Getting Educated in the 21st Century
During Phase 1 of the transition from the 19th Century model to the 21st Century model, educators were forced to question long-standing assumptions and develop strategies that were both affordable and available. Those strategies forced school administrators to distinguish between the superfluous and the essential elements of getting educated in this new environment. Phase 2 applies Lessons Learned during Phase 1 to create a robust and sustainable system of education for every child. This involved five basic principles:
1. Restructuring time
Throughout most of the 20th Century, time was the constant and learning was the variable. In the 21st Century, learning is the constant and time is the variable. Though far from optimal, the way students got educated during the pandemic helped break the bond to archaic time structures for learning.
2. Student-centered models
Throughout the 20th Century, education occurred in batch-mode. This aligned with the protocols for factory, and industrial operations. However, these protocols could not accommodate the special needs, learning challenges, or disparities among batches of students. Affluent parents could mitigate these obstacles with private tutors, and teacher assistants. Students whose parents could not afford these options fell behind and seldom recovered. The batch mode of education required lock-step performance. Out of step performers reflected poorly on the “productivity” of the education factory.
3. The educator’s role
The shift to student-centered education disrupted the role of the classroom teacher. In the 19th Century model, the teacher typically served as the “production worker” trained to infuse knowledge into the minds of students. She stood in front of the class and lectured the information into the open minds of the students. The quality of that infusion was constantly monitored through testing. Each student was expected to receive the data, then to repeat it back on multiple-choice tests. Poor test results pointed to teaching defects — never to variations in the ability of the student’s young mind to unpack the information and process it at the speed it was being presented.
4. Curriculum analysis and development
During the 20th Century era, schools did not always teach what students needed to learn. Some of it was busywork. It focused on content and getting kids to parrot the “right” answer from a textbook. Much of the curriculum in use reflected what teachers wanted to teach, rather than what students needed to learn. By being tied to a specific school in a fixed geographic area, students became a captive audience for these teachers. Student residents of the emerging 21st Century model will have no such constraints. Thanks to the challenges presented by the pandemic, students and their parents could no longer be held captive by geophysical entities. instead, five globally-recognized education objectives were incorporated into the curriculum of every K-12 school system: Leadership, Team Building, Problem-Solving, Persuasion, and Communications. It was hard for school administrators to object to educational alternatives that met school standards but were sourced from outside the school community and funded by parents directly.
5. School culture
Throughout the 20th Century, school culture discussions that included issues like diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) were prohibited by politically constrained school administrators. But with COVID-19 forcing them to debate why they should support specific directions, policies, or tools compared to others, they were forced to define and support globally-acceptable values such as honesty, integrity, and determination. Once educators and parents determined which ideologies they considered fundamental, they were quick to incorporate those values directly into the curriculum. In the 21st Century model, educators take a stronger role in social development aside from merely preparing students to enter competitive careers, accept prevailing belief systems and manage their behavior.
