Distance at John and Abigail Adams Academy

Distance learning unlocks solutions to today’s educational problems

“Bill Gates finally laid it on the line: ‘America’s high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don’t mean that our high schools are broken, flawed, and underfunded. . . . By obsolete, I mean that our high schools–even when they’re working exactly as designed–cannot teach our kids what they need to know today. . . . This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.’ ”1    The John and Abigail Adams Mentoring suggests that distance learning can provide a critical answer to replacing antiquated assembly-line education.

The Information Age
The information age has not just opened the flood gates of information but has also released a host of tools empowering students to systematically share themselves with the world. This change increases the educational load for both educators and students. Though this can seem daunting, people have a responsibility to use the age of information wisely. So what does all of this mean? Understanding education in the Information Age can be simple and exciting; each student gets to be (become) more than any previous people in history have been. Let’s step back a little and look at the industrial age.

The Industrial Age
In nearly 200 years the industrial age has produced more life improvements than the previous 6000 years of history. The industrial business machine requires less man power with greater output. Industrial production requires the standardization of parts for both machines and labor.
This standardizing or labor has produced standardized and compartmentalized education.

Standardization is making everything doable even “For Dummies”. This is the promise of our new day launched by the industrial revolution, anyone can be educated and anyone can have a high standard of living and be liberated.

Calculation, processing of information and production required by industry are today performed more and more often by computers and robots. Now a growing number of the populace needs a new kind of education, the kind of education that computers and robots cannot replace. It is the education which empowers a person with qualities of liberty, of full agreement, of inspiration, of listening and of understanding ––a Liberal Arts Education.

Liberal Arts
The term “liberal arts” has come to mean studies that are intended to provide general knowledge and intellectual skills, rather than more specialized occupational or professional skills.

The scope of the liberal arts has often emphasized the education of elites in the classics; but, with the rise of science and humanities during the Age of Enlightenment, the scope and meaning of “liberal arts” expanded to include them. Still excluded from the liberal arts are topics that are specific to particular occupations, such as agriculture, business, dentistry, engineering, medicine, pedagogy (school-teaching), and pharmacy.

Historically the seven liberal arts comprised two groups of studies: the trivium and the quadrivium. Studies in the trivium involved grammar, logic, and rhetoric; and studies in the quadrivium involved arithmetic, music, geometry, and astronomy. These liberal arts made up the core curriculum of the medieval universities. The term liberal in liberal arts is from the Latin word ‘liberalis’, meaning “appropriate for free men” (social or political elites), and they were contrasted with the servile arts. The liberal arts thus initially represented the kinds of skills and general knowledge needed by the elite echelon of society, whereas the servile arts represented specialized tradesman skills and knowledge needed by persons who were employed by the elite.

Liberal Arts Liberated
The liberal arts have long been physically bound by the classroom. The information age has produced solutions to communication needs. The liberal arts are all about communication and often with people outside the classroom. So, in a sense, the liberal arts have been liberated by today’s environment.

Yesterday’s Classroom
For example, students in yesterday’s classrooms could learn everything they needed with-in the 4 walls of the classroom and then go into the workforce and apply it. Today information is changing so rapidly that the information is outdated before the students get through their 2nd year of college. 54% of the incoming workforce will leave their first job within a year and can be expected to change careers 14 times in their lifetime. Today, students and educators needed to think beyond jobs, beyond careers and beyond the 4 walls of the classroom.

Today’s Answer
Students need a greater level of initiative and desire to plunge through the increase in information, but they also need experience with relationships and teamwork to overcome obstacles and combine information into easy to use and comprehensible formats. There is a heightened need to broadly apply information and technology while it is applicable and stay with the cutting edge.  Students must learn and apply with people that are out there operating as professionals on the cutting edge, applying and developing new ideas.

In order to make dialogue-time and instruction worthwhile for experts, students must do three things:
1: Broaden knowledge base
2: Increase epiphany rate
3: Master relationship skills

The liberal arts have not just been liberated by innovation but by need. When the need of a thing increases, its value also increases as well as its reason for being. The liberal arts like factories have been constricted by elitism and the 4 walls of the classroom. Like the factories of yesterday the “liberal arts” are being liberated today.

The Ideal and likely Impossible Classroom Experience
The ideal classroom may only be inadequately described theoretically. Each student would listen to the others and fully understand. Each student would project so that everyone was transformed from their presence alone. The momentum would increase between classes and the group would prepare for a whole new transformation each time they met.

Ideally there would be peace and order, everyone would be speaking at the same time and be fully understood by everyone else. All would learn and internalize everything at their highest potential and be able to do more the next time.

Each student would leave the mental and emotional experience tired. Many would have healthy headaches, just as if they had been resistance training with an experienced trainer at a gym, only with mental exercises and with multiple trainers (students).

True Story:
An Experience with Independent Thinkers
I began college at a small college in the mountains of Southern Utah now George Wythe University. Through unexpected chance, I found myself at a GWU steering committee meeting early in my college years; the school was only seven years old. This was a meeting which included powerful business men from all over the Western United States, gathered for the purpose of assisting the college as they transitioned into a new phase. There were about twenty men and women present most of which were 25-40 years in age. Each of the men had proven themselves and, as I found out shortly, they were all powerful leaders at critical junctures of the meeting.

I witnessed a phenomenon which, while often occurring in big-business executive rooms, I believe occurs very seldom in the classroom. Everyone present had his own unique way of contributing, some were scribbling madly on yellow legal pads, others were pacing the room rapidly; I suppose it activated their brains. Still others left the room periodically to process ideas or to discuss an idea with a colleague. This continued for hours only interrupted for short moments by the school’s founder to interject vision. I watched as a man went into the corner and repeatedly threw a ball against the wall, others were just sitting there in thought, elbows on the table, looking down with their heads resting in their hands.

The air was rigid with excitement. One after another they would go to the front of the room and fill the board with ideas about the value of a rolodex or explain a trend. Toward the end of the day we were short on time, I was the secretary scribbling notes as fast as I could, and there seemed to be limitless loose ends and only fifteen minutes left. Suddenly a Franklin Covey associate, stepped forward, made several categories on the recently cleaned board. Everyone was given an assignment and the meeting came to a close.

They actually listened to each other without becoming dependent. This kicked off my liberal arts education and the experience has become an example to me of what I consider an ideal classroom experience. I can now imagine youth who are comfortable with themselves, contributing to the class and moving together in common discovery; respecting each other and moving toward solutions to real inquiry and real concerns about other students, and their communities and the world.

JAAA makes it doable and fun
These men were experienced; they could sort out relevant information when people were all talking at once. They already had the seasoned confidence and assertiveness required to interject at the right time with the right input. They knew how to listen and recognized when they needed help. Every dialogue included multiple variables and they calculated efficiently.

How do you replicate that kind of experience with youth when youth don’t generally have the confidence, experience or the belief it takes to contribute at that level. At JAAA students don’t have the constricting 4 walls of the class room or its 30 dependent but popular students expecting an industrial download. Step by step they will learn to listen as consultants and to speak all at once through online forums; they will practice their initiative through “relationship education” and recieve a quality education.

Summary
Today we are in need of a new, liberated “liberal arts”. Students are now capable of learning more and applying what they learn to their whole selves in real-time through relationships and with new technologies. The arts of living can be combined with the arts of liberty as the JAAA mission statement suggests.

We know now that freedom works for all men including elites. We know that all men can experience ‘liberalis’ and receive the education “appropriate for free men”. This then includes both the liberal and “servile arts”. John Adams said: “I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth.” This grand scene continues today and with liberated educational models we can emancipate the slavish part of mankind even further yet. Come take a step into the Academy of John and Abigail, come learn about the school that connects the past and the future in an incomparable solution for today.

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1 Alvin and Heidi Toffler. 2006. Revolutionary Wealth. Doubleday. 361.