The Passion Economy

Over the last few weeks I’ve heard a number of social entrepreneurs advocate for less linear approaches to education.  Many of these arguments are based on the premise that academic institutions as we know them are not dynamic enough to serve our changing needs as students as we discover the world, our abilities, and our interests.  As Sir Ken Robinson (author, speaker and advisor on education) put it in one of TED’s most widely emailed videos:

[There are a number of things that we’re enthralled to in education as it currently stands]. One of them is the idea of linearity, that it starts here, and you go through a track, and if you do everything right, you will end up set for the rest of your life. Everybody who’s spoken at TED has told us implicitly, or sometimes explicitly, a different story, that life is not linear, it’s organic. We create our lives symbiotically as we explore our talents in relation to the circumstances they help to create for us. But you know, we have become obsessed with this linear narrative. And probably the pinnacle for education is getting into college. I think we are obsessed with getting people to college, certain sorts of college. I don’t mean you shouldn’t go to college, but not everybody needs to go, and not everybody needs to go now. Maybe they go later, not right away.

Where I’ve heard less discussion is on what a non-linear approach to education looks like.  What are the values that it’s based on? What are the grounding principles?  And how do you track your progress? Also, is it possible for an academic institution to be the purveyor of non-linear education?

A couple of recently founded alternative MBA programs would argue yes to that last question.  Take the KaosPilot School, a Denmark-based alternative MBA program whose mission is “to create positive societal change through personal growth and enterprise.”  Unlike traditional MBA programs, the KaosPilot School has no classes or subjects.  Instead, the school year is divided into several phases where students focus on one subject for a period of time.

Another example is Johns Hopkins’s recently-founded Carey Business School.  It takes the opposite approach of Kaos in that 80% of the curriculum is core, however its classes are pretty radical, such as a human expression module taught by a drama professor.  Says, Dean Yash Gupta in an interview in Fortune: “I believe learning is not about looking alike,” Gupta says. “If you really want to believe in a new kind of program then all experiences must come to play.”

The long term success of alumni from alternative programs remains to be seen, however the conversation around the need for such programs seems to be getting louder and louder.