This week, Congress voted to end a proven program that was sending achieving District of Columbia students to private schools where they were successful students. The Washington Post headline called it ‘Duplicitous and Shameful’ in a report that begins:
The waiting is finally over for some of the District of Columbia’s most ambitious school children and their parents. Democrats in Congress voted to kill the District’s Opportunity Scholarship Program, which provides 1,700 disadvantaged kids with vouchers worth up to $7,500 per year to attend a private school. . . .
In terrible schools across America, students are supposed to learn subject standards that keep going lower, and little help is usually available in learning even the less and less of government controlled expectations.
The illustration I have made and posted above indicates a new choice.
On the left, government — state and federal — decide what kids learn.
On the right, a student uses a mobile internet browser to engage unlimited knowledge.
As more and more kids put a smartphone in their pockets, they each can connect to the global knowledge commons. Students like those who were dismissed from good schools this week by the politicians have a choice to go where knowledge is selected in the open internet.
As to the knowledge available online, we should no longer let the education establishment hold the internet judgmentally at arms length. Every education energy should work to optimize the full range of study subjects online knowledge to be findable for those who teach and learn.
December 20th, 2009 at 10:56 am
I’d do it though. I’d totally be rocking my classes with smartphones over an ad-hoc network via the mobiles, a smartboard, and a class wiki.
December 20th, 2009 at 12:07 pm
bob bradley