Future School

Pre-1900s

• Home-schooled
• Church-based education (from the French settlers)
• Education is an individually promoted and implemented idea

• one room school house
• one teacher, all subjects, all levels

Notice any similarities?

... as you can see, we've

made a lot of changes...

This is such a common meme, it's

a common target in pop culture...

"I do recognize that many high school principals report increasing difficulty in maintaining an orderly, business-like environment in schools where there is widespread skipping and non-attendance of classes..."

A little light reading

Scary facts

The world economy will experience scarcities of natural resources from now until the middle of the twenty-first century

The post-scarcity world will put tremendous pressure on current business models, potentially rendering them irrelevant and obsolete...

The study (WWF, 2002) will also reveal a sharp fall in the planet's ecosystems between 1970 and 2002 with the Earth's forest cover shrinking by about 12 per cent, the ocean's biodiversity by a third and freshwater ecosystems in the region of 55 per cent.

• 35,000 school buses in Canada
• 450,000 in the US!
• 25 million students a year moved! (US)
• 5,750,000,000 mile driven per year (US)
• 822,857,143 gallons of fuel used per year (US estimate)
• $4471 per bus per year in fuel costs or $43 per child (US)

some thoughts

educational tools for this future

Students in this future will require the capacity to engage in:

• life long learning (i.e. self-directed and collaborative inquiry)

• connectedness (communication and collaboration with peers and experts around the world)

the use of standardized testing will increase

• less face-to-face time to gather anecodotal evidence
• the need for measurable data increases in order to make informed decisions

courses will:

• increase the use of authentic assessment
• involve teacher and student reflection
• make meaningful, purposeful links between learning and experience

equitable access for all individuals is ensured

emotive software that responds to needs of the student

"The software was 80 percent accurate in sensing the students’ moods—and toward the end of a 15-minute lesson, users were three times more engaged and focused than kids who had been working on regular, unmodified computers. " This month's WIRED

teachers need to have a more significant online presence

• stop giving handouts! Let them find the information.
• create interactive and online formative assessment
• be given PD opportunities to meet challenges of education in the digital environments

model collaboration

• in PLCs
• in teaching practice
• with students

ethical behaviour in the use of information and in collaboration must be taught

Create learning environments that are:

• flexible and adaptable
• driven by inquiry
• discipline-based

Now, Immediately, begin!

Education entangled with

business norms

grandma

What is education?

learning how to learn

1926 office environment

www.earlyofficemuseum.com

1957 Classroom environment

Robert Harris (1849 - 1919) © Confederation Centre Art Gallery

School At Canoe Cove, P.E.I.

Classroom 2009

De-Industrializing Education

2000

(cc) image by jantik on Flickr

2002 March

A brief history of education

2005

2010

Marylin More, Minister of Education for Nova Scotia, Nov 6th, 2010

metacognition

Sharon Friesen "Uncomfortable Bedfellows: Discipline-based Inquiry and Standardized Examinations", Teacher Librarian Magazine, October 2010

Future

How education has followed industrialization

into an unsustainable dead end, and how it will follow it out

Fears

• technology is just a flash in the pan
• educators will become redundant
• students will perform far below their actual potential and even fall through the cracks
• students without means to access technology will be left behind

StatsCan & NASDEPTS.org:

Mark Townsend and Jason Burke

The Observer, Sunday 7 July 2002

from The Futurist, 2010, Jan-Feb Edition

Human population growth rate in percent, with negative zero percentage, including the variables of births, deaths, immigration, and emigration, as listed on CIA factbook (2006 estimate).

The future?

http://docs.google.com/View?id=ddg3j6mp_26dhfgvchh

• Geography or even demographics need have little to do with education.
• Skilled educators will be valuable beyond the walls of the building they work in.
• Students will experience situations more immersive and personally engaging than anything that happened in the old industrial modeled schooling system.
• Technology allows us to focus on learning rather than arbitrary information based milestones.
• Students move through education at their own pace, using immersive simulation to develop personally resonant learning that stays with them.
• There is an erosion of personal boundaries and expectations as students (and the public in general) are able to experience life as any gender, race or culture.
• The ultimate goal of education is to free the minds of its students from ignorance, assumption and doubt and allow them to take in the world (real and virtual) as efficiently and meaningfully as possible.