- The First Wave emerged as the Agrarian Revolution replaced Hunter-Gatherer Age. Schooling in America within the Agrarian Age paradigm was focused on learning reading, writing, and arithmetic to keep written records of planting and harvests, taxation, and barter. Advanced education was rare and usually reserved for society’s elite.
- The Second Wave was the
Industrial Revolution (which Toffler suggested emerged in the late 1600s and continued through the mid-1900s). Schooling in America during the Industrial Age saw the emergence of mass public education, large factory-like school systems, and group-based teaching and learning. Education during that era resulted in the emergence of an educated middle class. School systems had (and still have) a monopoly on teaching and learning for most of America’s school-aged children. Academic subjects were (and still are at the secondary-level) departmentalized in ways that mimicked factory assembly lines.
- Toffler described his Third Wave as the Post-Industrial era. He posited that this era began in the late 1950s as most societies started moving away from the Industrial Age paradigm into the Post-Industrial Age paradigm, or what he called the Third Wave Society. Other terms used to describe the Third Wave Society include Information Age, Knowledge Age, “Digital Age” (Head, 2005), and the “Conceptual Age” (Pink, 2006).
Mental modules
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Mental Models
The concept of mental models was first proposed by Craik (1943). He said, “…the mind constructs ‘small-scale models’ of reality that it uses to anticipate events, to reason, and to underlie explanation” (cited in Johnson-Laird, Girotto,&Legrenzi, 1998, Introduction, para. 1). Johnson-Laird (1983) is one of the foremost authorities of mental model theory. He believed that people construct cognitive representations of what they learn and what they think they know. He called these representations “mental models.” Senge (1990) described mental models as “…deeply ingrained assumptions, generalizations, or even pictures or images that influence how we understand the world and how we take action” (p. 8).
Given the four current paradigms controlling the field of education (group-based teaching and learning, bureaucratic organization design, reactive public relations, and piecemeal change), practitioners and academics search for or construct mental models for their work that are required by each paradigm. These models are held by individuals, groups, and entire school systems. Examples of mental models for each of the four paradigms are provided below.
- Examples of mental models in the field of education within the Industrial Age paradigm of teaching and learning (Paradigm 1) include group-based teaching and learning, presenting a fixed amount of content in a fixed amount of time, teachers working center stage in classrooms, and so on.
- Examples of the controlling mental models for designing the internal social infrastructure of school systems (Paradigm 2) include treating teachers as employees that need close supervision, centralized administrative services, an organization culture that punishes innovation and excellence, an organization design that is mechanistic and bureaucratic, and reward systems that reward the wrong behavior.
- Examples of the dominant mental models in education for interacting with the external environment (Paradigm 3) include crisis-oriented school public relations, not allowing direct telephone calls or e-mail correspondence to senior line administrators, and perceiving external stakeholders as nuisances rather than as resources.
- Examples of the prevailing mental models for creating change in school districts (Paradigm 4) include high school reform, curriculum reform, lengthening school days, lengthening school years, and a mixed bag of other “quick-fixes.” The most famous, or perhaps infamous, mental model for change in contemporary school systems in the United States is the
No Child Left Behind legislation.
