Back to the future of school
“No more classes, no more books. No more teacher’s dirty looks…”
Before we begin, full disclosure: Growing up, I never cared much for school. It started too early; had too many rules; got in the way of doing more interesting stuff; and I really hated playing kickball. Graduating into adulthood hasn’t greatly altered those perceptions.
Now I’ll gratefully acknowledge that my time in school did result in my acquisition of a number of critical life skills and considerable lasting knowledge. I learned to read and mastered basic math concepts and operations. I learned to write a simple declarative sentence and string a number of them together to express a reasonably coherent rational thought. I was imparted an essential understanding of the principles and duties of citizenship in a constitutional republic and grounded in the general outlines of natural science and human history. I also learned to touch-type on a 20-pound Olivetti under the tutelage of the wrestling coach who assured our attention to his instruction by the assignment of a dozen fingertip pushups for infractions of classroom decorum. This skill has served me well right through this very moment.
Still, school started too early, had too many rules, and interfered with a of of really interesting stuff. And in the 56 years since I left elementary school I have yet to play a single inning of kickball.
But at the time, about the only practical way to pass along academic knowledge from generation to generation was to herd the community’s kids together in a classroom, add a teacher and textbooks and hope for the best. For most kids, it worked reasonably well; for others, not so much.
So let’s skip ahead six decades or so to a networked world where interactive media, individualized self-paced online instruction, and virtual classrooms offer means and methods and means of conveying information simply nonexistent only a very few years ago. A world where putting warm bodies together in a single enclosed space is often a less effective, less efficient, and less appropriate means of teaching and learning than the options offered by interactive digital technology. A world where a teacher and students in a classroom is an option, not a necessity for academic learning to take place.
Which raises the question, in 2020 and going forward, what are schools for? A particularly pointed question in the context of a still spreading pandemic and the rapidly approaching start to the traditional school year.
The knee jerk answer, of course, is “to educate kids.” But as anyone who’s been involved with an elementary school classroom will attest, for much of the year a crowded schoolroom is a virtual petri dish for a host of pathogens, and with the coming of corona, one more highly contagions virus will be added to that toxic stew. In the past, if kids were to continue their formal education keeping schools open would have been the only option. But as the school shutdown last spring demonstrated, tech can allow kids to continue to learn when contagion makes holding classes a hazard to community health.
Sixty years ago, closing school in the face of a pandemic would have been a family inconvenience, not an economic crisis. Stay-at-home moms were the rule in most families with school-age children, and for those where mom did hold down a full-time job, there were plenty of neighboring families where the youngsters could be looked after while mom was at work. That’s no longer the case. For many families, school is not just where Junior learns the ABCs, it’s where breakfast and lunch are served and, when class is dismissed for the day, the kids are kept occupied until mom and dad are off the job. Even if Junior can Zoom into class when on-site school is canceled, a cop, a nurse, a carpenter or trucker can’t very well keep an eye on the kids and work from home.
It’s said, never let a good crisis go to waste, and if COVID isn’t a crisis, we’ve never faced one. This one’s teaching us that it’s not our kids who really need traditional schools in order to learn, but that employers need them so parents can go to work.
That’s a reality that needs some rethinking.