
Dec 26, 2017 ● Eric Titner
What could possibly replace K-12 and college?
It’s no surprise to anyone that the world around us is changing faster than most people can keep up. Rapid technological innovation, increasing globalization of businesses and interconnectivity among people all over the world, and quickly evolving social and cultural norms are all helping to usher in a “brave new world” of sorts, with tangible ripple effects that affect how we live at all levels.
Education is no different. We’ve already witnessed a paradigm shift in the way children are being educated in recent decades, with a greater focus on a STEM-centered (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) education beginning in K-12 and continuing through college, and technology making learning more inventive and interactive.
For example, in a recent article in Education Week, Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education, said the following regarding the biggest impact that technology is having in education: “Right now, the value is in access to high-quality resources. We’ve moved from 100 percent of learning materials coming from an out-of-date textbook, to interactive materials, and students in remote locations having access to high-quality resources. Technology has enabled learners to explore and learn on their own in ways that were harder to do when the resources all had to come from the teacher. It’s very powerful.”
Current and emerging changes in an increasingly globalized world is leading many people—including education experts and educational technology insiders, as well as parents and students—to speculate on what could possibly replace our traditional K-12 and college learning models as we move forward. A perceptual shift regarding how educators are viewing their role in teaching students is taking place, with various ideas regarding a “traditional alternative approach” gaining attention.
A recent article in Psychology Today takes a closer look at “Education’s Future: What Will Replace K-12 and College?” If you’re curious about what learning traditional learning alternatives could potentially disrupt the current field of education as we know it, keep reading!
In his article, Peter Gray, Ph.D. and research professor at Boston College, as well as author of Free to Learn, highlights some of the deep problems with the current educational system: “Ever more people are becoming aware of the colossal waste of money, tragic waste of young people’s time, and cruel imposition of stress and anxiety produced by` our coercive educational system… Children come into the world biologically designed to educate themselves. Their curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and willfulness were all shaped by natural selection to serve the function of education. So what do we do? At great expense (roughly $15,000 per child per year for public K-12), we send them to schools that deliberately shut off their educative instincts—that is, suppress their curiosity, playfulness, sociability, and willfulness—and then, at great expense and trouble, very inefficiently and ineffectively try to educate them through systems of reward and punishment that play on hubris, shame, and fear.”
The problems in education that Gray is passionately warning us about are not relegated to the formative K-12 learning years. He sees serious issues in higher education as well: “…what about those years of schooling that we call “higher education,” especially the four years toward a college degree? Many young people, because of family and societal pressure, see that as essentially compulsory, too. For them, college is just a continuation of high school—grades 13, 14, 15, & 16. And those years of schooling are even much more expensive than the earlier ones, which expense must generally be paid by the parents or through loans that can saddle a person for decades."
Gray sees a more cost effective way forward in education, an approach that takes advantage of the natural way students learn and includes practical, real-world work exposure. He outlined the following three-phased approach to education as an effective way to approach K-12 and college education moving forward: