This article is worth reading by Kylie Smith
Our current models are as dusty and broken. They’re too expensive, they’re too rigid, they don’t meet the needs of the students and they waste massive amounts of time.
We created an assembly-line system meant to churn out assembly-line workers, writes law professor Glenn Reynolds in his book “The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself” (Encounter Books). The bell rings, you move to where the schedule puts you, the bell rings again, you do as you’re told. Everyone gets processed in the same way, and at the end of the line you emerge with a certificate of quality.
“How many 19th century business models do you see flourishing, here in the 21st?” asks Reynolds.
Education must now do more than create factory workers, yet it remains one of the few areas of life almost untouched by technology (apart from dopey ideas to give iPads to kids). Why can’t school be as individually tailored to your needs as your computer’s desktop? And why, in an age in which more and more luxuries become affordable, does schooling keep getting more expensive (outpacing even the growth of health-care spending) even as test scores remain roughly flat?
New solutions are already here. Reynolds points out that his teen daughter calculated that, of every eight hours spent in school, only about 2¹/2 was actually spent learning, with the rest being wasted on DARE lectures and other nonacademic activities. She enrolled in an online high school, graduated at 16 and was accepted at a selective university. Meanwhile, the flexibility of her schedule allowed her to hold down a good job — researching and writing for programs shown on the Biography Channel and A&E.
Spending less time with fellow teens and more with adults is likely to be an instructive process. We think of teenagers as products of biology — they act that way because of their raging hormones — but really they’re a social construct. Teens spend bored years sheltered from reality (in California, you can’t even get a paper route until you’re 18) and herded together with others the same age. Popularity with peers may depend on engaging in risky behaviors like drug-taking and early sex.
A hundred years ago, we didn’t have “teenagers” — we had young adults and apprentices who were expected to produce, not just consume, and contributed a third of family income. Young people mostly were surrounded by adults and learned adult values and habits like punctuality and responsibility.
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