The future of learning institutions

The very nature of the knowledge society presents a challenge for all learning organizations from schools to higher education. Knowledge technologies have entirely transformed the relationships between the individual learner and the public stock of knowledge thus making the requirement for learning organizations obsolete. This essay analyzes the learner traits pertinent to learning first, the new nature of knowledge in the digital era, and the curriculum and pedagogy that mediates learning within the learning organizations. This analysis concludes that while sophisticated knowledge technologies can support adaptive personalized education, they cannot elicit individual traits such as the capacity for independent learning, general intelligence, personality, or emotional construct. Thus human diversity and individual differences will stay widely distributed and will demand the complex human services provided by the learning organizations. Yet in order to meet the challenges created by the knowledge society, far-reaching changes must take place in their basic vision and concepts. A model for these changes is suggested.