The Schools of Tomorrow
July 8, 2009
One notable aspect of the schools of tomorrow will be the absence of a formal teacher/professor relationship. Students will learn from each other in collaborative ventures.
Hitherto, the teacher, instructor, professor has been seen as the source of knowledge and the old learning model assumed that he or she transmitted knowledge to passive, empty minds. While at the collegiate level, professors, if genuinely concerned about how their students process information, engage their students by moderating class discussions (the Dewey model of participative learning), the schools of tomorrow will have no need for professors to moderate class discussions or dialogue. The students will initiate the questions and determine relevance of the material and the questions posed, not the professor or mentor.
The student will not be required to submit an essay or article as the sole author: collaborative writing will be encouraged. This already occurs in the scientific disciplines at the highest levels of research. Unfortunately in the human disciplines, instructors still require single author papers from their students. There are no reasonable objections to permitting student collaboration with others: as long as the appropriate acknowledgments are made by the student. The only objection to this is tradition and the personal predilections of the teacher which always are and always have been impediments to knowledge.
The existence of the teacher also presupposes a direction of learning, mostly established by a syllabus. A syllabus will become unnecessary in the schools of tomorrow: many professors or teachers already either fail to abide by the terms they set forth in the syllabus (e.g., by making changes to it throughout the term) or fail to view the syllabus as a contract with the student. The students will determine their own trajectory of learning through collaboration and not have such a trajectory imposed upon them by a solitary undemocratic despot.
University instructors in the human disciplines often favor book knowledge over practical knowledge. They say the Great Texts teach critical thinking and critical thinking is obviously a very useful tool. But we must be careful here suggesting a sole source from which critical thinking emerges. Why must knowing how the parts of a machine fit together fail to entail critical thinking ability as opposed to knowing about the inner workings of the Great Texts? Or why must knowing how to write and edit a computer program be necessarily inferior to knowing how to decode a Greek or Roman classic? The schools of tomorrow will view such reasoning as literary fetishism. If we are to accept the postmodern system of categories, a machine is also a text that can be read, decoded, and analyzed. The literary text—the novel, poem, epistula, etc—will be viewed by the schools of tomorrow as equal to the machine, natural object, or any type of artificial construction. The schools of tomorrow will not view the literary text as some “special or unique creation of rationality or genius.”
The internet will eventually replace the library as the storehouse of data once servers holding the data can be backed up electronically and secured against attacks. Satellite, wireless internet will become universal. This is not only environmentally friendly (i.e., book making obviously consumes trees) but presupposes that libraries will no longer need to be built. This will also cut student book costs since students will not have to endure the college and publishing industry’s textbook racket.
As the collaborative learning process takes hold of the schools of tomorrow, the teacher or professor will only be seen as a reference, someone who can offer a valuable opinion about a subject matter or direct a student to a place that may have answers to an analytical question about the material. But the teacher or professor as an arbiter of student intellectual capacity is outmoded. Students will evaluate each other, and this will largely be based upon what questions and problems they think are relevant to solve, not the teacher. The teacher or professor will not impose arbitrary, unassailable, evaluative standards upon the student, although he/she can encourage students to adjust their evaluative standards. The teacher will be akin to the librarian: a living reference for knowledge but not its final arbiter. Grades, as formal marks determining the degrees of aptitude, will be viewed by the schools of tomorrow as irrelevant and subjective. A student either knows p or does not know p, and an arbitrary scale of values (i.e., A-F) obscures this: at most it measures student enthusiasm for a subject and the teacher’s personal feelings about the student’s enthusiasm for learning.
Quotations of internet sources will be permitted in the body of an essay or article as well as its sources. Eventually, only internet sources will exist and online papers will all follow one format for quotations: <B> x </B>, followed by the source URL, where x is the quoted material. MLA and Chicago styles will be viewed as outmoded complications as obscure as the Aristotelian categories of substance.
Video, by way of hyperlinks or embedded objects, will be allowed in essays or articles. Larger works, such as theses or dissertations, will be allowed in multiple formats, such as DVD, CD, HTML/XML documents, or in whatever format accessible the greatest number of people. The insistence upon paper theses or dissertations will be seen by the schools of tomorrow as outmoded, wasteful, and environmentally unsound.
There will be no further divisions between theoretical or practical knowledge: theory will only concern itself with practice and not Platonic ideals, abstractions such as “human nature”, or any other creations of the speculative mind.
Tags: Culture, Education, Society
