What is the significance of the year 2023 for Christian educators? Try, if you can, to imagine our world in 2023. Try, if you can, to imagine your role or your school in 2023. What will the world of education look like this far away date? Just putting this date on this page feels like the beginning paragraph of a science fiction story. And yet, it is upon us, we are already preparing the grad class of 2023. They are the kindergarten students that just started school this year.

Our mandate as educators is to prepare and disciple Christian students for the future they will face. We must arm them with truth and experience that emerges from our Biblical worldview and a deep relationship with Christ. The curriculum of our faith will never change, but the cultural context in which this education and discipleship happens is undergoing disruptive change in epic proportions. Digital technologies are altering everything about business, science, the arts, how we govern, how we relate, our social strata, our communication, our publications, how we study, how we plan, and how we perceive ourselves in relation to our world. It revolutionizes how we stand in, imagine and confront this world even to the affect of what is real and who we are. Yet most of our teachers are either digital outsiders to our students’ world or at best digital immigrants. Our students, on the other hand, are the first generation of natives in this digital world. They have grown up speaking the new digital languages and navigating the new digital highways. Their brains are wired differently and their pace of experience is way beyond our ability to keep up. They seemingly come into this world with a mouse in their hand.

The world is undergoing a pace of change that is unprecedented in human history. Part of what we are experiencing is the result of a communication revolution. If we look back there have been other turning points in history similar to this revolution, most notably, the invention of the movable-type printing press. You might recall the many lists published in 1999 of the most influential people in the past millennium. At the top of nearly every list was an obscure inventor who lived and died in poverty trying to find the funds to manufacture his machine: Johannes Guttenberg. This invention would eventually provide the necessary vehicle for the Protestant Reformation, the restructuring of the class-based systems of western society, fuel educational reform and scientific enterprise, change commerce and eventually bring about democratic societies. What is different about today’s revolution is the scope and pace of change.

Consider last year’s graduating class. They started school in 1997, just three years after the World Wide Web, as we know it, became available to the broader public. Google had not yet started and the Dot Com boom was only just beginning. Most of our schools still preferred the fax to email, if we even were using email in 1997. There were approximately 1 million websites available; at the end of 2009 there were over 234 million. There were about 100 million users in 1997; today that number is over 2 billion. When these 2010 graduates entered middle school the internet was going through its first major transformation as a platform for Web 2.0 applications such as MySpace and Facebook.

Effectively, this communication revolution has given fuel to Informationalism. Your students study, research or think very differently than most of your staff. Most school libraries have no relevance to our middle and high school students unless, of course, they have multiple computers and good search software. Names, dates and places don’t have the same relevance in a Google world. Knowledge must be managed not dispensed. The real skills necessary today involve discernment and informed criticism of the digital archives.

Hopefully none of this is news to you. It doesn’t matter where you are in the world - the digital age is upon us. It is a global reality that has erased borders, annihilated distance, and where your future students will be. We are in the beginning stages of monumental disruption that will either propel our Christian schools as global leaders or very quickly make us insignificant ghettos for traditionalists.
How digitally strategic is your school? In order to answer this question we have to look at the past performance of your school since 1997 when the rate of change became exponential. Then you can look at what you are doing today to make the shift for the next 13 years.

Even the technology industry leaders of 1997 were ill-prepared for the changes the internet would bring. The dot com boom is a good example of inflated ideas going crazy. Did your school go too fast or slow in how it adjusted to these changes? Did you change your curriculum? How much true online education did you incorporate into your programs? Did you even welcome it? In our school we made a critical shift in the late 1990’s to begin to emphasize and develop skills in web design and online communication. By 2003 our students were becoming proficient in internet communication, flash animation, online database management and network technologies. Many of our students have gone on to Internet related careers and our school has benefited directly. In 2004 we had a ready work force to help us launch our online school. We trained our teachers how to write online curriculum but then we hired our students to enhance and publish this curriculum on the web. We went from a campus school of 300 to a school system that now serves over 5000 students worldwide in just six years. The average age of our ten IT professionals is 24 and seven of them are alumni from our campus school. The youngest is still in grade 12.

The last thirteen years has taught us that the biggest thing we need to prepare for is change itself. Change does not have to be a threat but rather an opportunity. How equipped is your staff for this change? Are your classrooms still examples of the industrial age or are they transforming into digital work spaces where students and teachers can break out of the four walls, and rows of desks? Let me offer a glimpse. We use the slogan “Any Pace, Any Place, Any Time” to describe the new experience for our online and blended students. This has allowed us to individualize our students’ curriculum. Courses are beginning to allow for customization of learning styles and proficiency levels not available in the conventional classroom. Our online math courses are beginning to use prerequisite quizzes that test every student before they proceed to the next level of learning. If the prerequisites aren’t there, the program will send them to instruction that will give them the necessary skills before they move on. Since 2006 we have been taking our Grade 12 students to Mexico for six to eight weeks. They take net-books with them and start their mornings with English, Chemistry and Math. They spend their afternoons immersed in the local culture, touring and serving the Mexican community. Over the next 13 years students will be able to find ways to construct their schooling around their lives rather than their lives around their schooling.

In the book, “Disrupting Class,” Harvard Professor, Economist, and Futurist, Clayton Christensen shows in his research that over 50% of high school courses will be delivered online by 2019. “This substitution is happening because of the technological and economic advantages of computer-based learning, compared to the monolithic school model. Online technology provides accessibility for those who previously would not have been able to take the course. It provides convenience for a student to fit the course into his or her schedule at the time and place that is most desirable. To varying degrees it is simpler because it offers comparatively greater flexibility in the pace and learning path. And when it is software-based, it can scale with ease. Economically, it is often less expensive than the current model, even at today’s limited scale.”

Since 1997 the world around us, in nearly every genre of culture, has gone through massive disruptive change. Yet most of Education has stuck to the industrial, monolithic approach in our classrooms. This won’t last. The new generation of Christian digital natives are starting to show up as teachers in our schools. They will demand change for their students’ sake. They will lead the charge for innovation if we will listen and give them the reigns.

Like you, I want to change the world. Like you, I believe this will happen one student at a time as our young disciples leave our schools and go on to become leaders in every field and industry of life. In 2023 this will mean that they must become accustom to and proficient in digital technology. The survival of your school and more importantly the future of our Christian students depend on this.