The question of leaping outside of current mental models was the heart of the late Bela H. Banathy's approach to "reform." (see book Systems Design of Education, 1995, and various articles). Actually, he rejected the idea of improvement, reform, and restructuring because they merely reorganized the same thing. He articulated an idealized design process wherein the stakeholders sat down, developed their vision for what they want the future of their society and community to look like, then designed the education system from scratch based on that. Much more holistic than any current process. Helping people start with a bigger picture and an idealizing process helps them break free of current thinking - if you can get them to idealize in the first place. The closest I know of in terms of implementing this process has been tried in Indiana recently, with the help of one of Banathy's former colleagues, Charles Reigeluth of Indiana University. I took this design concept to heart in the late 90's and (naively) tried to get Idaho school district interested. I later realized that there is a fundamental obstacle to this in our society that has to be addressed first. It is the same thing that prevents us from having dialogue about health care, justice, etc. etc. It is that we don't have the social skills, let alone the forums set up, to talk about things in this manner. So transforming education is fundamentally rooted in transforming grassroots consciousness. Yet it is a chicken-and-egg problem,, since education is ostensibly the crucible that can help build that consciousness and competence. The creation of open-learning networks that initially operate in parallel with the "system" might help catalyze such discussions because they would afford people natural opportunities to get together and go "Huh...um...what do we want our kids to learn and why? And how? And where?" Such questions are currently monopolized by "professionals" and laypersons feel little competence to participate in such decisions, even though it is only the stakeholders who have the right to answer such fundamental questions.
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