Rethinking Education
Part of the reason susan and I want to homeschool Sam and Max lies in the way that the education system has become one of the last holdouts of the industrial era. You put raw material (your kids) in at one end and, thirteen years later, out they pop. Educated. Socialized.
Er, well, no.
In fact education is at one of its more basic crossroads. The internet is here and that, as ever, changes everything. The Tyee is exploring the issue of distributed education, that is where kids can sign up for courses online. Not seen as good news by the teachers’ unions. It is, however, potentially, great news for the actual process of learning.
Imagine for a moment that distributed education became the norm with kids taking a significant portion of their course work online. Would that abolish schools and teachers?
No. What it would do is free teachers to actually teach in small groups where learning rather than custody was the goal. If students were taking courses online with schools offering tutorials and one on on help to those students the entire system would become more flexible and far more responsive. And, I suspect, more interesting for students and teachers alike.
The tradional classroom and curriculum become less relevant as the world changes ever more quickly. While being able to read well, write fluently and actually know multiplication tables are still crucial, almost everything beyond these basics can be approached in a huge variety of ways.
Education - public, private and home based - have as their goal adults who can function well in the society. The problem is that this society has radically shifted. “Knowing” things is largely irrelevant in a world with Google and Wikipedia available on your cell phone. Instead, being able to define a problem and set about solving it is increasingly important.
Schools are going to change or simply cease to be relevant to an increasing portion of the population. Change is hard; but it will happen in any event.
Written by jay on September 8th, 2006 with
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