The other day I saw a vision of the future of education and it looks nothing like school as we know it. I attended Tech Forum in Tarrytown, NY, sponsored by Tech & Learning, showcasing technology in education. It was a small conference, maybe 200 people, but the implications are HUGE. It is now dramatically clear to me that education must be repurposed to produce lifelong learners, not just people who can read and write and pass assessment tests. In other words, each child has to learn how he/she learns best and that the learning process has its own rewards. I, personally, am the product of a visionary elementary school that I attended in the 1940s. It was/is the mission of my school, the Little Red School House, in Greenwich Village, NYC: "...to educate students to become independent thinkers and lifelong learners and to pursue academic excellence and achievement in a context of respect for others and service to the community." I believe that they succeeded with me and, as a product of that philosophy today, I am in the unique position to describe its outcome more than sixty years later, which may be of value to educators today. How kids will learn in the future will look very much like the kind of learning I do today. As an experienced autodidact, my learning is self-directed. The role of teachers in the future will be to guide/coach their students in activities similar to those I pick for myself. In the past three years I have been on several of the steepest learning curves I've ever encountered in a lifetime of one new project after another. One example: I learned how to be a videographer from a dead start of never even holding a camcorder. User-friendly technology -- a point-and-shoot camcorder and the Apple iMovie video editing program -- made it possible for me to learn the mechanics of a sophisticated art form without years of apprenticeship. Even more significant was the brilliant tutorial service, One-to-One, offered by my local Apple store. Add to that my self-knowledge that I learn best by plunging in with total immersion. I learn by doing, and the inevitable tear-out-my-hair mistakes and stumbling blocks are simply part of the learning process. In these very recent months and years, I have also learned how to engage in and track online conversations, use social networking, blog and, best of all, start my own innovative education company involving technology. (More to come on this in future posts.) My personal renaissance has made this time in my life, the beginning of my eighth decade, the most exciting and meaningful. I'm being used to my fullest, which is amazingly renewing. I feel as empowered and energized as I did in sixth grade, the best year of my childhood (and my last year at Little Red). I loved school so much that my profession as an author of children's science books has been my way of recreating elementary school for myself in perpetuity and sharing the fun with other kids. There's nothing like making a discovery -- either about the world or about oneself -- to generate love of learning.
Learning new things and instantly applying them is the most thrilling and joyous way to live life and it is now available to our children in the coming tsunami of the digital revolution. It shows up in their natural affinity for all the interactive digital devices at their disposal. Children are learning more than they ever have before (whether or not schools are involved) although we adults may have less control over what they are learning. If we want to guide this learning, we adults must be exemplars of lifelong learning. We either join this digital revolution and help direct its course or we will be pushed aside. We have to use technology to enhance our hard-won academic skills and to pass them on to the next generation. We have to change how we judge our students, not by their performance on an assessment test that purports to measure what they already know, but by how well they can learn something new. Like it or not, this is the paradigm shift that is going to engulf us. We ignore it at our peril. Having plunged in myself, I see its thrilling possibilities. At this point in my life, I am excited about the future although (sigh!) I haven't got another sixty years to see what happens.
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