The most recent Fast Company magazine features a long look at Apple and its success, and includes this excerpt:
Steve Jobs has often cited this quote from Henry Ford: “If I’d have asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!’ “
This is Jobs’s defense of Apple’s reluctance to listen to even its most passionate customers, and the line is a good one to remember the next time you’re considering a new round of focus groups. “The whole approach of the company is that people can’t really envision what they want,” says Reid. “They’ll tell you a bunch of stuff they want. Then if you build it, it turns out that’s not right. It’s hard to visualize things that don’t exist.”
Last year the Alberta Government’s education department initiated a look into education’s future that they titled “Inspiring Education”. It consisted of many months of community conversations and then a weekend gathering with a mind-broadening array of speakers. Inspiring Education’s Steering Committee recently published its initial summary of results to date.
But in a world of government schooling, where entrepreneurial forces exist only on a tiny level with minimal radiation, asking people what they want in future schooling results in… mostly… a call for “a faster horse”. And that’s what Inspiring Education runs the risk of being.
The future of schooling will require liberty. Freedom. Room to run. Room to try things. Room to fail. Room to succeed.
We don’t really know what we want in schooling. But we will know it when we see it.
Will we ever be free to see it?
GLO
gordotto@parentsnschools.com
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