C.M. Rubin, a US-based educationist, journalist and author of the award-winning ‘Global Search for Education’ series, interviewed Dr. Peter Senge, senior lecturer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of the bestselling The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of The Learning Organization (1990) which has made him a household name among informed corporate leaders around the world.

How do you define a ‘learning system’? What are the main differences between systems thinking for business and education?

The obvious difference starts with aims. In business, you are trying to achieve a mission that involves serving a particular customer. In education, the objective is to grow people. This also involves serving a ‘customer’ but in many ways customer is a bad metaphor used too casually in education, because students are both recipients and co-creators of learning. But mostly, they need to be seen as co-creators. Learning occurs when students learn. So this is not simply a matter of professionals (i.e. teachers) producing a particular type of product (students). It is a joint process of exploration and mutual development.

A common element that connects both business and education is the need to grow an organisational climate or culture that supports collaboration, risk-taking, and deep sense of common purpose and commitment. So in this particular way, leadership is quite similar in education as in business. What I always remind people is the single biggest difference from a leadership standpoint is the complexity of a school — in particular the complexity of its stakeholder environment. Businesses have no stakeholder analogous to a parent. Parents have a profound commitment to schools because they have a deep commitment to the well-being and growth of their children.

How can we avoid the trap of treating education as a business when the product needs to be human beings who can lead satisfying lives?

I think the simple response is we have to keep remembering our purpose. In education, it is to grow people and help society evolve. There are these two fundamentally different but related purposes in education: benefiting students and benefiting the future of society. Education is the only institution in society that has a 50-70 year time horizon. It has the strongest potential to influence the future, just as business has the greatest power in the present. But no business has a time horizon of this scope and the potential to make the sort of impact on society that education does.

Which school systems or schools you are familiar with have established collaborative inclusive learning organisations? What are the key measures of success they have shown?

Within the SoL (School of Learning) Education Partnership there are now 15-20 school districts with about 1,000 schools all together. If you visit these schools, you’ll see a profound shift in the climate, from classrooms to the school as a whole. Teachers and students learn together. There’s real appreciation of students’ leadership in transforming education, ongoing inquiry, reflection and innovations in pedagogy. In short, these schools create real learning environments.

The very first thing you notice is the deep engagement of teachers and students. Teachers are learning, students are learning.

The two are connected because they’re both contributing to an overall environment of continuous learning. Second, you’ll witness the depth of learning. Today, there is way too much emphasis on superficial mastery of techniques rather than deeper learning, for instance in the sciences and mathematics. Lastly, you will notice a more inclusive culture among very diverse learners.

Perhaps the greatest single outcome is the growing evidence that the whole systems approach connects very deeply with the intuitive systems and thinking capabilities of all children. For example, many learners who struggle with traditional pedagogies and cultural biases towards certain types of learning (like verbal felicity and rapid deductive reasoning) are no longer disadvantaged in an environment focused on relationships and processes of change.

What is different about learning outcomes needed for the 21st century versus the 20th century in terms of key competencies required? What are the key competencies required of teachers today?

The key differences in competencies required I believe are depth of understanding, appreciation of interdependency and collaboration, and reconnecting head, heart and hand. Children need to develop deep confidence that they can learn, solve complex problems and that they can do this together. The problems we face in all societies — from global problems like climate change to more local ones like inequity and loss of purpose and connection to one another — are beyond the reach of existing institutions and their reliance on hierarchical structures. People need to collaborate to solve these problems and this is where students need to build new competencies.

Fostering collaborative learning of how to face the challenges that mean most to us will require teachers who are engaged in developing deep competencies. We teach who we are, not just what we know. Teachers used to working in silos and standing and delivering the curriculum will be unable to meet the needs of today’s learners. This is why leaders, like principals who build school cultures of collaboration and risk taking, are so important.

What do you see as the greatest shortcomings of 21st-century learning environments? How can teachers and students work to counteract them?

Fragmentation and excessive individual competition destroy the natural spirit of learners who want to truly learn. Over a very long period of time, schools have become places of performing for teachers’ approval, or scoring in tests. This was never conducive to learning and it is less credible for students who no longer expect teachers to be the font of all knowledge, because they have access to so much information of their own.

What would be your ideal vision for education in 2030?

That the variety of schools matches the variety of learners. We all learn in different ways and truly learning-centred schools — as against teaching-centred schools — will be able to serve many types of learners. Such schools would also be more embedded in the larger community, so that parents and family as well are deeply connected to the learning process — students, teachers and community members building healthy communities together.