Education in a Knowledge Society
By Carl Bereiter

Two of the most important influences on education in the United States today converge from very different disciplines. The ideas expressed in recent business literature and current research in cognitive science both have sweeping implications for educational change. Each suggest, in quite different ways, a new concept of what schooling should be about, and each suggest fundamental changes in the education system. Taken together, these new ideas may guide us as we consider the question "What does it mean to be an educated person in the 21st century?"

This type of question has guided the development of education and its periodic transformations, such as in the rise of the natural sciences. No longer would anyone conceive of an educated person who was ignorant of science. But today's question involves a more radical change - now we are concerned not so much with the incorporation of new disciplines as a change in the way all disciplines are approached. Today, new discussions are taking place around the idea of knowledge societies. This refers to a society organized around the production of knowledge in the same sense that an agrarian society is organized around agricultural production and an industrial society is organized around manufacture. Keep in mind this idea of a 'knowledge society' as we consider the ideas formulated in business theory and cognitive science.

Two Views of Education for the 21st Century

Business literature includes the work produced by organizational theorists, management consultants, economists, futurologists, and diverse social scientists. All these consider the implications of the rapid rate of technological change, the rise of Asia-Pacific economies, digitization, globalization, outsourcing, the shift from a manufacturing-based to knowledge-based economy, and the need for constant innovation. The 'high-end' educational ideas found in the business literature recognize the importance of knowledge - knowledge as a third factor in production (along with capital and labor). The ideas found in business literature also recognize learning as a way to gain competitive edge. And, finally, they recognize a social transformation as extreme as the 19th century shift from an agrarian to an industrial society - that is, the shift to a knowledge society.

This points to personal qualities that must be cultivated in order to produce people who can thrive in and contribute to the new order: imagination and creativity, teamwork, communication skills, information-finding skills, problem-solving abilities, technological literacy, and above all, a continual readiness to learn. However, these may not be the only answers for education in the 21st century, especially if we consider the issue from the perspective of cognitive learning research.

In the 1970s, cognitive learning research was where the business literature is now, emphasizing cognitive strategies and 'learning to learn'. The emphasis has since shifted dramatically toward content learning and efforts aimed at learning with understanding. [See research on Reading (Anderson & Pearson, 1984); research on expertise (Chi & Glaser, 1988); and research on misconceptions (Wandersee, Mintzes, & Novak, 1994).] What becomes clear from this and other research is that once students start to get deeply into the pursuit of understanding, they begin to show spontaneously all the traits that the business literature urges: imagination, collaboration, problem-solving, communication skills, and readiness to go on learning.

The emphasis in the business literature is on process outcomes, on turning out students who function in specific ways. However, the current emphasis in cognitive learning research is on content, on turning out students with a genuine understanding of science, mathematics, and other school subjects. A commonsense response to the differing implications of business literature and cognitive learning research might be, "Let's have both." But as attractive as this eclectic solution may be, its effect is to drain away the energy that might produce something new and exciting out of the interaction of these two new forces. What is really called for is a new synthesis.

A new culture for learning

The real vision conveyed in the business literature isn't concerned with education; it is concerned with business structures - structures that create knowledge-based organizations. Today, the most successful businesses are organizations whose competitive advantage stems from the cultivation and use of the organization's knowledge resources. Because these resources are generated out of (and to a large extent reside in) the work of everyone in the organization, maximizing them requires a design that defines everyone as a contributor. This is the revolutionary vision: abandonment of bureaucratic structures, structures in which a worker's responsibility is defined by routine tasks and where nonroutine problems are referred to a higher level, and replacing them with mission-oriented team structures in which problems are solved and new knowledge is generated within the working groups. This vision has much in common with an educational movement now taking shape in cognitive research.

In cognitive research, along with a shift toward content, came a shift in focus from individual cognitive strategies to a classroom culture that supports inquiry and the pursuit of deeper understanding. For example, Ann Brown's work in the 1970s dealt with teaching strategies to children (Brown, 1978). By the 1980s individual strategy instruction had evolved into 'reciprocal teaching' (Palinscar & Brown, 1984). This was then assimilated into the more comprehensive 'communities of learners' (Brown & Campione, 1990). It became increasingly evident as learning research moved into the present decade that improving learning would require changing the prevailing culture of the classroom. This is where the literature of business and cognitive science should come together. A fusion of the two can help shape the classroom culture and clarify what education for the coming century should be.

Enculturation into World 3

It is the job of parents and the community, of individual teachers and of educational leaders to constantly reassess what it is that our children require in order to become productive members of society. And that can be difficult when society is constantly evolving. What should it mean to be an educated person in the 21st century? It is difficult to know the social consequences for employment, equity, quality of life and so on, but it is evident that knowledge and knowledge work will become increasingly important. You will not know your way around in tomorrow's world unless you know your way around knowledge. But knowledge can be thought of in different ways. Is it a quantifiable thing that you possess or a sort of 'knowledge ability'?

Knowing your way around knowledge is not the same as knowing your way around the Web. Working out a vision for education in a knowledge society requires a first step, and that first step is understanding knowledge in two quite distinct senses. First, knowledge is something that people acquire and that becomes a part of them; and second, knowledge is something they work with and that in some sense takes on a life of its own.

To carry on this discussion, we need distinguishing labels. Karl Popper has provided some, with his labeling of three worlds. World 1, the physical world, need not concern us at this point. The important distinction is between Worlds 2 and 3. World 2 is the subjective world, comprising the knowledge in people's heads. (Without harming Popper's concept, we can expand World 2 to include situated knowledge as well - knowledge that is implicit in the practices of communities and not assignable to individual minds.) World 3, roughly speaking, is the world of discussible ideas. It consists of immaterial knowledge objects that can be created, criticized, modified, replaced, and so on. For instance, the Pythagorean Theorem is an object in World 3. The child's knowledge of the Pythagorean Theorem is part of the child's World 2. The distinction thus coincides with the similar distinction between knowledge-building and learning. Learning takes place in World 2 while knowledge-building is work carried out to produce changes within World 3 (or on the objects of World 3).

What is especially attractive about the World 3 idea is that it encompasses both the traditional idea of a fund of accumulated knowledge that is passed on to the young and the more dynamic idea that knowledge advances through people's creative efforts. World 3 is a workspace where knowledge objects are in various stages of development. Some are finished to the extent that no one bothers to tinker with them anymore. Others are under current development and are the subjects of research, criticism, controversy, repair operations, and novel conjecture. The Pythagorean Theorem is one of the finished objects in World 3. But when students produce explanations of the theorem or intuitive proofs or examples of application, these are World 3 objects, just as the activity that produces them is work in World 3. This conception of World 3 stretches Popper's concept, but only slightly. He said at one point (1972, p.156), "I suggest that one day we will have to revolutionize psychology by looking at the human mind as an organ for interacting with the objects in the third world; for understanding them, contributing to them, participating in them; and for bringing them to bear on the first world." Hence, the role of schools in the knowledge age is to enculturate students into World 3.

A Proposal for Change

The ideas about organizational transformation and knowledge work, prominent in today's business literature and cognitive research, may help us create an environment in which students learn to function in World 3. The first step is to reconstitute schools along the lines of other organizations whose function it is to produce knowledge. Learning goes on in all organizations, but only some organizations have the function of producing knowledge. The learning that occurs, whether it is in a shoe factory or a research laboratory, is internal to individual minds, to the developing practices of work groups, and to the organization as a whole. The excitement over the idea of learning organizations reflects a growing appreciation of the value of this learning in that it increases the competence of the organization to perform its functions. In these intensely competitive times, learning is one way for an organization to gain a competitive edge. Today we see efforts to promote learning that range from formal courses in company-run schools to on-site coffee bars where employees hang out and exchange instructive stories about their work (Wenger, 1995).

In addition, however, and quite apart from this internal betterment, some organizations have the job of producing knowledge. These include university research centers, independent laboratories, market research companies, and research and design departments within larger organizations. Unfortunately, the current lingo calls this learning too, thus obscuring an important distinction. Of course, learning does go on in these knowledge-producing organizations as in all others, but the actual work of the organization is not learning, it is producing knowledge. These are referred to as knowledge-building organizations (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1996; Scardamalia & Bereiter, in press; Scardamalia, Bereiter, & Lamon, 1994). A research laboratory is a knowledge-building organization. A shoe factory is not, although it may contain a research group that is. Schools today are not knowledge-building organizations. They could be, and that is the radical cultural shift proposed here.

Ordinarily, classroom life is organized around activities (Doyle, 1986). The new challenge is how to reorganize classroom life to mirror that of the most successful business organizations in America - corporations and other entities that are organized around the pursuit of knowledge. In the 21st century, schools must become workshops for the production of knowledge. Imagine students as workers. They can be learners, too, and because of the nature of their work they will be expected to learn a great deal. But learning is not their job, producing knowledge is. It is meaningful work, because what they are producing is something for their own use, and so their work has that quality, so rare in the industrial age, that comes with building one's own house or raising one's own food.

Many educators would endorse this proposal, thinking it is what they are already doing. Yet very little of the so-called 'constructivist' pedagogy of today is actually concerned with the production of knowledge. Instead, it is concerned with the carrying out of projects that use knowledge, but have some other objective than its production. Students may plan a trip to Mars or design a moon station; they may draw up an environmental or business plan; they may play a game or even create one. At their best, such projects generate a considerable amount of learning, but it is important to realize the difference between this and authentic knowledge creation.

The difference can be dramatized in an experiment by Yarnall and Kafai (1996). Yarnall and Kafai adopted an approach called "Learning Science Through Design." In the course of studying ocean habitats, elementary school students were expected to create educational computer games related to the ocean theme. In their report, Yarnall and Kafai call this a 'project-based' approach, lumping it together with Community of Learners (COL) (Brown & Campione, 1994) and Computer-Supported Intentional Learning Environments (CSILE) (Scardamalia & Bereiter, 1994). While that is an accurate categorization, it reflects the common weakness in elementary education for elevating a procedural characteristic to the status of pedagogical philosophy. The authors then proceed to distinguish "Learning Science Though Design" from the other two approaches in that it is less structured and awards students a higher level of "creative control over the production of an artifact."

Evidently, the students did throw themselves energetically into creating the computer games. They collaborated, consulted experts, and discussed programming problems. So if the purpose was to teach software design and programming, the project would have been considered a success. But what about "Learning Science Through Design"? In 20 out of 20 games, some of them explicitly modeled on quiz shows, the designers created quiz-type questions. Most games used the ocean theme as a context for the quiz shows (if you don't answer the question correctly, a grouper bites you, for instance). But on the computer bulletin board used for discussion, the authors report that the discussions were about game design and programming, not about oceans. Incredibly, the one science question posted was rejected by the teacher, who told the student not to expect others to do his research for him!

The authors are candid in concluding that "Learning Science Through Design" in this instance failed "to create a consistent context for a deeper level of subject inquiry," and they suggest that in the future their method might need "to structure the electronic exchanges around content more along the lines described by both Scardamalia and her colleagues in the CSILE project and Brown and her colleagues in the COL environment." This sounds like a minor modification, but it isn't. Getting students truly engaged with problems of marine biology instead of solely concerned with software design would involve a shift in focus so radical that the game-building activity might no longer be relevant.

I have seen students in a COL classroom intensely engaged with the problem of how male sea otters are able to mark off a territory of ocean as their own - a problem that was not handed to them, but that they hit upon themselves as an anomaly in information they had assembled. The same sort of thing occurred in a CSILE classroom when a group studying the Arctic biome could not reconcile the reasons they were given for why trees do not grow in the Arctic with information they found about trees growing in deserts and tropical rainforests. The issue here is not only the learning of science content; it is also learning about knowledge - that is, realizing that knowledge is much more than static stuff in textbooks. Students see that knowledge is assimilated and understood. They see that it is prodded and molded and sometimes reshaped in ways that lead to different questions, more problems, and ultimately to new understandings.

Knowledge-Building in the Knowledge Forum Classroom

The idea of schools as workshops for the construction of knowledge wins ready assent from educators, but the difficulty is getting them to see that it is anything different from most 'activity-based learning'. In discussing adult organizations, it was easy to distinguish learning from knowledge-building. Everyone learns, and progressive organizations do much to promote it, but in an increasing number of jobs, it is not learning, but creating or adding value to knowledge that is called for. Learning is the reason we send children to school, however, and knowledge-building is only going to be valued insofar as students learn from doing it. Since students need to do some kind of work in order to learn, why not let that work be the construction of knowledge?

One major prejudice must be overcome if knowledge-building as real productive work similar to what goes on in industrial and research laboratories is to find a foothold. It is the idea that credit belongs only to the first person to come forth with a new idea. But an original theory or explanation is only one kind of knowledge product, albeit an exceptionally important one. Other worthwhile products of knowledge-building are interpretations of theories, criticisms, translations of complex ideas into simpler terms, analyses of implications or applications, descriptions of phenomena which the theory does or does not explain, experimental demonstrations, simulations, historical accounts, and so on. Many adults pursue respectable careers producing knowledge of these kinds.

A Knowledge Forum classroom works something like this: A student enters a note asking what keeps gravity from leaving the earth. Later, another student reports that she has read that gravity is a force between things and therefore not something contained within things. Several students seize on this and use it to make sense of what they have heard about gravity being everywhere. As adults read the notes, they will likely conclude that a genuine advance in knowledge has occurred, helped along as much by the first students' naive question as by the second student's important finding. Knowledge has been produced, not of news-making or prize-winning caliber, but just as important to the students' intellectual world as discoveries made by leading-edge universities are to the researcher's world. That is all we really need to allow in order to accept knowledge-building by students as genuine productive work rather than merely a learning activity.

As many parents know, it is often difficult for students to respond to the question, "What have you learned?" But how about the question, "What advances in knowledge has your class made?" In a Knowledge Forum classroom an answer might go something like this:

"Well, we've been working on systems of the body and we started out with one group studying the eye and another group studying the brain. But pretty soon we realized that to understand how we see, we had to work on how the brain and eye are connected. We have a good idea of how information gets from objects to the retina and from the retina to the brain, but we don't understand what happens after that - like, how do you know what you're looking at. Some kids don't think that's a problem, but I do.

We've been working on the Aztecs and the Incas and those other groups. We've collected lots of information, but we're just starting to put it together to understand what their civilizations were like. It's hard, you know, because they didn't think about things the way we do..." The preceding example combines remarks made by various students when asked to tell about their class's work.

Conclusion

My favorite line expressing enculturation into World 3 appeared in a Knowledge Forum (CSILE) dialogue among elementary school students working on genetics: "Mendel worked on Karen's problem." Captured in these five words are several important notions: the sense of a shared knowledge-building enterprise, continuity with the past, and the conception of a World 3 object (in this case, a formulated problem) that persists over time and space and that various people may work on in different ways. This is knowledge-centered education - and Mendel gets into the picture, not as a dead white male with the authority of the scientific establishment behind him, but as someone with a contribution to make to a current problem.

There are cultural differences - just as there are individual differences - in how people think about science, mathematics, literature, and history. But these are not differences that preclude constructive criticism and collaborative knowledge-building. Consequently, World 3 provides a meeting place for different cultures, and knowledge-building serves as a unifying activity. The largest cultural divide, cutting across the whole world and with great consequence, is that which separates people who are at home in World 3 from those who are not.

It seems that the education system itself is on the wrong side of the cultural divide, ill-disposed to treat knowledge as a focus of productive work. Better models of schooling are available, models that are compatible with the needs of a knowledge-based economy, with the best of cognitive learning research, and with enduring values of education. But those models cannot simply be taken up as variations on project-based learning or whatever new method comes to the fore. In order to move to the other side of the divide, in order to find their place in a knowledge society, schools must undergo a much more radical transformation. Only by becoming knowledge-building organizations themselves can schools hope to provide students with a way into the life of a knowledge society in the 21st century.

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Carl Bereiter is a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, at the University of Toronto, where he is a member of the Center for Applied Cognitive Science. He has conducted research and has published in the areas of early childhood education and statistical problems and measurement of change, the psychology of writing, intentional learning, and cognitive development. His books include: Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool, (with Seigfried Engelmann); Arithmetic and Mathematics; Must We Educate?; The Psychology of Written Composition; and Surpassing Ourselves (the latter two with Marlene Scardamalia). He is a member of the National Academy of Education, has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, and has been a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.