Paradigm Shift Examples

When the 16th century Polish mathematician and astronomer Copernicus presented a fully predictive mathematical model postulating that the earth revolved around the sun, he created a scientific Paradigm Shift.

When the French chemist Antoine Lavoisier published Traite Elementaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) in 1789 together with his oxygen theory of combustion, he created a scientific Paradigm Shift.

When Albert Einstein delivered in 1905 his Theory of Relativity contained in the paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies", he created a scientific Paradigm Shift.

Now whilst it was not Thomas Kurn’s intention, the term today has been adopted and embraced widely to include both the scientific and non-scientific worlds. This is because his insights can be applied with equal rigor to them both. His argument states that "when enough significant anomalies (inconsistencies) have accrued against a current paradigm, a state of crisis is created which allows new ideas to be tried, eventually leading to a new paradigm". This new Paradigm gains its own new followers, “and an intellectual "battle" takes place between the followers of the new paradigm and the hold-outs of the old”. For example, this was a battle lost by the English monarchy hold-outs in 1215 with the signing of the Magna Carta Libertatum (Great Charter of Freedoms) which brought about a Paradigm Shift in societal governance.

Today, a Paradigm Shift is said to occur when the vast majority of the members in a community changes from one way of thinking to another and is less dramatically tagged ‘the old way of thinking’ Vs ‘the new way of thinking’. But fundamentally, it is a revolution, a transformation, a conversion, a metamorphosis that just does not happen by chance but it is driven by agents of change with the likes of scientists, inventors, social change activists, innovators and entrepreneurs all delivering or exploiting environmental or economic transformations, expanding commercial markets, technological advancements or major social attitude shifts.

Other great Paradigm Shifts in human civilization have centred around the harnessed benefits of fire and the revolutionary innovations of the wheel and gunpowder. Agriculture was a Paradigm Shift some 10,000 years ago in early primitive society, where it changed their way of life from being nomadic into settled structured communities. Down through history, the art of war has seen many innovations but it could be said that it was the development of the airplane that ushered in its greatest Paradigm Shift.

In more recent times, when Jack Kilby / Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce (Intel founder) / Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation received their U.S. patents in 1959 for the microchip, they created a Paradigm Shift in data/information processing that is still effecting significant societal change even today. In 1990, thirty years after the invention of the microchip, an English computer scientist at CERN, the European Particle Physics Laboratory, Timothy Berners-Lee with the help of Robert Cailliau, implemented the first successful communication between an HTTP client and server via the Internet. Little did they know less than 20 years ago, that in bringing about the World Wide Web, they had sown the seeds of a Paradigm Shift in Open Online Learning that will rock the very foundations of the centuries old Paradigms in education, teaching and learning.

"The skills required for the future will be the same as those required for today – coping with and adapting to change." PB

What is a Paradigm Shift?

According to Joel Arthur Barker, author of the book “Paradigms - The Business of Discovering the Future”, a paradigm is a set of rules and regulations that does two things: (1) it establishes and defines boundaries; and (2) it tells you how to behave inside those boundaries to be successful"

Paradigms are the sum total of the basic assumptions, concepts, conventions, values, protocols, traditions, principles, prejudices, rituals and superstitions that constitute a way of viewing reality for the community that shares them.

Wiktionary describes a paradigm shift then as; “A radical change in thinking from an accepted point of view to a new one, necessitated when new scientific discoveries produce anomalies (inconsistencies) in the current paradigm”. The link to scientific discoveries exists because this term was first coined in 1962 by Thomas Kuhn in his book “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions”, to describe a change in the basic assumptions within the ruling theory of science.

This paradigm shift in learning is not just a process of turning the current face-to-face certification products into a digital medium and offering it on the global communications platform at the same price and under the same regime conditions. No ...no ... no, this is a revolution by the grassroots people (learners, teachers and industry) whose needs have been marginalised for too long by educational institutions across the world with their government elite focused too intently on their own survival and power needs.

This paradigm shift is a revolution by learners against the grossly inflated price of education, being generated by an inefficient system imploding on itself with its plethora of compliance issues, audit requirements and fashionable dictates of well-meaning but grossly detached government ‘purse string' holders.

 It is a revolution where the learner takes charge of their own learning using the tailored convenience of the internet, much like the people of the 1450’s did with their newly printed books.

It is a revolution for the democratization of knowledge and the overthrow of the outdated and overwhelmed approach of censorship and sterilization by the elite. The revolution has already begun. Triggered in some part by the people of India (outsourcing centre of the world $14billion p.a. service export revenue) devouring learning from the internet and building wealth creating businesses on an electronic platform blind to their credentials but a slavish servant to their global/information age skills and ability. While the rest of the world crashes into recession, their economy continues to grow.

As this revolution spreads, much like the industrial revolution of the 1800’s, it will cross borders and industries rapidly, forcing even main-stream industries to embrace the new learning paradigm or run the risk of obsolesence. Just like the industrial revolution, it will be a 'bloodless' revolution where the stakeholders will simply vote with their feet and 'walk off the farm' , leaving the past educational paradigm behind them.

It is my contention that our education systems the world over, controlled by educational institutions at the behest of the government elite, are too shackled by the old paradigm to embrace this evolving revolution. As Albert Einstein said

“We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” 

So the revolution will need the innovative help of individuals like entrepreneurs, passionate teacherpreneurs and knowledgeable industry experts to lead the change into the new paradigm – open online learning

"In times of radical change the learners inherit the earth while the learned find themselves perfectly equipped for a world that no longer exists." Erik Hoffer