Are Schools Learning Organizations?
"Life must be lived forward, but it can be understood only backward.”
Kierkegaard
In our last lesson, the focus was on the need for systemic transformation to produce the kind of learning students need to meet the challenges of the future and on beginning to understand the components of the current traditional organization as they emerged in the twentieth century. In this lesson, the focus is on two models of organization: the traditional bureaucratic model and an emerging conceptualization of the learning organization.
As you consider the development of the bureaucratic model and its implications for practice, it is important to understand that the arguments being made for transformation acknowledge that there is the necessity for structure, for policies, for procedures, and for the presence of the six social systems within an organization. As you will see, the significant difference is in how those systems operate within a learning organization and in a bureaucracy.