Redesigning education

by Kenneth G. Wilson

Kenneth G. Wilson, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and educational reformer, argues that American public education is dangerously out of step with the demands of today's postindustrial, knowledge-based society. "What educators need most is to find an organizing, driving vision - a new paradigm powerful enough to promise a systematic redesign of American public education." But until we upset traditional assumptions about education, Wilson and coauthor Bennett Daviss warn, necessary reforms will languish regardless of their importance. Combining Wilson's experience in science and industry and curriculum design with Daviss's experience as a journalist specializing in education, Redesigning Education shows how the redesign process can produce a series of integrated changes around which a national educational infrastructure can develop. To spread the most effective ideas from school to school, the authors envision a national educational system modeled on the Agricultural Extension Service.