a good many of the subjects taught in later stages of the educational process. Such subjects – whether reading and writing, arithmetic, spelling, historical facts, biology, and even such advanced subjects as neurosurgery, medical diagnosis, and most of engineering – are best learned through a computer program. The teacher motivates, directs, encourages. The teacher, in fact, becomes a leader and a resource.
In the schools of tomorrow the students will be their own instructors, with a computer program as their own tool.
Historically, the elementary school has been totally labor-intensive. Tomorrow’s elementary school will be heavily capital-intensive.
Page 202
Achievement has to be based on the student’s strengths – as has been known for millennia by every teacher of artists, every coach of athletes, every mentor. In fact, finding the student’s strengths and focusing them on achievement is the best definition of both teacher and teaching. It is the definition in the “Dialogue on the Teacher” by one of the greatest teachers of the Western tradition, St. Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430).
Schools and schoolteachers know this too, of course. But they have rarely been allowed to focus on the strengths of students and to challenge them. Instead, they have perforce had to focus on weakness. Practically all the time in traditional Western classrooms – at least until graduate school at the university – is spent on remedying weakness. It is spent on producing respectable mediocrity.
Page 203
Here, the new technologies might make the greatest difference. They free teachers from spending most, if not all, their time on routine learning, remedial learning, repetitive learning. Teachers will still need to lead in these activities. But most of their time has traditionally been spent on “follow up”; teachers, in an old phrase, spend most of their time being “teaching assistants.” And that the computer does well, indeed, better than a human being. Teachers, we can hope, will thus increasingly have the time to identify the strengths of individuals, to focus on them, and to lead students to achievement. They will, we can expect, have the time to teach.
But even if technology enables them to do this, will the school change its attitude and focus on strengths? Will it be willing to teach “individuals” rather than “students”?
Page 209
Indeed, no other institution faces challenges as radical as those that will transform the school.
Page 212
The knowledge society must have at its core the concept of the educated person. It will have to be a universal concept, precisely because the knowledge society is a society of knowledges and because it is global – in its money, its economics, its careers, its technology, its central issues, and above all, in its information. Post-capitalist society requires a unifying force. It requires a leadership group, which can focus local, particular, separate traditions onto a common and shared commitment to values, a common concept of excellence, and on mutual respect.
In his 1943 novel Das Glasperlenspiel (The Glass Bead Game), Hermann Hesse anticipated the sort of world the Humanists want – and its failure. The book depicts a brotherhood of intellectuals, artists, and Humanists who live a life of splendid isolation, dedicated to the Great Tradition, its wisdom and its beauty. But the hero, the most accomplished Master of the Brotherhood, decides in the end to return to the polluted, vulgar, turbulent, strife-torn, money-grubbing reality – for his values are only fool’s gold unless they have relevance to the world. (Narcissus and Goldmund an earlier work by Hesse explores the same theme.)
Managing the Non-Profit Organization
Peter F. Drucker Harper Business 1990
In an interview with Albert Shanker (then president of the American Federation of Teachers)
Peter Drucker
My school grades were always excellent. I learned very little and studied less, but I knew how to take exams.
Albert Shanker
Essentially, the way schools are organized is to get a lot of activity and work on the part of teachers while the students sit and, you hope, listen. You hope that they are remembering something. And you create a few punishments or rewards in terms of grades or leaving students back. Without that responsibility and without that engagement by students, the results are very, very meager.
Peter Drucker
I’ve been a teacher-watcher since fourth grade when I had the great good luck of two exceptional teachers. And I’ve been a teacher myself since I was twenty. I have yet to see a great teacher who teaches children. All the great teachers I’ve seen made no distinction between children and adults. Only the speed is different. Whatever the task is, you do it on an adult level. The task may be a beginner’s task; the standards are not. The fourth grade teacher whom I still remember once said many years later that there are no poor students; there are only poor teachers. That would imply that the job of the teacher is to find the strengths of the student and put them to work, rather than look at the student as somebody whose deficiencies have to be repaired.
Albert Shanker
When I taught, I was very rarely approached by a principal or assistant principal and asked whether the children really learning or really engaged. I had a very tough class, mostly youngsters that just flown in from Puerto Rico, who had great difficulties with the language. I was hoping that someone would come in to help me. Then, the door opened one day and there was the principal. After what seemed to me like a half hour, but must have been maybe thirty seconds, he said: “Mr. Shanker, there are a lot of pieces of paper on the the floor throughout your room. That’s very unprofessional. Would you see to it that they’re picked up?” Then the door closed and he went away. The only thing that anyone was ever interested in was essentially a set of bureaucratic requirements.
Peter Drucker
One implication is that the school has to be focused on performance and results rather than on rules and regulations and, therefore, needs a clear definition of its mission.