34 - Conclusion

Summary

The schools of today were largely designed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to provide workers for the industrial economy. In the 1970s, economists and other social scientists began to realize that the world's economies were shifting from an industrial economy to a knowledge economy (Bell, 1973; Drucker, 1993; Toffler, 1980). By the 1990s, educators had begun to realize that if the economy was no longer the 1920s-era factory economy, then our schools were designed for a quickly vanishing world (Bereiter, 2002; Hargreaves, 2003; Sawyer, in press). Leading thinkers in business, politics, and education are now in consensus that schools have to be redesigned for the new economy, and that the learning sciences are pointing the way to this new kind of school – a school that teaches the deep knowledge required in a knowledge society. This consensus led major governmental and international bodies to commission reports summarizing learning sciences research; these reports include the U.S. National Research Council's How People Learn (Bransford, Brown, & Cocking, 2000), the OECD's Innovation in the Knowledge Economy: Implications for Education and Learning (2004), and a study of twenty-eight countries conducted by the International Society for Technology in Education, called Technology, Innovation, and Educational Change: A Global Perspective (Kozma, 2003).