As many of you who subscribe to my Shift Age Newsletter know, I co-authored a book with Jeff Cobb on transforming education. Shift Ed: A Call to Action for Transforming K-12 Education was published in April by Corwin Press.

Now, three months later, I am happy to report that the response from the education community has been strong and extremely positive. Two conferences that had me as the keynote speaker purchased copies of the book for all attendees, and the feedback from these educators has been so positive that I am humbled. In addition, several school superintendents have purchased copies for the principals in their districts. I am currently scheduled to present to three large education conferences this summer and fall, as word of mouth on the book is spreading across the country. As I am a futurist and not a professional educator, it is truly gratifying to hear such positive reactions from K-12 educators.

Why did a futurist write a book on transforming education? Here are some of the reasons:

-There is so much noise, finger-pointing and argument about K-12 education today that it became clear to me that there’s a lack of vision. Many people have points of view, but they are relative to practices they either criticize or support, all based on the present landscape. The present system doesn’t work, so we have to completely start over with a new vision.

-The current system is from the Agricultural Age for its school year, the Industrial Age for most of …

This new decade, 2010-2020, will be known as the Transformation Decade. The definitions of transformation are several: the act or process of transforming, the state of being transformed, change in form, appearance, nature, or character.

Don’t those definitions feel like what has been already going on in your life and the world?  Many of us have already been living in this state.  Many of us have only recently felt the impending alterations, disruptions and reorganizations that have begun.  Everything seems to be in a transforming state of shift.

We are entering the first full decade of the Shift Age, even though it has already taken root in the last 4 years.  This new age has launched incredible shift and upheaval already. This current Great Recession can only be fully understood when seen as the reorganizational recession between two ages, the Information Age and the Shift Age. It is not unlike the recessions of the 1970s, which was the decade of transition between the Industrial and Information Ages. Almost everything is in a state of shift, in a state of being transformed.

Think about all that is going on in your life and in the world.  The way we communicate has and will continue to change in form, appearance (our gadgets are vastly different than even five years ago) and character (how many of you text or tweet regularly versus even three years ago).  The shape of our relationships is changing.  The shape of how we work,  how we live and how  and in …

In the last two columns I looked back at the history and development of the American School.  I also wrote about some recent developments that both transformed a school and became the genesis of what is now an on-going process to create the 21^st century educational campus for K-12 education.  This column, and future ones, will describe what a task force of committed people in the general area of education is doing to truly face the future of education in America.

[A promise to all my readers who enjoy focused commentaries on a variety of subjects:  I will continue to write those while continuing to write about transforming education for the 21^st century, so please continue to come here the subject matter will not just be about education]

As a futurist I spend most of my time thinking, writing and speaking about the future.  I make my living through the sale of the Shift Age Trend Report, my book The Shift Age, and primarily speaking engagements.  I truly believe that my highest value is to be a catalyst to get people to think about the future and to hopefully at times facilitate a conversation about the future.  Now, in addition to this activity I find myself participating in actually creating one of the most important elements of the future; the 21^st century American school.

I say American because the task force of which I am a part is focused on the creation of new forms of K-12 education in this country.  That …

We are ten years into the 21^st century.  We are entering the Shift Age.  We all have experienced rapid and almost unbelievable change in our lifetimes.  We sense even more change in the years ahead.  Everywhere we look, we see institutions that we grew up with starting to crumble before our eyes yet their replacements are not yet fully discernable. This is a time of great transformation.

In the U.S. many of our institutions were created in the first part of the 20^th century.  It is now time to take them, one by one and transform them for the 21^st century.  Health care, transportation systems, infrastructure and the environmental caring for our beautiful land all must be looked at through the lens of this new century.  Equal to, if not of greater importance to all of these is education, particularly the K-12 stage of education.

The history of K-12 education in the U.S. is largely mapped with the ages we have experienced.  During the first century of our country we were basically an Agricultural Age country with the vast majority living in small towns and deriving wealth from the land.  The single room school house of Abraham Lincoln  was the educational system of the day.  The town was small so kids of all ages went to the same one room school usually with a single teacher moving from student to student.  The school day and the school year were scheduled to fit the rhythms of agricultural life.  The school day ended in …