A New Model for Education

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Schools tend to reflect the societies in which they are embedded. In America before the Civil War, little book learning was needed to manage what was for most people still an agrarian life. School started relatively late in the day and ended early to leave time for chores. In summer, school let out entirely so children could help their parents in the fields. Education was narrow in scope, controlled largely by the teacher, and focused predominantly on basic skills.

In that world, the model of education embodied in the one-room schoolhouse was sufficient. Teachers taught reading, writing, and elementary mathematics to complement the skills students learned outside school. Since relatively few students progressed even as far as high school, the need for higher levels of education was minimal.

The school reforms of the 1980s consisted mostly of an added program here, an improved strategy there, and a computer someplace else. These efforts were like taking aspirin for a life-threatening illness. -Keith Geiger, National Education Association

In the information age, the human beings that industry needs are those who can do their own thinking, get actively involved, work in teams, and be innovative, not merely industrious. The problem is, the factory model school, which doesn't encourage those qualities, is still with us and needs to be replaced with a new kind of schooling that does. -Bill Blakemore, ABC News

By the end of the 19th century, more and more of the population was settling in cities and going to work in factories. To teach students the basic skills and simple facts they needed for industrial jobs, the first great revolution in schooling took place: the factory school model appeared. Large buildings enclosed labyrinths of classrooms where students sat in neat rows with the teacher in front. Schools sought to be an efficient social institution that could turn out identical products. Students learned enough to work at jobs that they would probably keep for much of their lives.

Today many students still attend factory-model schools. Much of the day is spent passively listening to lectures. Many classes teach skills for jobs that either no longer exist or will not exist in their present form when students grow up.

It is clear that yesterday's innovation has become today's obstacle to change. Only about 20 percent of the employed population now works in factories or on farms. People graduating from high school or college will average six to eight jobs over the course of a career, many of them requiring skills that are unforeseen today. About half of all employed Americans work with information-analyzing information that already exists, generating new information, storing and retrieving information. Soon a major portion of this group will not even work in an office, much less a factory, but at home.

This postindustrial form of society calls for a new, postindustrial form of education. Teachers, parents, school administrators, and policymakers have begun to realize that an entirely new model of education is needed. In this new kind of school, all students will be held to far higher standards of learning because everyone will have to be prepared to think for a living and everyone will have to be capable of learning many new skills over the course of a lifetime. This model of education will increase the links between students and their communities, bringing the resources of school to bear on the complex ethical, civic, and technical decisions that all citizens will have to make. The timing and location of education will be more flexible, to reflect and take advantage of changes in the workplace. The distinction between learning inside of school and outside of school will blur.

Education is an enterprise distinguished by its paucity of technology, and obviously that situation must change. -Luther Williams, National Science Foundation

Technology is merely a tool to help us improve the opportunities for learning and help us really approach the kind of teaching that we think is important in our schools. -Linda Roberts, Department of Education

As we look to the major sectors of our economy, the educational system is the only sector that has not brought technology to bear upon its operations. And in a society so rich with information, we can no longer rely on skills appropriate only for the industrial age. -Constance A. Morella,U.S. Representative

Technology is a key transforming element in creating this new model of school. Just as technology is reshaping other institutions, it has the potential to reshape education, ending the disjunction between school and the broader society. Technology offers unlimited new ways of learning, of teaching, and of running schools. It provides new ways for everyone involved in education to be openly accountable to parents, to communities, and to students.

Yet technology by itself is clearly not enough. As applied in factory-model schools, technology can be as uninspiring as traditional mimeographed worksheets. Computers in schools have too often been used for drills, for word processing, and for remedial work. These applications fail to take advantage of the rich, interactive capabilities of today's information technologies.

Compare the use of computers for drill and practice to their use as effective learning machines. With imaginative, inspiring software, students are not forced to come up with the one right answer; rather, they learn to ask many questions and to devise multiple approaches to a problem. They learn at their own pace and in their own style, so that skilled students advance without restraint while other students have the various resources they need to meet high standards.

Traditional schools have emphasized individual performance and competition and have discouraged students from working or even talking together. In the new model of school, classroom experiences emphasize critical thinking, teamwork, compromise, and communication-the skills valued in today's workplace.

Technology itself is not the curriculum. Technology is a key that opens opportunities for students to learn in the classroom. It is a way in which we can bridge what in the past have been large gorges that have separated students from opportunity. -John Dossey, Illinois State University

This model of education calls for changing the roles of students, teachers, and schools. In the new model of school, students assume many of the functions previously reserved for teachers. In small groups, individual students act as peer-tutors for others. Because they are often the ones most familiar with new technologies, students lead by example, helping their classmates work through problems. In this way, students begin learning from an early age how to communicate and how to assume greater responsibility for their own education.

Teachers, in contrast, change from being the repository of all knowledge to being guides or mentors who help students navigate through the information made available by technology and interactive communications. They help students gather and organize information, judge its value, and decide how to present it to others. Moving from group to group and from student to student, teachers help students stay focused and working at the limits of their abilities. When the class meets as a whole, teachers share the responsibility for teaching with the students-each of whom has been forging ahead at his or her own pace.

Integrating technology into [today's classrooms] makes about as much sense as integrating the internal combustion engine into the horse. -Lewis Perelman, Discovery Institute

In this new model of school, education looks different than it does in most schools today. Schools might be open all day and all year, with groups of students rotating in and out of session. Classrooms might include students of different ages. Traditional 50-minute classes will stretch or disappear to accommodate activities made possible by technology. Longer-term projects will cut across disciplines, combining the subject matter of previously separate classes. Multiple choice tests will be replaced by new kinds of assessments that measure the acquisition of higher-order skills.

Schools may emerge in unlikely places--such as office buildings--or more conventional schools may have branch campuses integrated into businesses, hospitals, or homes. Secondary schools may forge new links with two-year colleges and community institutions to ease the transition from school to work. Individual classes will be integrated into workplaces, providing a vocational education far richer and more useful than what is offered today. Technologies used at home will convey lesson plans, homework, and assessments both to students and to their parents.

The ultimate goal of this new model of education is to foster communities of lifelong learners, where intellect and cooperation are highly valued. Within these communities, decisions will be made by those in the best position to make them-by students, teachers, and educational administrators.

Kids retain 5 percent of what they hear and 10 percent of what they read but 80 percent of what they do and 90 percent of what they teach. -Robert Ballard, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

The elements of this new model of education are starting to appear in scattered communities across the United States. Schools are experimenting with new organizational structures, new forms of governance, and new uses of technology that are designed to reflect the constant flux of modern society. This trend is about to accelerate dramatically. As technology becomes more powerful and plentiful, and as the needs of society more urgently call for a new model of education, American schools will be caught up by irresistible forces of change.

For more than 200 years, from the founding of the 13 colonies in the 1600s until well after the Civil War, the nation's educational needs were largely met through the model of the one-room school. As the nation urbanized and industrialized in the latter part of the 1800s, today's factory model of K-12 education emerged. As the nation enters the next century, technology allows us to consider a new model of education, one that couples classroom learning and resources to education resources found quite literally throughout the world.

In the one-room school and in today's factory-model schools, the teacher is the heart of the education enterprise. In the new model of education, the teacher will emerge as the mentor, guide, and broker to the world of knowledge made accessible by technology.