This school year, he took his children out of school and enrolled them in a home-learning system.
He understands he is taking an inordinate amount of risk with his own kids. But the decision to do this might as well have been inevitable.
It was their friend, Fred Kintanar, who first told him how our views of education would be drastically changed by the computer and Internet. Traditional education is inexorably expensive.
And there are social costs that need to be reconsidered. The early morning and mid-afternoon traffic gives us an idea of the cost of moving thousands of children to and from school every day.
How much savings in fuel, green-house gas emissions, and just plain ordinary stress would there be if kids could only study at home, using the home computer and a good internet connection?
Fred said, we will all eventually realize how expensive traditional schooling is. Only a few of us will be able to afford the personal and social costs. He was batting for distance education and home-school. This was the “wave of the future.” The future, he said, would be within the time of the next decade.
The dissenting opinion to this is that distance-education is not for everybody. The conservative view is that most parents do not have the time and ability to help educate their kids. This view is rooted on the idea that parents have to supervise home-schooling themselves. This is a view which cuts both ways in the argument. It is why home-schooling is difficult. But it also tells us why it is not only good but absolutely necessary.
In better times, we should all rather have a more direct hand in teaching our kids. In the future, home schooling could be handled in such a way as to ease this burden on parents. He imagines Fred saying, the technology needed to do this is there and has been there for many years now.
What is lacking is merely the imagination.
It is always difficult to change the mind-sets of people. Much harder still to move this with large industries, which is what schools and the whole educational system are. Over time, schools develop teaching methods and pedagogies. These are not the major problem. The teaching methods and pedagogies are easily translated into a distance-learning environment.
It is the complex of teaching infrastructure which is harder to amend. School administrators have a culture of their own, a standard system of operating and a practice rooted on the most traditional conservative assumptions.
They think enrollment figures, building infrastructure, library buildings, laboratories, standards of excellence, and established testing methods for this. This will take longer to change.
Only a select few will realize the inevitable practicality of distance-learning. Only a few university institutions have ventured into this. But all will have to, eventually.
And there are many reasons for this. Expensive education is a process of social selection. Only the children of the well-to-do get well-to-do education, which prepares them for well-to-do jobs. The poor stay where they are.
But this is no indicator that well-to-do children ever really become better educated. Many have written how the current educational system worldwide has become merely a system of processing children for “factory jobs” inside the factory environment of a traditional school.
Imagine classroom sections of 35 to 60 students all supervised, their test papers checked, by a single teacher. These numbers inevitably make the act of teaching impersonal. There is no room in the crowded classroom to learn creativity and develop an inquisitive mind. These numbers also explain why learning will consistently degrade the more “successful” school institutions become. “Success” being measured now mostly by “enrollment” figures.
It is because he has been a teacher for 30 years now that he feels schools and universities should reassess their teaching methods and reconsider the teaching environment. This should start by asking if the institutions have maximized the use of the computer and internet resources in their teaching methods. Children are more inclined now to research on their own. They developed this all by themselves.
The school institutions do not include in their curricula self-teaching and self motivated research using computer and internet resources. The old didactic teaching system is still the rule. Schools still have a long way to go.
He can not wait where his own children are concerned. Last year, when his children were enrolled in a regular school, their time together was mostly spent on the road driving to and from school. While this amount of driving through morning and afternoon traffic took a toll on the father, soon he realized how much time this gave him to talk with his kids.
They talked mostly about school and what was “lacking” in it. He found this “lack” surprisingly also pertinent to his own work as a teacher. His own children made him a better teacher.
Eventually, they all talked about alternatives to regular school. In due course, they remembered Fred Kintanar and how possibly right he is. Now they will know for sure.