Humanizing the Education Machine

“Our current systems of education were designed to meet the challenges of the industrial revolution. What sort of education do our children need now to meet the radically different challenges of the twenty-first century? Humanizing the Education Machine explores this dilemma through the numerous voices of educators, community leaders, and parents. It is not just a call to action. It offers a plan of action for what education needs to become to engage our children in the present and prepare them properly for a future that none of us can predict. There can hardly be a more important conversation.”

– Sir Ken Robinson, Educator and Author of Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That's Transforming Education

“Our work at the Clayton Christensen Institute focuses on elevating the conversation and positive potential of disruptive innovation to transform our struggling education system. Humanizing the Education Machine captures the potential with a combination of in-depth research and compelling stories. Read it to further your vision of how you can play a role in this transformation.”

– Michael Horn, coauthor of Disrupting Class and Blended, and cofounder of the Clayton Christensen Institute

“The central issue for education in the twenty-first century is to keep the role of technology in perspective while discovering human solutions to uniquely human problems. Humanizing the Education Machine is a valuable contribution to this key topic that can be appreciated by administrators, teachers, and parents.”

– Lou Cozolino, author of Attachment-Based Teaching and professor at the Graduate School of Education and Psychology at Pepperdine University

“For decades we have known that our education system is failing our students, teachers, parents, and communities. Now a new kind of education is developing for the connected twenty-first century – and it's kid-centered. How we got here, how we go forward, and what we should expect from our schools is explored in detail, using smart research and lively writing. I was caught up in the text; you will be, too.”

– Susan S. Szenasy, publisher and editor-in-chief, Metropolis

“More than anything else in education, we need a culture shift. We need to shift from trying to create a one-size-fits-all solution to a culture of continuous innovation and iteration across the classroom, school, and district levels. We must think about the future our students face and ask new questions. The research, stories, and insights in Rex Miller's Humanizing the Education Machine gives educational leaders the new questions. It also provides a new framework for that cultural shift.”

– Jaime Casap, Google Education Evangelist, Google

“This is one audacious book. In fact, Miller makes the case that education is in such crisis that the only appropriate response is to swing for the fences. Somehow it is personal, global, nuanced, outrageous, and perfectly logical. It is a book for the ages, and it presents the first way out of our current circumstances that makes so much sense. It's a must-read.”

– Steve Peifer, recipient of the 2007 CNN Hero Award, the 2007 Yale Counseling Award, the 2010 Excellence in Education Award from the National Association for College Admissions Counseling, and the 2013 NACCAP Guidance Professional of the Year

“Read this book carefully, for as goes K–12, so goes the nation. Each quarter, I ask my college students if they enjoy their classes. They look at me as if it's a trick question. Truthfully, no, they tell me; most of them do not. They find most classes stifling, rigid, instructor-centric, and dull. Then I ask them if they love learning new things. Yes, they do! This book helps us understand how schools fell off the exciting, engaging, transformative path of teaching and learning new things and how we can change that. Read it carefully – learn new things.”

– Colleen Carmean, PhD, Assistant Chancellor, University of Washington Tacoma

“Rex Miller has the rare capacity to go deeply into systems, mine for the wisdom, creativity, and innovation, and then translate his findings for the rest of us to be inspired and welcoming of change. This book is an important part of a larger sea change that has the capacity to reinvigorate education by putting relationships, well-being, and learning back at the center.”

– Michelle Kinder, executive director of the Momentous Institute, Oak Cliff, Texas

“For his latest book, Rex Miller has marshaled a distinguished group of professionals to join him in examining successful models of educational innovation around the country. The result? Humanizing the Education Machine offers a remarkable and readable wealth of actionable insight. It is a veritable road map to a potential future golden age in education. That future is not inevitable, but this book certainly places it within our grasp.”

– Eric Hamilton, professor of education, Pepperdine University

“This is not the usual techno-utopian vision of new technology and innovative corporations stepping in to fix the education system. Rex Miller and his MindShift team start from a deep and profoundly human vision of learning as a rich and messy organic process of growth and discovery that no single and simple technology can provide. But new technologies should not be ignored either. Rex Miller and his team have spent the past two years investigating the shining examples that can give us a glimpse of a better, more human future for learning. Their futuristic visions may not be the future we will live, but the subtlety and richness of these visions allow us all to imagine great questions we have never asked before, and great questions is where learning begins.”