Don't get me wrong, Harlold: I think it's a thought-provoking post, and I'm glad you published it. One of the strengths of blogging is the ability to put out your thoughts and get feedback. And you do a good job of clarifying your ideas in your comment, I think.

I'm still unconvinced, though, that the historical shift you identify actually took place. I'm woefully underinformed about the history of American schooling, so I'd be more than happy to be corrected, though.

I haven' t seen any mention of exactly how industrial schools were meant to have "focus[ed] on an enforced sense of responsibility," beyond things like "students are told what is important and that they will be tested on it, " and the observation that students were penalized for turning in late work. I guess I still can't understand how these were innovations of industrial schools. Preindustrial schools didn't do this?

It seems to me that your description of industrial-age schooling, "students are responsible for doing their work but what work has to be done comes from an Authority," would apply quite nicely to 19th-century American schools; indeed, it would seem to describe quite a large proportion of formal schooling from all sorts of times and places, as well.

My point here isn't to quibble; rather it's to suggest that the desire to enforce, and perhaps instill, personal responsibility (particularly in the puzzlingly narrow Nine Shift formulation, which seems to boil down to "finishing your tasks on time) seems to extend well before the 20th Century. If that's true, than we may have less reason to suspect teaching responsibility won't extend beyond the 20th Century, as well.

But of course, I understand that this comparison with history isn't your whole point; after all, even if responsibility had always been the main concern of education, it would be possible for that to be changing now. I'd suggest, though, that quite apart from any appeal to historical trends such a change strikes my as unlikely.

It's not that I see no changes for the workplace Of The Future. Although I still suspect that the importance of the "new economy" is being overrated (yes, we're adding knowledge jobs--at about the same speed we're adding service jobs), I can see how certain types of work will certainly change. As I mentioned earlier, I can easily see a change in what what we mean by work..."why aren't you at your desk?" could conceivably become a thing of the past in some fields . But I think that the "meet your deadlines" type of responsibility currently encouraged by schools is likely to become more important in an economy where people don't have a boss making sure they're working every minute. Doesn't more independence requires more responsibility?