Schools of the Future
WOULD you be happy if your children went to a school that allowed them to come and go as they pleased, using the school as a place where they could receive the guidance they needed to find out the things they wanted and needed to know?
This will be schooling of the future, says Mike Lloyd, Microsoft’s schools’ solution specialist, who was in SA recently to introduce the information and communication technology (ICT) company’s Schools of the Future project.
The skills needed by the globalised knowledge economy and development in ICT mean that education needs to make a sea change, said Lloyd, who is in constant contact with policymakers across the globe on the issue.
Microsoft launched Schools of the Future in 2005 with a conference on how to educate children to integrate technology with education, from making teaching increasingly computer-assisted to redesigning school buildings to create a learning space more conducive to developing the kind of thinking and learning the digital economy wants.
A prototype school was built in Philadelphia, US, in 2005 and others have followed.
Technology is the big driver of the huge changes the world has seen in the past decade or so, and the force behind the world of work’s hunger for collaborative workers who can work independently and think creatively, says Lloyd.
“Your boss needs to know that he can trust you to be able to go out and learn what you need to know on your own, without help. The schooling system doesn’t encourage that. People are going to have to be far more self-reliant than they had to be in the industrial period,” he says.
Teaching is lagging and this is the source of the perennial complaint that schools are not producing pupils who are able to deal with the world of work, says Lloyd. First world economies are increasingly “experience economies”. This term was first used in a 1999 book by B Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, who describe an advanced service economy selling “mass customisation” services that are similar to theatre, using underlying goods and services as props.
The core subjects and themes of a traditional school just do not give pupils the edge in this new world, says Lloyd.
“The problem is you need to know a lot more than that to participate in a knowledge economy, let alone an experience economy,” he says. The other problem is that old-style schooling bores today’s technocratic children, he says, referring to a 2006 study that found that half of the US’s high school dropouts left because school was “boring”.
“Today’s digital kids think of information technology and communications as something akin to oxygen. They expect it,” says Lloyd, quoting researcher John Seely-Brown, who specialises in organisational studies with a particular bent towards the organisational implications of computer- supported activities.
Most of the world’s schools are not ready for these pupils, says Lloyd.
However, like Philadelphia’s School of the Future, there are schools in New Zealand, the UK and Thailand that are moving towards, or using, this new way of thinking about educating children, he says.
All these schools — and learning spaces — have been specially designed with the child in mind, as places in which today’s children will be enthused and inspired.
At Christchurch in New Zealand, two schools in the city’s Cashel Mall are prime examples of this new type of school, says Lloyd.
At the primary school Discovery 1 and the high school Unlimited each child decides, based on his or her talents and interests, what they will learn, and when.
The schools are members of the New Zealand Learning Discovery Trust and recognise that learning can take place anywhere — the children are given “trust licences”, which allow them to explore the shopping mall in which the school has been deliberately situated, says Lloyd. The licences can be revoked for misdemeanours.
Because more complex ICT based tasks take up more time and demand greater concentration from children, this has meant that at schools such as Discovery 1 and Unlimited children move around the school buildings far less, says UK education technology consultant Prof Stephen Heppell.
This means schools do not have to be buildings with long lines of classrooms, and also means that schools are going to have to rethink the common practice of banning cellphones on their grounds.
“As a learning technology they are potentially the most powerful of all; they are always ‘symmetrical’ in nature (as soon as telephone technology lets you see video you could also contribute to it) and they are as, if not more, important to learning than computers,” he says in a 2004 paper, Building Learning Futures.
The South African government signed an agreement with Microsoft in 2002-03 in which the software giant undertook to supply software to all South African schools.
The deal has been criticised along the same lines as similar deals that the company has made with other governments’ education departments around the world — because of Microsoft’s alleged anti-competitive practices.
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