Future kids will learn from the internet via mobile devices wherever they are: at home, on the bus, on the beach, at the workplace, and yes, perhaps at school. For 21st century learning to move ahead, we have to get it clear in our minds that having a place where children spend all day is not the same thing as learning.
As a long-time high school debate coach, I judge this contention by Michael Horn to be a red herring:
“It seems obvious to me that for a variety of reasons, roughly 90-plus percent of students (that number is derived from some projections we ran when we were researching the book) could never take part in a fully virtual school program because of family structures and associated economic realities and the like, which is why hybrid-learning of various sorts will ultimately be so important to the future of education. Having a physical place for most students to go will always be important.”
Sure, kids need a place to spend the day. In the future, though, that place is highly unlikely to be where very many of them can find the best material to learn for science, history, math, technologies — and even the 3Rs, like this sampling of math study pages that go far beyond standards teaching in the grade trap of each individual student.
Forgive me if I use the debater’s tool of narrowing the contention I challenge. I realize that in the excellent book Horn co-authors, Disrupting Class, traditional education practices are helpfully called into question. Yet I would go farther than trying to repair schools as the platform of education. Radically, I know, my suggestion is that the individual student connection to the internet must become the platform for learning. After that, it will be time to figure out what use places we require our children to spend most of the days of twelve of their years may have.
July 6th, 2009 at 9:02 am
July 6th, 2009 at 9:12 am
I would like to go down the trail that starts with this question: Now that learning is centered in the internet and accessed personally by individual students, what can we add to complement that? What we now call schools might be eliminated as an answer by other complements: apprenticeships, daytime centers for sports and arts, etc. You and I seem to think alike on this, and I appreciated this opportunity to sharpen some language.
July 7th, 2009 at 12:37 am