A Schooling System for the 21st Century
If we were to put together a schooling system that applied the concepts discussed in the papers on this site, what might it look like?
While this article begins talking about "Gifted" students - as was the focus of the journal - it is clear that this system is designed so that every child's gifts are discovered and supported.
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Roeper Review, V2, #4, May-June 1980
A Schooling System for the Twenty-First Century
Robert L. Fizzell
Long range planning for the gifted should not be limited to our present education systems. Today’s educational structures do not provide the best opportunities for these youngsters.
Educators and parents of school children tend to think small when it comes to planning. We are always focusing on next semester; long term plans are for next year. This is not surprising when a “lifetime” is four or eight years.
However, it is important that we break from this pattern once in a while to get a proper perspective on our problems. Programming for gifted children provides a good example.
Most suggestions of programs for the gifted are things that could (and should) be done today: they are plans for next semester at best. The problem with this approach is that it takes the existing system for granted. Ninety percent of any recommended program is a continuation of the existing structure. Such plans never consider questioning the assumptions and implications of that structure and will always be limited by the structure.
Real long-term planning should not be so restricted. In fact, it must look at basic assumptions and reevaluate structure if it is to function properly. In education we must try to determine what it is we really want and need, then determine the best way to achieve it without unnecessary commitment to existing structure.
What do we want? In simple terms, we want to help young people develop their knowledge and skills to the maximum. For the gifted child, we want to ensure that “efficiency” and “standardization” do not impose restrictions that could be stifling. We want to ensure a balance of social and academic growth. We want youth to learn certain skills and knowledge and believe that each individual must have the opportunity to develop his own gifts and interests. Finally, we recognize that the costs for this process cannot greatly exceed current expenditures. While this final point might be a modifiable assumption, it rests on a rather firmly established set of social priorities which we will accept for now.
A couple of the above points need further consideration. First, we must look at what is meant by “developing knowledge and skills to the maximum.” This rests on the idea of potentials; but can we validly talk of maximum on the basis of current understandings of human potential? I think not. It appears that the best we can say is that different people progress at different rates. The five percent who are slow learners are clearly just that. At the other extreme, we also have no evidence that the five percent who learn more quickly ever reach their potential. Thus we must look elsewhere for our meaning of “maximum.”
Frequently, the school’s main function was simply to sort out those whom they wished to support for future access to opportunities from those whom they sought to consign to the bottom of the social heap.
If we cannot set a goal according to potential, we certainly can set one according to pragmatic social interest. Public schools were never, and need not be, designed to bring children to their maximum development, but only to a functional minimum. While we wanted to see some “bright” students progress a great deal, the main emphasis was on some sort of minimal functioning to permit youth to move on to the next stage in life. Frequently the school’s main function was simply to sort out those whom they wished to support for future access to opportunities from those whom they sought to consign to the bottom of the social heap. Of course, only the former needed to learn much, but even then, we didn’t pay close attention to what they learned.
What we really want today is some set of minimum standards which will permit all students to move toward further training or toward other options. Public schools must ensure that all graduates have these minimum qualifications to be successful in whatever they choose and to function satisfactorily as citizens. I firmly believe that at least ninety-five percent of our young people could meet this baseline by age twenty, while the academically gifted students might achieve them much sooner.
This brings us to the second problem with our general objectives for public schools: the standard set of academic goals. Schools are trying to specify what a graduate should actually know. Some people argue that we can’t do this, but I believe we can at least come very close. Table I lists a set of objectives for the high school graduate. These objectives can be achieved by 90 percent or more of the youth and provide a solid basis for full participation in our society and for entry to further training.
It will take a certain kind of structure which must have two critical components to achieve this. First, it must provide for variety. We recognize that different students progress at greatly different rates and, that they do not all progress in the same type of program. Thus, we must provide for variety in rate and variety in style. Second, our structure must certify that all graduates have mastered the objectives.
These requirements are not really new. Schools have talked about them for years, but never felt that they were important enough to act upon beyond minor variations in the traditional structure. Here we have said that we will go beyond that structure.
Some additional tasks that have been attached to schools need to be mentioned before we continue. These are clearly secondary functions but society does expect them and they do relate to the fact that “schools have the kids.” Thus, if we want to impact children, school is the easiest place to do it. Health, nutrition, custodial service (“baby sitting”), identification of abuse and neglect, and other local interests all get dumped onto the schools. Now it is certainly true that society has legitimate concerns here, and it is true that schools are a good place to catch youth. However, it is not true that school personnel are the best people to administer these functions. In fact, these functions often present a conflict of interest. The schools’ only interest in these other areas is that if the child’s health and emotional needs aren’t met, schooling becomes difficult or impossible. Thus, our new structure should provide for these functions but in a different way.
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The model I would recommend to meet the above criteria draws on three related existing structures and is solidly based. These existing components are: alternative schools, community education, and community based social services. Let us look at how these can be combined into a model for schools of the future that will meet the needs of gifted youth as well as others.
The core of the plan is what is called the Community Service Center (CSC). (Figure 1) One CSC will serve a population of about 100,000 people and coordinate the delivery of all social services, including education. It may have several satellite sites depending on local population distribution, but for our purposes we shall describe it as having one primary center.
The primary service to be delivered at the CSC is advising and assisting. Each family will have a Human Service Counselor at the center who assists family members to obtain the services they need. As such, he will be both an advisor and an ombudsman.
Available at the CSC will be primary public health services, public aid, employment counseling, mental health services, some schooling, and recreation programs. In addition, there will be some thirty to forty sub-centers which will provide direct child care, education, nutrition, and recreation services. All of these will be linked to each other and to the CSC by a mass transit system.
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Educational services will range from preschool through adult education, and will include special services for developmentally disabled and all others with special needs. However, the delivery system for education will be very different from that of current schools.
All educational services will be specifically goal directed with no reference to required time. Services will offer assistance to achieve specific aspects of the general educational goals of the community — such as in Table I. There would be many options for individuals to choose from to attain these goals. For example, one family might choose to educate their children to a certain level and have competency testing provided by the CSC. Other young children could be provided with Montessori, open classrooms, traditional classrooms, tutors or group experiences. At a higher level there would be opportunities for self instruction, apprenticeships, and peer study groups. My research (Fizzell, 1975; 1979) indicates that there are about a dozen and a half basic learning situations which are needed by different people (Table 2).
Gifted youth could select programs that would permit them to progress as fast as they were able in areas of their choice. There would be no artificial barriers to their social interaction for recreation would be separate from school. For example, a high school youth could take one or two courses at the community college, explore fine arts with other high school youth, and participate in recreational activities with many people of similar interests and abilities. A young gifted musician could create a program which explored music during part of several days each week and remaining with peers for academics.
Educational advisors would be available to each family at the CSC to assist students in finding appropriate programs and to monitor overall educational development. It would be the educational advisor’s responsibility to ensure that each youth achieved the defined objectives and then to certify this to potential employers and higher training institutions. Each child would progress as fast or as slow as was appropriate for his interests and abilities. Social contacts and social development would not be restricted by academic development. Each child’s life would be a combination of individually suitable experiences rather than the current single school experience for five hours each day.
Cross age experiences would be greatly increased by people coming together by common interests. Preschoolers, school age children, and senior citizens might be brought together at day care centers used for parenting education or at community cafeterias which would replace school lunches. The ages and development level of students in one class or learning experience would vary. Public transportation would replace school buses and enhance better behavior modeling and more varied social contact for youth. Generally, increased cross age contacts will enrich everyone’s experience.
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Such a structure is feasible because almost all components now exist. Restructuring may seem like fantasizing to some readers, but a moment’s reflection should reveal that the proposals here are quite feasible today for any community for it is really only a restructuring of existing elements to improve service delivery and need not increase costs. The result would be an education system which encouraged the development of individual gifts while meeting general developmental needs. It would be freed of the restraints imposed by existing structures while improving on the current goal orientations.
Long term planning can help us see the present more clearly. It provides freedom for dealing with problems and gives us the opportunity to create entirely new systems which can serve us better. At the same time long term planning need not be so far fetched that we would have to wait decades to implement the plans. The proposal here — though projected twenty years down the road — could actually be put into practice within the next couple of years.
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