Last week I went to hear about "an innovative high school for the 21st Century." My daughter is applying to it. How does it relate to your post? It was like walking into my high school. At the time I went to the school it was "an innovative high school". I went there because it mirrored my mother's teacher training 20 years earlier, "an innovative educational training program."

Now each program was slightly different, but this school, my own high school, and my mother's training was all based on experiential, cooperative/collaborative, and project based learning. The technology was different and that was what changed some of the elements within the style of teaching.

What is even more interesting is that when we looked at my alma mater for my daughter to go to school, the years I went to school were considered the "failed experiement." When I asked what data they had collected on the long term effects of that educational system (i.e. higher ed statistics, jobs/career data for my year, surveys on perception of education to prepare for life long learning), they didn't have any. Instead, it was failed because our SAT scores were lower for the years of the "failed experiment." In other words, to really examine the Inuit system of (oral) education, a study would have to get at a deep level of understanding the system and a new way of measuring success (surviving, despite extreme conditions, for thousands of years is a good measure, but many educators might want to "test" the inuits. Could they pass the tests?).