Historically, when the nation has a cold, schools sneeze. Examples are legion. When the Soviet Union launched the satellite Sputnik in 1957, President Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act (1958) aimed at getting better math and science teachers National problems of drug and alcohol abuse and tobacco smoking has led to states mandating courses to teach children and youth about the dangers of all of these substances. The Civil Rights movement in the 1950′s and 1960s’s spilled over the schools across the nation. Christian groups have pressured school boards to have prayer in schools, teach creationism, and vouchers (Educational Policy-2004-Lugg-169-87). The U.S. has competed economically with European and Asian countries for markets in the 1890s and since the 1980s. Each time that has occurred, business leaders turned to the schools to produce skilled graduates then for industrial jobs and now for an information-based economy.

This vulnerability to political stakeholders is very clear now with business and civic leaders pushing schools to be more efficient and effective in competing with China, Japan, and Germany.

In big cities where the problem of bad schooling is worst, results-driven reformers want mayors to take over schools and appoint their own superintendents, individuals who will accept no excuses from teachers and principals, will fight union rules, raise test scores, and create more charter schools.

More importantly the sum of all these technologies form an interacting whole much like a technological ecosystem. I call this super system of codependent inventions the technium. Like life itself, this whole system exhibits behavior that its parts do not. Just as we cannot detect any “hiveness” in an individual honeybee (only in the total system of the hive), we cannot see the behavior of the technium in a lone iPhone, knife, or refrigerator. The true influence of technology is felt in its whole system.

The patterns by which living organisms mutate and diversify in evolution so resembles the way technological varieties transform over time, that we can think of the technium as the “seventh kingdom of life.” Technology is an extension and acceleration of the same forces of evolution that crafted the other six kingdoms of life.

I would suggest that most of the problems in the world tomorrow will be caused by technologies that we are still inventing today.

It takes time to gather the group together (and depending on the issue, this could be a large group). It takes a great deal of effort to create a mechanism in which the individuals are able to participate in meaningful dialogue. Sincerely listening to the stakeholders, coming up with common language and reference points to determine the current state of affairs, the desired state, and benchmarks to determine progress towards the ideal requires an open mind and genuine curiosity. Valuing where people are coming from and harmonizing this with a destination where they may be less comfortable going to takes a special set of skills. Smoothing over the inevitable bumps in the process involves copious amounts of patience and composure. Staying the course and slowing the process down when the stakeholders may wish to charge ahead takes perseverance. Following up to ensure that everyone is satisfied that they have been heard and taking the time to celebrate successes requires a commitment to the entire process.

We are becoming people of the screen instead of people of the book.