My previous post appears to have generated quite a bit of discussion (off-line at least), reinforcing for me the complexity of the situation we find ourselves in, and the fact that for so many of those involved in education, working within the constraints of existing systems and bureaucracy makes it difficult to take a truly detached perspective and develop some big picture ideas about what schooling in the future might be like.

Two people who have never had a problem thinking about the future are Alvin  and Heidi Toffler, and when thinking of the issues of schooling in the future I remembered back to an article that appeared in the February 2007 edition of the Edutopia magazine, featuring an interview with Alvin Toffler in which he expresses his ideas about schooling in the future.

When asked about the most pressing need in public education right now, Toffler’s response is “shut down the public education system“! When asked why we don’t simply readjust what we have in place now and whether we really need to start from the ground up, Toffler provides a clear insight as to what he thinks about the dilemma I raised in my previous post;

We should be thinking from the ground up. That’s different from changing everything. However, we first have to understand how we got the education system that we now have. Teachers are wonderful, and there are hundreds of thousands of them who are creative and terrific, but they are operating in a system that is completely out of time. It is a system designed to produce industrial workers.

I remember reading Future Shock when I was training as a teacher,  and participating in discussions about how far fetched many of the ideas appeared to be and how much of a stretch the thinking involved – but now most of it reads like a history book 🙂 You have to remember that it was written 20 years before the WWW was launched on the world – before it was even conceived of, and yet it was predicted in what the Tofflers wrote. I wonder how close to the mark they are with this prediction of schools in the future??

This is challenging stuff! The concept of simply shutting everything down and starting over is not new – but is almost never considered seriously as an option for school reform – the costs are considered too high, both in dollar terms and in terms of the social and emotional investment in what we have at present. That said, we should be prepared to take these ideas seriously – particularly in the situations where we are building new schools! Toffler’s list of fundamentals at the end of the article make a good starting point for discussion: