New wine, new wineskins

"... no man putteth new wine into old wineskins; else the new wine will burst the wineskins, and be spilled, and the wineskins shall perish. But new wine must be put into new wineskins; and both are preserved. " (Luke 5:37-38)

The above passage relates to Jesus Christ and his teaching to his disciples. It's a quote that is often misquoted (used for example as "old wine into new bottles"), and is applied metaphorically within a wide range of contexts. As you will see, it's important to use 'wineskin' rather than 'bottle', to appreciate the full meaning of the quote. The meaning of the parable has been applied as a popular metaphor to show how volatile it can be at the nexus of old and new cultures or ideas. Alvin Toffler illustrates this phenomenon quite eruditely in his book Future Shock, warning that where old and new cultures clash, there will be disorientation, confusion, stress, disruption ... and there will also be winners and losers.

Today we are facing this challenge in education, across all the sectors of learning and teaching. In fact we have been facing this challenge for some time. Putting new wine into old bottles means that new practices do not sit well with old practices. New methods cannot be fully explained or justified by old theories. New approaches often break the boundaries and rules of old paradigms.

The rapid influx of new technologies into formal learning environments has created a large amount of disruption to old practices, and it has created a fair amount of stress for those practitioners who have become comfortable with old practices. There are winners and losers. Some teachers thrive, others merely survive, and some fall by the wayside. Change is never an easy thing to manage, and is never fully welcomed by any profession. And yet change is exactly what we face each and every day, especially if we are educators.

Let's deconstruct the meaning behind the parable of the new wine in old wineskins. 2000 years ago, at the time of Jesus and the disciples, wine was stored in skins - bladders that were usually fashioned from goat skin or sheep skin, to hold the liquid. Often the wine would ferment inside the skins, forcing them to expand to their limit, and eventually causing them to become brittle. Once used, the wineskins had to be discarded, otherwise the new wine would ferment, expanding them further, and causing them to burst. It was false economy not to buy new wineskins to store the new wine in. Wine was spoilt and money lost when the rubric was ignored. The power of the parable resides in the nature of the wineskin. Replacing wineskin with 'bottle' would therefore make the analogy meaningless.

The parallels between the wineskin parable and the state of the current state education system are clear to me. My interpretation is this: new societal needs require new methods of teaching; new methods of teaching need new theories - theories for the information age. For example, if new technology is used in the same way as old technology, the pedagogy 'wineskin' is likely to break. When interactive whiteboards were introduced into classrooms a decade or so ago, many teachers used them poorly, often in the same way they had used the non-interactive dry wipe whiteboards. This was usually down to ignorance due to lack of training. The old practices continued, negating the potential of the new technologies, with the result that teaching did not improve. Teachers failed to capitalise on the affordances and potential of the 'new wine' technology, because they were still limiting their practice and their imagination to the 'old wineskins' mind set of the past. Similarly, now that mobile phones are owned by just about every student in the school, it seems that the old wineskin of 'banning phones in class' needs to be discarded, and a new wineskin of 'let's see how we can harness the potential of smartphones in learning' needs to be applied. I could go on, giving other examples of how the old paradigm needs to be discarded in favour of new pedagogies and theories, but time and space prevent me.

We should know this though: The current generation of learners brings a new set of expectations that are largely unfulfilled because of the old models of teaching that still exist in schools, colleges and universities. Rigid delivery methods and siloed curricula do little to support the development of the Knowmad Society. There is evidence to suggest that learners appearing in our classes are learning in different ways to those in previous generations. And yet state-funded education has not advanced sufficiently to support these new ways. The new wine is still being contained in the old wineskins. Society also has new priorities that were unknown even a decade ago. These have arrived with such rapidity that they have caught the conservative, slow-to-change state education system off guard and ill-prepared to meet them. The old wineskins are leaking at the seams, and are about to burst. We are now preparing students for a world of work that doesn't yet exist. It follows that new theories must be applied to explain and underpin the new practices that need to emerge to meet the new expectations. We need new wineskins for new wine if we are going to save education. We need a new vision in our schools, colleges and universities to preserve what is good and great about education - a 'wineskin' that will cope with the vast, sweeping and fermenting changes that are about to engulf us.

Photo from Wikimedia Commons


New wine, new wineskins by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.