> we could rip the existing curriculum-driven teacher-centric pedagogy out of our schools and replace it with a student-interest-driven project-based pedagogy without losing any of the vital functions of schools you articulate.
Agree
In a different life years ago, I spent time with Oxford tutors and (more importantly) the students with whom they worked. Each student was guided roughly in the same compass direction with that particular tutor (Philosophy, Mathematics, History, Latin Literature, Physics, etc) but with real sensitivity to the interests and strengths of each individual student, which influenced the books suggested, the lectures which should be attended, the other Oxford colleges they might visit, or selected people they should talk to in the pub or college tea room.
The contrast was stunning to the American college experience of large lectures, grade-grubbing, competition, formulaic grading on the curve, frequent plagiarism, study for the test, and other hierarchical non-collegial behaviors that persist over into the junior faculty fighting for tenure on the basis of research and publication with teaching students a distant fourth after brown-nosing and politicking. Remaining a tenure-track professor in this system seemed a life sentence, and I left to follow my own muse.
So yes, we could (and indeed should) rip out the curriculum-driven teacher-centric grade-grubbing content-obsessed narrow competitiveness and replace it with a student-interest project-based directed-reading no-exams pedagogy with probably better results over the student's lifetime in terms of health, wealth, happiness and social contribution (important overall quality metrics in a short sometimes wretched life where none gets out alive -- pointed out by an octogenarian tutor).
The Internet is great for content, a new experience in personal communication (as was the telephone relative to mailed letters), but lacking in personal touch and real nurturing interaction that only a positive tangible social experience with other students and teachers can provide (another Oxford tutor's view: there is a difference between phone sex and real sex that needs to be enjoyed and appreciated).
Ultimately school (at least from the students' perspective) is about friends and psychosocial/emotional development (primarily) and only secondarily about academics and content (albeit some of my talented Asperger colleagues think the reverse). Going forward we need a best-of-breed blending of online education, warm supportive personal experience, a focus on student differences as much as their similarities (every student -- even an identical twin - has learning differences), oriented around an organizational paradigm they will experience as an adult in a knowledge-based collaborative communication-intensive 24X7 Dan Pink/Thomas Friedman world where the half-life of information shortens ten-fold and survival means continuous learning.
How we get there is unclear -- but from a California perspective, it is clear that independent schools have real advantage over our imploding public schools. Large classes, one teacher, curriculum-driven (thank God we are not Texas), zero personal attention, one size/pattern fits all, no funding for extra-curricular activity -- no wonder we are seeing more family interest in independent schools despite the economic meltdown.
But independent schools cannot rest on laurels, but need be looking far ahead (though parents often look just to graduation). Kids today are wired differently (everyone's brain is the product of their childhood stimuli) and the optimum pedagogy is not that of our simpler childhoods decades ago. The tools of technology for instruction and communication with students have advanced (there was only one phone for students at my boarding school 50 years ago). The global stage upon which today's students will walk as adults is almost unimaginable.
We need to do something different (read, better) in how we teach, since students are different (some would say better or at least better adapted) in how they learn.
Change is the only constant.
== Bill
(thoughts before setting off to an Easter observance -- pondering how/if the next generation will arise from this generation's mistakes)
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