Learning shifts in the ages of mankind

The changing ages of learning

For almost 3 million years, mankind’s existence and success in the nomadic old stone age was built on their learned ability to hunt and gather foods.

Then in about 8,000 BC, people discovered how to cultivate crops and domesticate animals leading to probably mankind’s greatest paradigm shift – the shift to community and the start of the structured society. Though breaking out at similar times through out the world, it is the Middle-Eastern town of Jericho that is generally credited as a key trigger point. This shift, though gradual, created an entirely new learned set of skills and knowledge requirements to ensure success in this new agricultural age.

By the late 18th century, another great paradigm shift was again changing the learning and educational requirements, with the advent of the industrial age. Triggered by the people of Great Britian with their improved transport systems and innovative steam engines they radically changed the face of textile production in that country. This paradigm shift soon swept up other industries in Great Britian and eventually spread to the societies of Europe and the Americas.

 Less than 200 years later, the industrial age was to transform again in a 1959 Paradigm Shift triggered by the invention of the computer microchip by Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce. This new Paradigm ushered in the information age bringing with it once more, a whole new set of requirements in education and learning to ensure successful participation and owner benefit.

Educational institution that have in the past been the agents, drivers and promoters of change now found themselves at the cusp of irrelevance for simply standing still whilst our global society has been transformed again into a new entity. This crisis for the traditional educational institutions is further exacerbated by the fact that since Timothy Berners-Lee’s successful internet experiment in 1990, a new global age has been triggered by the exponential developments on the internet communications platform.

Given time, the educational institutions of the past were able to realign and adapt to the new age but today, time is a commodity we don't have in dealing with the double-wave tsunami of the digital and global age happening in such quick succession.

Now whilst the machine based microchip multiplied by exponential leaps, the speed and form (graphical interface) of information processing, the internet is multiplying by comparable degrees the capture of human capital which is also exponentially and colaboratively forming, with its electrical circuits and networks - the global brain.

The choice for national governments and educational institutions alike is quite clear, to connect to this phenomenon and grow or stay detatched and wither. This crisis in education can not be managed in degrees. Whether we like it or not the new education and learning systems in the next 5-10 years are going to change radically, as learners pursue the new open online learning to the detriment of the old.

"A prior education can be a real barrier to new learning" PB