Why I think schools have a future

When I wanted to learn how to make bread, I looked on the internet, checked out Youtube, and talked to other more knowledgeable friends. I applied what I read, saw and heard. It seemed that you can indeed learn almost anything you want from the internet.

At today's GAFE Summit 2015, one speaker made the same assertion during a part of his address in which he raised the question of the relevance of schools in the future. He said (and I paraphrase here, which translates to 'I may have completely misinterpreted his actual meaning'): 'Motivated learners can learn anything from the web'. The implication seemed to me to be that schools may well have no place in our future, at least not in their current form or format.

This is a question I've been pondering for some time. I've come to the conclusion that there are two critical assumptions behind the assertion that they may not have a future, and they are as follows.

1. Schools only teach knowledge and skills.
2. All learners are motivated.

The first begs the question of what schools actually teach, actually an enormously complex question. I recall having an argument with an 'old school' colleague that went something like this: 

Him: 'I teach <his subject>'

Me: 'You teach boys'

Him: 'No I teach <his subject>'

Me: 'No you teach boys'

You get the picture. This discussion went straight to the heart of the matter. In the secondary environment our subjects are in part merely a 'vehicle' through which we teach what we would now describe as the 21st century skills of critical and creative thinking. Of course content matters. I often find myself saying to others that a 21st century education is about thinking, but you can't think in a vacuum. You have to have something to think about. I find myself more than a little irritated by the NCEA 'haters' society which claims that under New Zealand's NCEA assessment framework content no longer matters. 

However in fact we teach even more than that. The New Zealand curriculum includes a component on values, and of course the key competencies. These are all things that we teach, many of them not just in the classroom but on the sports field on the concert or drama stage etc We teach them by virtue of ur interpersonal interactions with our students every day. This is one of many thingsthat make teaching such a demanding profession: we are being ';judged' every minute of every day as students take meaning from our non verbal communication as ell as the words we say.

In this regard schools as physical spaces in which people meet ought not to become redundant in my opinion. 

The second question is also interesting. I would agree that motivated learners are now able to find most things they want on the internet somewhere. However in the secondary system we teach adolescents. By their very nature these are young people who are finding their identities, finding their way in life, and they do so frequently by making mistakes. That's the nature of adolescence. Many of them are not as well motivated as we'd like in terms of their learning.

The usual response to that is that they must be allowed to follow their passions. However the problem is that they don't know what they don't know. How many times in our careers have we seen young people undertake a significant change of direction because of something new that they have learned in a class that they initially didn't want to be a part of, or as a result of an 'inspirational teacher'? I fear for a world in which people never read Frost or Shakespeare, never see the beauty of a geographic landscape or a simple mathematical proof. I am not a brilliant mathematician (I struggled), but I recall being spellbound when I saw the proof that for any two numbers on a number line, you can always find another number in between, regardless of how close the initial two numbers are. To my mind it was beautiful.

These are things that make us who we are, they are often life changing, and they are things that demand some form of human interaction. I guess that doesn't necessarily mean that schools may have their current physical or organisational format, but as social and learning organisations in my opinion they most definitely do have a future.