Why Are Your Kids Still Riding the School Bus?

OPINION 

While I probably know more about Prince William County’s budget process than most, the more I learn the less I realize I actually understand.

It’s “complicated.”

When it comes to the school budget, it’s even more so. Sorting out the cost of the new high school to be built in the Coles District, the swimming pool issue, the crowded classrooms, student performance, et al, it’s a math problem that exceeds my intellectual capacity.

When I do look at how we invest to educate our children, I realize that the model is still based on sending kids to a brick and mortar school every morning so they may study using books that were out of date on the day they were printed, and work in learning the answers to pass standardized tests designed to some mean.

Why are kids taking a bus to school when technology will let them learn anywhere?

I sometimes question as to whether we are building roads that we just won’t need as knowledge workers transition from the Industrial Age model of traveling to some central location available anywhere to the Information Age model of accessing information from anywhere.

I wonder if we are building schools to house students who will be transitioning to a new model of learning that allows them to learn any time, any place, any where, continuously.

Just as machinery and the Industrial Age changed everything in the 19th and 20th centuries, technology and the Information Age are changing… well… everything in the 21st Century. The problem with change is that if is often missed by those who are educated, invested in, and part of the existing model.

I can imagine all of the “why nots” rolling through your mind after reading that last statement. There are always “why nots”. I would like to explore the “why”.

All of the knowledge of the world is now available on-line on any laptop, tablet, or smart phone anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Education is about acquiring knowledge. Perhaps its time to re-engineer the way we educate our children to get away from out of date books, over-crowded school rooms, exposure to the risk of simply going to school, and the “fixed hours” model.

I concede that our current education model really includes a “baby sitting” role allowing couples to bring in two incomes to improve their standard of living. I also offer that “babysitting” is not, at least in my opinion, a legitimate role of any school system. Perhaps returning responsibility for a child’s education to families and holding parents and guardians accountable instead of teachers might be a desirable consequence.

Of course, there will always be a role for the school system to ensure that children acquire the tools and skills necessary to enter society How we evaluate these skills might be worth revisiting. “One size fits all” standardized tests appear to be problematic and come with their own set of unintended consequences.

I’m a fan of the Khan Academy, an organization on a mission. It is a not-for-profit with the goal of changing education for the better by providing a free world-class education for anyone anywhere.

All of the Khan Academy’s resources are available to anyone. It doesn’t matter if you are a student, teacher, home school student, principal, adult returning to the classroom after 20 years, or a friendly alien just trying to get a leg up in earthly biology.

Folks like me believe the Khan Academy might just be the future of education. Watch this Ted Talk and decide for yourself. Bill Gates is interested. A number of public and private school systems are using it.

To be clear, I am a student not a teacher. I personally believe that education is a lifetime affair. Those of us in our 60’s know all too well that many of the facts we learned in grade and high school have been disproven, many assumptions have been over-turned, and our understanding of the universe continues to evolve.

To keep up, one must keep exploring. Those haunts at libraries and bookstores have been supplemented by (I’d use the word replaced, but I still like libraries and bookstores) access to all of the information in the world from my favorite chair.

I suggest that perhaps its time to explore models for education to “re-think” how we impart knowledge to our children. Perhaps 40 minute information blasts engineered toward teaching answers to standardized tests should be replaced with a more Socratic method that focuses on giving students questions, not answers. Perhaps leveraging technology to replace textbooks, encouraging homeschooling to reduce the pressure for brick and mortar buildings, and re-engineering the teaching discipline to include more Socratic methods, and perhaps take on a mentoring and consultative role for family driven learning might be worth exploring?

Education is taking “baby steps” in what is clearly a tipping point in how people acquire knowledge. While issuing laptops and tablets, thinking about using technology to re-invent and re-define how we educate our community, expanding the exploration beyond children to include everyone, should be the priority. Our education system should create a thirst for knowledge driven by an inquiring, probing mind by continually probing into the subject with more questions. Satisfying the knowledge demands of today’s fast-moving world, dynamic training requirements for the labor force, and ever accelerating understanding of science and the universe in which we live starts in Kindergarten.

It should last a lifetime.