We are children of our times. We frame our worlds as they are given to us by our language and the structures of our education. The frame is invisible until there is a change so pervasive that we see by contrast what we took for granted. The education I received in the 50s and 60s was not experienced as a choice. It's what education was.

I thought adolescence was a universal developmental stage. But adolescence is a modern invention. When the printing press invented school -- collections of benches on which to sit and read -- it invented adolescence. Learning had been accomplished through apprenticeship. Young people worked beside adults, learning by doing. Then textbooks necessitated a prolonged period of time to learn the art of symbol manipulation. The real American aristocracy -- the upwardly mobile masses -- postponed adulthood.

It was called "education." Today the structures of education are out of joint with the structures of adulthood. That's why so many businesses are educating workers. More education takes place today in conference rooms, meeting rooms in hotels, and via remote telepresence and onsite computer-assisted learning than in classrooms. The need for continuous lifelong education is now an unquestioned assumption. Apple flooded schools with computers, but didn't provide teachers who knew what to do with them.

I know a fourth grade teacher who was supposed to teach computers but didn't know how to turn them on. She asked her class, "Who knows how?" Hands waved in the air. She turned the task over to a student and hid behind her desk.

But she couldn't hide forever. So she asked her three brightest students secretly to teach her after school how to use (and teach) the new computers.

Older managers as well as older teachers must learn from younger adults as well as teach them. The wisdom of experience is relevant, but relevant in a different way. Command-and-control behaviors do not make for good coaching.

At least that teacher knew how to get out of the way, but that didn't make her a coach. She needed to learn how to be present but not controlling, available but not directive. Like the best computer assisted learning, good coaches provide information not at the convenience of the curriculum but when learners are most teachable.

Teachers threatened by this challenge take away computers and lock them up. They call it a "computer lab" and let the kids in there an hour a day.

Imagine being a teacher when pencils were invented. You pass out pencils and watch as the children discover that pencils can do anything because a pencil is a symbol manipulating machine.

Afraid you're no longer needed, you collect the pencils and lock them in a Pencil Lab, letting the children use them an hour a day. The rest of the time they write with rocks on slabs of broken concrete.

The structures of education, like the structures of work, are moving through a sea-change. Symptoms include:

+ Rising drop-out rates. Racial minorities, the canaries in the coal mine of society, die first. The irrelevance of school to life in the world was experienced first in ghettos. Now blue-collar workers and middle-aged managers are feeling the pain so it's a "crisis." + A growing "black market" in education. We give lip-service to traditional structures but barter for "educational goods" on the job and over the Internet, in the global marketplace.

+ Businesses become centers of education, not because they want to, but because they must. McDonald's teaches politeness and civility because the traditional structures of home, family, religion, no longer do the job.

+ Conscientious teachers who can't see the forest for the trees redouble their efforts. They become exhausted , working harder and harder, but it's like drinking from a dribble glass. The gears of the system don't mesh with the real world. Veterans count the days until retirement. Burn-out abounds.

+ "Work-to-school" programs grow as apprenticeship is re-engineered for the 21st century. Is there hope? Of course. The solutions begin with understanding the depths of the transformation we are experiencing and asking questions relevant to our real lives. The process of finding answers together will generate the security we need to remain effective during revolutionary times.

December 1, 1995