Xref: utzoo comp.society.futures:290 comp.edu:754 Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!fluke!kurt From: kurt@tc.fluke.COM (Kurt Guntheroth) Newsgroups: comp.society.futures,comp.edu Subject: Re: High Schools of the Future Message-ID: <2551@fluke.COM> Date: 23 Dec 87 19:41:51 GMT References: <2285@dasys1.UUCP> Sender: news@tc.fluke.COM Organization: John Fluke Mfg. Co., Inc., Everett, WA Lines: 68 Keywords: Technology, Schools I think there is something about being an educator which makes you yearn for a diverse, unstructured educational system. Educators continually push for smaller and smaller class sizes, individualized instruction, unstructured curricula, etc. This push occurs without regard to benefit, without regard to cost, and without regard to evidence that this is not always beneficial. For instance, in this "High Schools of the Future" article, kids learn at home from their computers. In what way does this individualized instruction affect their social development. They are not learning anything about working in face-to-face group situations. Their skills of social interaction are not being developed. Do they become adults with social experience similar to their parents, or do they become a generation of isolated, anti-social hackers. (Hackers in the general sense of someone who focuses intently on an individual endeavor and is uninterested in the environment or group activities.) What is the quality of the instruction given by the computer? I have seen "porogrammed learning". I always found the bite sized morsels of knowledge these courses provided to be stifling and lacking in interest. You can't "leap ahead" in a programmed learning course. Unless each child's workstation embodies an aritifical intellegence substantially as powerful as current generation high school education liveware, the quality of knowledge transmission will be far lower. If a human monitors the student's progress, how does s/he deal with the more limited bandwidth between student and teacher. Inspecting test scores by correspondence is far slower than taking a quick glance at the face of a student to see if it is registering comprehension or confusion. How does a human deal with the wide choises of curriculum promised, and the wide range of rates-of-progress. To fulfill each child's potential, a given subject must be able to be presented at depths ranging from shallow to very deep, if children are given a fixed set of subjects they must master. Who will prepare this coursework? How will students be motivated in a totally unstructured home environment? Part of the discipline of school is a lack of ready distractions from study. Will students pick up a broad range of interests or will they focus on a single subject, so that you have musicians who cannot read (text), and historians who cannot use a bus schedule to get to the mall. Are there not, indeed, "basic skills" which we all must have to get along in society. Do not these skills include reading (from paper or CRT), writing/typing/editing, and the ability to make change, count items, and solve formal problems? How will we insure that students learn all these things if we give up "control" of their learning to the ultimate extent envisioned in this article? The existing structure of schools is well organized for teaching basic information, promoting needed social skills and interactions, and providing a common cultural base for children. It delivers these services to nearly all children, in an economical way that is not a burden on society. It generates a large population of similarly educated children, and has only limited capability to generate an elite overclass of highly educated rulers. The existing structure of schools is less well organized for teaching critical thinking and reasoning processes. These forms of mental discipline are difficult to teach and both children and educators often fail to understand what modes of education foster this kind of learning. Children nowadays either form or fail to form advanced reasoning habits pretty much on their own. Such people often go on to technical trades or professions. There is some evidence that gradeschool aged children lack they physiological maturity needed for abstract reasoning, and that at the gradeschool level, rote learning is more appropriate. It would be interesting to research ways to develop abstract reasoning in children, but I don't see how the mere presence of an unstructured environment would develop it. I expect to see my children going to high school just like I did. On the other hand, I might expect to enroll myself into an electronic university. With developed habits of reasoning and discipline, I can build my own structure, and benefit from deep education in areas of interest.