Or we could enjoy life without wasting any time on inefficient schooling. Here is my four part plan to change schools.
1. Core Curriculum- Before formal schooling, potential students should take a short, three month course that touches briefly on all basic subjects and skills. This course will assess their reading and writing levels, and make sure they are up to scratch. At the end, all who participated and attended satisfactorily will be issued a certificate that entitles them to continued education.
The purpose will become obvious in a moment, when you read about how much autonomy I want to grant students. We need to make sure that anyone who want to pursue their own choices has enough information to make those decisions.
2. Ageless Classes- Why are we packaging students by date of manufacture? It's hardly their most important feature. Different people learn at different speeds, and in vastly different ways. Also, it prevents older people who may have missed out on classes they wanted to take from returning to school. If you dropped out of middle school, for whatever reason, you can't go to college, or even high school, and people think it's weird for a 30-year-old to be sitting in a class with 13-year-olds. With the no-age system, anyone can join any class, as long as they have the requisite knowledge (see below).
Also, we can completely abandon what sociologists call "The Hidden Curriculum," where the school environment teaches children more than just the knowledge contained in textbooks. Teachers and faculty teach kids to respect authority, love their country, and other cultural lessons. However, the transmission of culture is less important today, since cultures are quickly mixing together, and creating a global culture. (I plan to replace the contents of these parentheses with a link to my Globalism post, as soon as it exists.) In any case, culture should be the job of parents and friends, etc, while school's purpose is knowledge. Without age as a factor, how would we keep track of cultural development? The answer is, we don't.
3. Heightened Specialization- Never again should a child who hates math have to sit through year after year of droning lectures on something they don't care about. We need to do research: interview professionals and ask them how relevant each mandatory class is to them now. We can collect precise data on what is necessary for each job, and design curricula for each field.
At any point after taking their three month core classes course, students can choose what career they think they want to take. Specialized tracks will be available to show what skills they eventually need to have, and thus what classes they will need to take. A certain level of groundwork may be required for some classes (you can't take calc-based physics without knowing calc), but classes are no longer age-based, so it doesn't matter if you haven't taken a class yet: just take it now.
Obviously, the school can also provide a helpful list of "core classes" for those who haven't decided what they like yet. Once they do decide, they can start enrolling in the classes they want to take.
4. No grades- Yes, that's right. No more A's, B's, or F's.
"But then how will we know how well the kids are doing in their classes?" you might ask. "How can the kids can't learn if they aren't motivated by academic success?"
Without grades, it is very possible to be motivated. Children are born with an internal desire to learn everything they can about the world. This exploratory urge is what makes babies and toddlers the fastest to learn a language. However, it seems to drop off very quickly, starting around 6 or 7 years old. What happened to this wide-eyed appreciation of knowledge for its own sake?
Education happened. We literally train the yearning for learning out of kids, by replacing their intrinsic desire with extrinsic rewards and punishments, like grades and little trinkets.
Intrinsic motivation has been shown to be the most powerful driving force for humans. However, when a reward is given to someone for doing an action, they suddenly abandon any internal desire to do that activity. Rewards become like crack to them, and they start needing more and more of the reward to do the same thing. If we dangle a carrot in front of a kid who has their nose in a textbook, their attention will shift to carrot. Eyes on the prize, right? We want the prize to be the knowledge, not the grade.
That doesn't answer the question: "How will their progress be monitored without grades?" The answer is simply "Why does their progress need to be monitored?"
They chose their own classes, so they clearly want to learn what they're learning. Teachers can usually tell who is engaged, and who isn't, and the students themselves definitely know if they are doing well in the class. If a student or a teacher feels that a student isn't understanding the material, they can schedule remedial lessons, or perhaps take the class again.
5. Tailored Teaching- We all know how vastly different people's styles of learning can be. Even if you weren't one, you almost certainly had a kid in your class who either couldn't sit still in class, wasn't paying attention, or simply didn't get what the teacher was saying. Chances are, you didn't focus 100% of the time either. I mentioned segmented attention last time: well now it's time for segmented teaching.
The best way to focus curricula for individual students is to have a higher ratio of teacher to student. Obviously this would require more teachers, since my system invites more students, not fewer. This is not a problem- it actually helps solve the problem of a dwindling job market. I am not qualified to formulate a curriculum generation system, but I think a little research could stand to be done on education training that focuses on teaching the teacher to adapt to each individual student differently.
It's as simple as that. With these 5 changes, students will be motivated to learn more, since they are learning what they want to learn, and aren't pressured by grades. We don't need to have so much of our old-fashioned structure, like set curricula. What is the exact usefulness of American Literature to an architect? Who knows? Obviously research needs to be conducted before we make any changes, but I feel confident that we can do it.
Drawbacks- I realize the biggest potential drawback to this system, which is that it almost eliminates one of the positive latent functions of the school atmosphere, which is the social aspect. For younger children, who may not have so much freedom to go out with friends, school is a necessary stepping stone to teach them how to make friends and behave socially. In my system, they may miss out on the opportunity to interact with kids their own age.
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