
The Shape of Things to Come
Page 3 of 3
The schools which will survive...
Here is what will happen to those schools which don't get torn down or turned into office buildings, after the pending socioquake happens:
- Most will become appendages of the electronic public utility glorified day care centers supervising groups of electronic learners and losing ground day by day to private operations competitively offering such services.
- A few will survive as schools and be models and providers in the electronic public utility.
- A few will develop unique and highly valued features, products and services, which can't be had elsewhere on or off the Web, and will carry forward on that basis.
- Parenthetically, a special case: university graduate schools may survive by becoming more of what they were trending toward becoming apprentice trade schools, though it would be much better were they to cultivate more of the special features which can keep them in demand. At the same time, at the other end of the educational ladder, many or most elementary schools may survive for a time if only because of the greater need of personal supervision of their charges. These schools also, a few years later, will face some interesting problems.
Simply put, most present-day schools and school systems can't be bothered to do these things. The vast majority of these will soon abruptly cease operating as schools. As we write this (October 2000), today's schools seem to be at their economic and political peak, commanding more money and material resources than ever before in American history, a larger public expense on the whole even than that of national defense. To see how fragile all that is, look at the results they are getting from that enormous investment and commitment.
Even less extravagantly endowed schools, in the poorest regions of the country, will quickly follow their richer cousins into oblivion when those emerging cardboard computers can get air-dropped in saturation into any jungle to bring the Internet and the emerging free public electronic utility that education is about to become.
Flatly, the best available anywhere is going to be available everywhere, and much of it for free. It is that which schools and teachers are about to run into.
After more than 30 years of personal struggle, this writer has come to accept that most schools simply are not going to make the needed improvements, and therefore are about to go down.
How completely and abruptly they go down, and whether enough mitigating alternatives can be gotten into place in time to prevent huge or catastrophic waste of human and material resources during the now-looming socioquake, is the question before us.
For a while, we had hoped to see the charter school movement establish some viable alternatives, but too many of these have thus far been pale imitations of the regular schools (perhaps because of the review system through which their proposals get cleared). Many seem to beat to death some minor variation or innovation as the great answer while ignoring all else, even each other's efforts, as a possible source for further genuine improvement.

A hard conclusion, with all due apologies
Most schools, and most teachers, just won't survive coming events.
For you as a teacher to survive the coming ruptures, you'll have to work without the material or moral support of most of those around you. But within a decade, you then will be one of the few who still have the irreplaceable satisfaction of working meaningfully as a teacher.
Your Socrateur, Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Important References:
These sites also contain much of relevance, including some of the aforementioned Socratic procedures of Project Renaissance:
You can find accelerated-learning courses in:
- Cambridge College, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in its masters-level training for teachers, the National Institute of Teaching Excellence (N.I.T.E.), under Provost, Mahesh Sharma, 1000 Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge.
- Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, in its education department under Prof. Lyelle Palmer.
- Win Wenger's book, Beyond Teaching And Learning.
Project Renaissance's orientation, as reflected in this book, is on understanding and not on memorization. Some of that understanding can come on pretty rapidly, because most of what you're trying to learn is already there in your unconscious data-base, which constantly is getting reflexively associated, but whose resultant insights almost never reach consciousness.
This book and Project Renaissance feature a good many direct, pretty easy ways to bring those insights readily conscious, in context and generally. Whatever learning then remains to be done integrates readily around this already-known core. See the review in Book Reviews.

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Win Wenger
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