What classrooms used to look like

We hear nearly everyday how technology has advanced to near-science fiction levels. We experience unimaginable changes in daily life that we could not have anticipated even 10 years ago. Advances such as home automation, purely electric vehicles outselling established brands, light bulbs that use a mere fraction of the energy of incandescent bulbs, advances in science, medicine, and engineering and the growing grass roots maker movement in schools, not to mention high schools and some middle schools launching science experiments to the International Space Station, and the widespread and equitable access to information via the Internet, American society has truly come a long way. But despite these examples of advancement in (the mostly) marketplace, not much has changed in the fundamental way students are being taught in our schools. Except for the sepia tone, period furniture and clothing styles, and perhaps the lack of diversity, the image above could very well be taken of many classrooms in America today. The column and rows structure of the classroom with each student facing the front speaks to the “sage on the stage” approach to education that too many of our schools still indulge. This is a structure whose roots were established during an era of industrial mechanization where unskilled workers flocked to the cities in search of jobs and were “educated” to possess basic reading, writing, and arithmetic skills to be able to run the machinery in factories. These jobs remained the domain of unskilled laborers, with the added advantage of replacing workers as easily as one would replace “interchangeable parts” on the assembly line.  The teacher, much like the floor boss of the turn of the century, is the repository of all knowledge and control. This model focuses more on classroom management than on meeting the needs of students. It requires students to “play by the rules” to access knowledge held in trust by the teacher.

I’m interesting in examining how the classroom of today needs to adapt to a world where access to information is no longer the domain of a particular group of people who can decide when, where, and how to transfer that knowledge to others. We want to train skilled workers, not drones who are as interchangeable as the cogs in a wheel.