So it’s been about five years now since I wrote this to my kids:

Dear Tess and Tucker,

For most of your young lives, you’ve heard your mom and I occasionally talk about your futures by saying that someday you’ll travel off to college and get this thing called a degree that will show everyone that you are an expert in something and that will lead you to getting a good job that will make you happy and make you able to raise a family of your own someday. At least, that’s what your mom and I have in our heads when we talk about it. But, and I haven’t told your mom this yet, I’ve changed my mind. I want you to know that you don’t have to go to college if you don’t want to, and that there are other avenues to achieving that future that may be more instructive, more meaningful, and more relevant than getting a degree.

And today when I read this, I still think that old post is pretty relevant:

Of the 2 million graduates in the class of 2011, 85 percent will return home because they can’t secure jobs that might give them more choices and more control over their lives.

Ok, then.

The other day at Tucker’s basketball game, I overheard two moms talking about the “plan” for college. The one mom was very passionate about her son NOT going to a traditional college right  after high school. “My kid has no idea what he wants to do, and I’m not sending him to some $25,000 a year school to have him figure it out,” she said. “He can take all the standard requirement courses at a community college, transfer out when he’s ready, and in the meantime see where his interests are.”

The funny thing was that the other mom was shaking her head slightly in agreement but I could tell by her questions that wasn’t going to be an option for her child. “What if he can’t transfer the credits?” “Don’t you think he’ll miss a lot of the ‘college experience?’” “You mean he’s going to live at home?” The horror.

I have a theory, and I may be wrong, but I’m willing to bet that the 15% who do get a job out of college are not necessarily the smartest kids out there; they are the ones who are the most passionate and committed to the life’s work they know in their hearts they were meant to do. It’s not like every kid from an Ivy school is getting a job; plenty of kids from what Newsweek or U.S. News would consider third tier colleges will go on to find fulfilling work that will give them “more choices and more control over their lives.” Or, they will be the creative, self-motivated, problem solvers who will start their own businesses, carve out their own paths to success.

Look, I’m somewhat swayed by the statistics that show kids with college degrees are dealing with much less unemployment that those without, and that they make more money. And I know there can be amazing learning that happens in some university classrooms.  But I’m also swayed by the fact that neither I nor even one of my friends from college ended up doing what they got a degree from school to do. Way too many of us are going to college because we’re “supposed to” without any real clue what we want to do with our time there. Thirty years ago when I was in school, that wasn’t such a big hit in the pocketbook; there was always grad school, right? Today, I think that mom at the basketball got it right. Who can afford to waste a couple of years in college? And unless you really want to get saddled with debt, grad school’s not as much of an “hey-I-finally-figured-out-what-I-want-to-do” option.

I’ll say it again: Tess, Tucker, you don’t HAVE to go to college. Nor should your schools have to prepare you to go to college. What they and me and your mom need to help you with is finding your passion, going deep into learning about it, becoming an expert, and then using that expertise to change the world and make a living. We need to help you learn how to cobble together your own education, and you don’t have to wait until college to start down that road. And odds are pretty good that 10 years from now when you are looking to strike out on your own, your passion and your portfolio will take you as far if not farther than a degree that came at a great expense and in all likelihood with only a slice of relevance.

So, college? Maybe. But we’re keeping our options open.

This quote from Robert Krulwich of NPR caught my eye yesterday:

But there are some people, who don’t wait.

I don’t know exactly what going on inside them; but they have this… hunger. It’s almost like an ache.

Something inside you says I can’t wait to be asked I just have to jump in and do it.

He was talking about beginning journalists, but I couldn’t help thinking about the many teachers who I have met over the years who haven’t waited. People like Shelley Blake-Plock and Dolores Gende and Anne Smith and Kathy Cassidy and Brian Crosby and Shannon Miller and Shelley Wright and Jabiz Raisdana and a whole slew of others who had some type of hunger overcome them, something that made them jump right in and really change the way the thought about teaching and learning and classrooms. For some, I know, what’s happened over the past decade or so has simply afforded a way for them to do more of what they always believed, to give kids the reins and let them learn about learning. But for others, and I would count myself in this second category, the last 10 years have brought to life a way of thinking about education that is decidedly different from the lens we originally carried into the classroom. For us, this has been a real transformation, not simply a shift in methods or pedagogy.

Unfortunately, the vast majority of teachers are still waiting…for something. What is it? Permission? Direction? Inspiration? Enlightenment?

I know this is a crappy time to be in education. Maybe as crappy as it’s ever been. Thousands of people are losing their jobs, their benefits. The profession is being dragged through the manure. The onslaught of tests and data collection and standardization is doing the same thing to teachers as it’s doing to kids, driving the creativity and the passion and the enjoyment of real learning right out of them. I am not unsympathetic to these realities…not at all.

But we can’t use this moment as an excuse to continue to wait. Technology aside, our educational systems are not creating the learners that we want our children to be. And it’s not about layering whiteboards or blogs onto a narrow, one-size fits all curriculum that has marched along undeterred for what seems like forever. It’s about fundamentally changing what we do in classrooms with kids.

The good news is that many have acted on their hunger. They’ve put kids ahead of the system, redefined themselves as learners first, teachers second, found the courage of their convictions and made learning, not test scores, the focus. The bad news is that far too many teachers still don’t even know that the traditional model of education is failing kids when it comes to learning. But somewhere in the middle, there are those that know there is a different path, yet they won’t make the leap.

What, I wonder, are they waiting for?

So this morning it’s David Weinberger that’s got me thinking. No doubt, David has been one of my favorite Web philosophers for a long time, someone who almost always seems to open the window just a bit more for me. Today, it’s this:

…we knew all along that atoms were never up to the job. We knew that the world doesn’t boil down to even the best of newspapers, that it doesn’t fit into 65,000 articles in a printed encyclopedia, that there was more disagreement than the old channels let through. (What they called noise, we called the the world.) We knew that the crap pushed through the radio wasn’t really all that we cared about, or that we all cared about the same things within three tv channels of difference. The old institutions were the best fictions we could come up with given that atoms are way too big.

And I’m wondering, deep down, have we known all along that this idea of an “education” was really a fiction, something we created out of necessity with the implicit understanding that in a world limited by atoms, it was never really the end all, be all, but it was the best we could do under the circumstances? And if we didn’t know that, can we admit that now?

The circumstances have changed. We’re no longer constrained by atoms. For 125 years we’ve been making the learning world small, and now the world is all of a sudden big…huge. All of a sudden, the walls have been obliterated. Learning is unbound, and “an education” is next.

The work now is in making the transition happen in ways that don’t hurt the kids or teachers currently in our schools. In ways that prepare our kids for a learning world where atoms still matter, but for very different reasons.  A peaceful revolution of sorts that starts…where?