In a new book, Free Agent Nation, Daniel Pink explores how self-employed knowledge workers are increasingly transforming the American workplace as they abandon traditional jobs and reinvent themselves as freelancers, independent contractors, and proprietors of home-based businesses. He looks at how this transformation is beginning to shape schooling in an article in Reason magazine. School is a modern invention, Pink notes; throughout most of history, people learned from tutors or close relatives, and it wasn't until the early 20th century that public schools as we know them became widespread. (Not until the 1920s did attending one become compulsory.) Mass schooling based on the One Best Way of doing things was good preparation for the Organization Man economy and a highly structured workplace. It accomplished many great things. But Pink contends that that approach to schooling (which endures today, for the most part) makes less sense in the new My Size Fits Me economy. Free agency, he believes, will accelerate three movements in education: home schooling, alternatives to traditional high school, and new approaches to adult learning. In his analysis of home schooling, Pink emphasizes the "unschooling" strand that allows kids to pursue their own interests in their own way. Pink likes it because it is consonant with the animating values of free agency: having freedom, being authentic, and defining your own success. This will likely strike many as too child-centered, even irresponsible. Still, his analysis includes many fresh insights about the ways free agency is changing education. Pink notes that free agency for adults has already led to flexible schedules that make it easier for parents to home-school their own children, and it has created a huge cadre of potential teachers (e.g. not just writers and retired teachers, but also carpenters and others with special skills) who can hire themselves out as tutors to home-schoolers. Pink has less to say about alternatives to high school (which include apprenticeships, entrepreneurship, and national service) and adult learning (expect more self-teaching via the web, formal distance learning, conferences and the devaluation of traditional degrees), but his thoughts on the impact of free agency on these institutions are interesting as well. For more, see "School's Out," by Daniel Pink, Reason, October 2001. Free Agent Nation: How America's New Independent Workers Are Transforming the Way We Live, by Daniel H. Pink, was published in May 2001 by Warner Books. Its ISBN is 0446525235.
