By Beverly Creamer
Advertiser Education Writer

The new P-20 seamless education system envisioned for Hawai'i, from preschool through postgraduate college studies and into lifelong learning, is not without precedent.

For a number of years there's been a national movement called P-16 that has growing support throughout the country and has already been embraced by 25 states.

Both of these concepts are based on the same foundation — that children need strong preparation at each level of learning in order to prepare themselves for the next level, with all parts of the system working together to provide it.

The P-16 movement talks about providing a good beginning, with universal access to preschool education. It also speaks of using individualized learning plans beginning in the middle years in order to teach to each student's strengths. These plans would incorporate not just academic progress but also social and psychological development.

But it ends when college ends — with a four-year undergraduate education.

By contrast, Hawai'i's new initiative, embraced by the Good Beginnings Alliance, the Department of Education and the University of Hawai'i system, takes the ideas even further.

Establishing a P-20 ideal not only embraces an undergraduate college degree, but also sets up a framework to allow easy access to education at any point in an individual's life path.

And it is an attempt to change the way Hawai'i's three educational units view the individual, not in segments of time, but as a whole — and as someone who moves through life learning, adapting and wanting to be educated.

It sets up an education system that will be flexible and adaptive to meet the needs of our changing world — needs that we may not even have imagined.

It takes into account the new world we live in with its rapidly changing technology, and the inevitability that people will change jobs and careers multiple times in their lives.

It also sets up a system of easy accessibility to education, as well as high expectation.

No longer will it seem impossible to go back to school at age 35 or 40, in the midst of raising young children.

No more will it seem an insurmountable task to change careers at age 45.

Education throughout the lifespan will become a matter of course. Something that is available to anyone. At any time.

Such changes will, in effect, finally fit into the lives that people are already leading, lives that incorporate jobs and school and raising families — all in the same time frame.

This model can also incorporate the very early years, and the time before a child is born. It can be argued that the success of an individual also begins with good prenatal care, and positive nurturing both in the home and beyond it.

None of this will be easy to accomplish, of course. And the leaders of Hawai'i's education systems — Evan Dobelle at the University of Hawai'i, Pat Hamamoto at the Department of Education and Elisabeth Chun at the Good Beginnings Alliance — understand that.

But they have begun the work of moving in a united direction.

And, as they do, our state will set a new model for the nation, a model that goes beyond P-16. A model for something even better.

Reach Beverly Creamer at bcreamer@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8013.