Lyndon Furst's
A Different Perspective
"The Future of School"
POSTED 8/17/09
The Future of School
It seems that I have been in school all my life, either as a student or as a teacher. Things are different in school nowadays. My first experience some 65 years ago is a little vague but I do remember a few things. The teachers all seemed like giants and they were not so nice and sweet as they are now. My second grade teacher enforced discipline by spanking our hands with a ruler when we misbehaved. I still have thick skin as a reminder of the wages of sin. Teachers don’t do such things nowadays.
Other things are different too. I remember our desks being fixed to the floor so they could not be moved. They were all in straight rows with the teacher’s desk in the front of the room. And that’s where the teacher spent most of the day, in front of the room giving us information as well as instructions in how to do our assignments. In the event the teacher moved from the front it meant somebody was misbehaving and would soon feel swift punishment from that ubiquitous ruler. We were not allowed to talk to each other and certainly not allowed to help each other with our school work. That was considered cheating. If we needed help we would raise our hand and quietly wait for the teacher to call us up to her desk.
We were only allowed to get out of our desks with the teachers permission. I never quite got the hang of the "permission" thing, which maybe explains my calloused hands. My fourth grade teacher was quite progressive for her day. She actually differentiated instruction, having three different groups based on ability. There were Bluebirds who were the top of the class, while most of the kids were in the Robins. A few of us were relegated to the Sparrows where we struggled along doing our best to make the teacher happy.
Things are a bit different now where schools make accommodation to a variety of learning styles. Kids aren’t rigidly kept on the same pace in every class. Teachers are particularly adept at giving individual help. And students in modern classrooms have much more flexibility. They’re actually allowed to move around the class during study time and get help from the other students. Sometimes they are assigned to work together in groups on special projects.
While there have been a lot of changes in schooling during my lifetime, there are many more to come. Schools of the future will be quite different. Teachers will not be primarily dispensers of information; rather they will be more like guides as students search for information on their own. Learning will be much more self-directed with students actually prescribing their own curriculum at times. Flexibility in schooling will be taken to an extreme. Self-initiated learning will be very common.
Home schooling, which is looked down upon by many school people today, will in the future be viewed as a normal alternative educational process. In fact the animosity between home schools, private schools, and public schools will mostly disappear with all three forms of education operating together for the benefit of student learners. Some students will do their studies primarily at home while still enrolled in the public school. Computerized instruction will make such a thing possible. Students will be allowed to advance in any individual subject as fast as they want; they will not be held back by rigid graded curriculum. A student in fifth grade might be studying high school algebra even though he’s only at the fourth grade level in reading and social studies. That’s what education will be in the future.
Oops! That last sentence is incorrect. That’s not what education will be in the future. What I have described is what education is right now. Yes, all these things are happening in our rural community here in Southwest Michigan. Both our public schools and our local university have entire courses of study that can be obtained online. There is no need for a student to actually be present in the classroom. Home schooled students are able to get educational services from the public schools right in their own homes. The animosity between the two types of schooling is rapidly fading away.. Schools both public and private are much more flexible in how they deliver curriculum to their students.
From my perspective, schooling today has much more exciting prospects than it did in my day. Students seem to be at the center of the learning process with teachers playing more the role of a "guide on the side" rather than a "sage on the stage." Students must assume much more responsibility for their education than they have in the past. And that’s the future of schooling. No scratch that: that’s the present of schooling.