It’s Time to Reinvent School

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We’re barely one month into the 2020 school year and I spent an hour this morning watching my 7th grader have a meltdown — I think it’s time to reinvent school. If anything positive has come out of the pandemic, it might be that it has forced us to re-evaluate how we do things. We shop differently, we dine out differently, conduct business differently, and even go to school differently. Now it’s time to look toward the future with a critical eye and discuss which of these changes should continue to evolve and become permanent. Don’t shake your head and say “no, this is just a one-time event.” I see the pandemic encouraging us to put new critical infrastructures in place that can support improved models for many of our daily activities, especially when it comes to school.

Let’s Take Advantage of This Opportunity

For the past 40 years, people have investigated how children learn, and the answer regularly is that they all learn differently. Exceptional school systems and teachers try to apply that model in the classroom tailoring how they structure lessons to a child’s particular needs. Based on my own experience with one of these exceptional school systems and on an unscientific survey of anecdotal data, this approach just isn’t all that successful in public schools with relatively large class sizes. For a child with special needs, an individualized education plan (IEP) can be successful but trying to accommodate individualized needs in a regular classroom the rest of the student population is marginally effective. Trying to tailor education to each child is hopelessly daunting.

Maybe it’s time for a completely new approach. One that takes advantage of all the “newly” available resources such as academic support, homeschooling techniques, online learning websites, and distance learning. For example, what is clear to me is that my child doesn’t do well in the current distance learning model — she’s bored, easily distracted, and unmotivated. In a classroom setting, her performance is marginally better but it takes a diligent teacher to keep her engaged. If you put her in front of a teaching website such as Khan Academy, she turns into a perfect student. Of course, this begs the questions; What is best for her? What will have a long-lasting positive impact? How do we accept varying pathways into a unified education program?

Assessing a Child’s Needs

My first problem is that I don’t have a clear picture of how best to teach my child. I have a better picture of what doesn’t work. There is a plethora of research, worksheets, and quizzes that may help you determine your child’s type but, thus far, I’ve found these are about as useful as Cosmo quizzes. Even if an “official” test existed, as any of you who have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator likely know, the test provides useful insight but isn’t prescriptive about a solution. My child appears to be mostly a kinesthetic or physical learner-based upon a bunch of these quizzes, and teacher and psychological evaluations, but she readily moves between categories depending on the circumstances and subject. That’s why it’s not sufficient to say; “I’ll just homeschool or she’ll do everything online or with tutors, etc.”

We need a multi-disciplinary approach that provides a standardized portrait of a child’s learning style and then tailors the curriculum to meet those needs. Sure, this is complicated and may be more expensive, but the potential benefits are worth the effort.

How Many Years Did You Spend in School?

I have an MBA which means that I participated in 18 years of schooling. In reality, I spent much more elapsed time doing my MBA part-time and taking on several certificate programs. Aside from the obvious financial implications, can our society and our children afford to do this anymore? Just as we learned from the pandemic that full-time schooling serves an important function as a babysitter, I believe that taking 16 years to obtain a college degree has been in part a deliberate attempt to keep people out of the workplace protecting the jobs of the existing adult population. By 2040, the US median age could be 38.6 years with the aging population limiting workforce availability. Wouldn’t it be more effective to allow our children to progress at their own accelerated rate when appropriate and get them engaged in national service or the workforce earlier?

A Deeper Level of Change is Needed

Magnet and charter schools simply reshuffle existing approaches or populations. I’m suggesting a deeper level of change. What would schooling look like with a mixture of delivery methods, a minimum of standard “lecture” time, and students progressing at different rates? Abandoning the long-lived structured school system might be the next step in the evolution of education as it has the potential to provide better education to a wider range of students. I’ll go as far as suggesting it is one solution to the disparity between well-funded and under-funded school systems. If we break down the silos, everyone will benefit.

Many ideas struggle for acceptance unable to reach critical mass until a major problem brings them into the light and makes them affordable. The story of the shift from horses to autos in cities in the early 1900s is one such example. Then there was too much manure, now we have too much virus. It could be the perfect time to reinvent school. What do you think?