Home schooling is best, but it is unable to meet the challenge of scale needed in “public” education. For this, private schools are the best. However, in the future, they will have to take elements from home schooling, and advances in technology, to create an “education for the future”.
Technology will have to replace “group” education with individualized instruction, but in a group situation. The way to envision this is clear:
1) Each student will have a personal thumb drive that is their own curriculum, selected from any number of curricula available at the national level. When they plug it into the school network, maybe verified by a thumbprint scan on the thumb drive, the student will be “exactly where they left off”, when they last unplugged.
2) Curricula will be fully multimedia, interactive, and will teach multiple subjects simultaneously. For example, the student’s parents, above selecting a block of general education created by a particular education corporation, also want a block with the history of France.
While viewing the history block, the student is also being taught, reviewed and tested on English grammar, the French language, the geography of Europe, and seeing any number of images and people relevant to what he is doing.
With his keyboard, he are typing answers to questions, re-spelling new words they have seen on the screen, and directing the flow of the block into information digressions he are interested in. Say they see a picture of Louis XIV, with a brief description. They can follow it up with a mouse click and learn more about Louis XIV, before continuing back into the history block. They also have a microphone so they can practice pronunciations in both English and French.
The back and forth with the computer includes review of subject matter, and importantly, is paced based on how the student is learning. Slumps and spurts in learning are common, and the computer can adjust accordingly.
The education block can even produce suggested ideas that the human teacher can use later to go into higher levels of learning with the student.
Importantly, early on in the student’s education, they will be taught well known memorization and learning “tricks”, so they can learn to both store and correlate knowledge better than in the typical broken linear manner most of us use. This will spare their intellectual resources for higher levels of learning.
Because doing things this way saves enormous amounts of student time, curricula will have to expand to more subjects and more advanced learning in study subjects.
Curricula will be created by any number of sources, and reviewed for quality like books. Optimally, parents will have broad choices to select their childrens education.
And once the thumb drive is taken out, the student can move to any similar school without losing a day of learning, instead of the months of review and adjustment needed today.
Again, teachers will still be needed, as they will monitor and certify student performance, troubleshoot problems, maintain discipline, and teach higher levels of learning.
The cardinal sin is to waste a student’s time. Something done far too much today. And while not all students will prosper this way, the great bulk of them will.
I couldnt’ agree more with your entire post...and...It should be a cardinal sin to waste a child's time.
When considering the structure of future private education we should give up the idea of the Prussian military model, brick and mortar, prison-like school. There are two reasons:
1) Hasn't the successes of homeschooling proved that it is unnatural to treat children like factory widgets, or worse, like prisoners? Children learn best when challenged on their level, and when they are allowed to completely master one level before moving to the next.
2) Brick and mortar schools are expensive! The curriculum and technology today is relatively very inexpensive ( compared to a government school) and excellent in its quality.
The future of private education should be thinking in terms of dame schools, mini-schools, homeschool cooperatives, tutoring centers, and one-room school houses.
There is one thing that **must** be done. We **must** break the government choke hold on team sports. Those wishing to promote private education must also organize sports leagues. Much of the support for government education in my county is based upon parent's desire for their children to have an opportunity to participate in the government sports leagues.