The Advanced Class
In Eighth Grade the local school system divided us into three tracks. I was assessed as College Bound and I never thought for one second what it would feel like to be thirteen and told I was on the Middle or Lowest Track.
Cultural divides begin when systems divide us. Today’s politicians are just exploiting resentments that began as we were being shaped into conforming adolescents and assigned to different futures.
I don’t remember consciously feeling like I was better than anyone else, but I must have at a deep unconscious level. I had been selected as Advanced and I also must have assumed that 2/3 of my class wasn’t as Advanced as me.
That’s probably why I’ve felt that I just know better than most people for most of my life. Probably why people like me feel it’s natural that we would know the right way to think and talk.
Almost all of my friends in High School were also in the Advanced Class. Then I went to a Top-Ranked College where everyone had been in the Advanced Class.
I grew up in an Advanced Class silo.
During my so-called career, all of my jobs required thinking and talking like an Advanced Class person, with titles like — Writer, Planning Director, Producer, General Manager, Executive Director
I told other people how to think and talk for most of my working life. People who weren’t in the Advanced Class.
In 1998, when I was fifty, my wife and I broke out of the silo, left our Advanced Class friends and moved to Logan, Utah. A few years later I had a much deeper understanding of Learning, partly through my doctoral program at Utah State University and partly by living in a place where very few other people thought or talked anything like me.
The Internet was just emerging and suggesting big changes ahead in Education, away from transmitting knowledge to different Tracks of students and toward guided exploration for everybody. I saw the most important thing people learn from Tracks is the one they’re supposed to stick to.
Big hierarchies with lots of tracks organized the world for a long time, until recently, about twenty years ago, when people could start seeing everything and tell their friends. The stories people from the Advanced Class at the top of the hierarchy broadcast to keep everyone peacefully in their Track stopped working.
We need new stories in new media that don’t divide us into Tracks, that draw us into one global classroom with plenty of Breakout Rooms. The stories are there. We need to tell them now.