The Role of Schooling - 2025 C.E.

We've already talked about the role of content knowledge in 2025, and how it is important for teachers to be able to not only provide a filter between the surfeit of information out there and the sponge-like minds of school children, but to show them how to construct and maintain such a filter for themselves. But what about schooling? By which I mean the process of education... the process of learning in a school environment?

To be frank, I think it will be much the same as it is today, albeit operating within a more technological paradigm. There are those that may feel that with the continual advancement of information-based technology that is readily available to the average student, that schools may become obsolete. Kids will be able to take total control over their own education and learn from any location with an internet connection. In such an environment, the very idea of schooling will be obsolete.

I do not think this scenario is realistic or even desirable. There is a great leap between a student empowering and taking responsibility for his education and taking total control over it. It is the same leap (metaphorically speaking) as exists between a would-be pilot seeking out qualified instruction and that same person leaping directly into the cockpit of a jumbo jet. In the first case, the student/pilot understands the need and desire for knowledge and information and takes steps to obtain it responsibly and accurately. In the latter, the student/pilot hopes to self-train - and although all the information may technically be out there for a motivated individual to find for himself, any attempts to immediately use that information without tempering it with actual knowledge and preparedness could (and very likely will be) doomed to tragedy.

This is not to say that it is impossible for students to grow, develop, and learn without a formal schooling process. Indeed, in the technological world of 2025, it may be easier to become a true autodidact than it was just a quarter-century ago. But the irony of the matter is this: the very thing that makes it potentially easier for students to "just do it" and seek out learning and education on their own - the sheer amount of readily available information that hovers at our fingertips - is the very thing that ultimately makes it more difficult to succeed in this endeavor. As I have said before, and undoubtedly will say again, without the ability to filter between good, reliable data and unsupported, questionable information (the wheat from the chaff, as it were), self-teaching is and always will be an uphill battle. For middle and high school age children, who for the most part have not yet developed the maturity and discipline needed for such a challenge, formal schooling will be necessary.

THIS is what I feel the true role of schooling will be in 2025. Teachers will continue to teach and impart their content knowledge to their students, but their main role will be to help students develop the skills and techniques they will require to take reasonable, responsible, and ultimately productive control over their own education and learning.

In many cases, this will be accomplished through non-traditional methods that the teachers of a prior generation may or may not recognize. Teaching will be more about making authentic connections between a student's world and the world "outside". Just how will this be done? Stay tuned.