Schooling in 2025

What will be the role/responsibility of schooling in 2025? In some ways, my answer to this question is the same as my answer to the role of content knowledge in 2025: as a vehicle to teach skills. While the factual information in our lives is very easy to find in the Internet age, there are few better ways to learn skills than to receive guided and graded practice in a controlled environment. Critics of schools (i.e., our students) will certainly argue that many of the things they learn in school are not useful in their lives – most people will not use differential calculus or dissect a frog outside of the classroom. But even the basic skills that are taught in earlier grades and reinforced through high school-level instruction – basic grammar or algebra, for example – are best learned at school, rather than re-discovered by each individual as they go through their lives.

More importantly, this line of thinking misses the point. The formulas of calculus may not be important, but the thinking strategies that go along with solving complex mathematics have value even as purely mental exercises to strengthen overall cognitive abilities and push the limits of what the brain can do. Comparing ancient civilizations may not be useful, but skills of historical comparison, evaluation of evidence, and chronological thinking are essential mental processes that students will benefit from mastering, and cannot easily acquire from reading things on the Internet or watching a video.

Some critics of the entire process of education see it as a strategy for control, teaching our youth how to take direction from superiors, follow arbitrary rules and schedules, and learn how to work until their bosses are satisfied with the product. It is hard to see the structure of modern schools without seeing echoes of the early industrialization of the country, when the future workforce had to learn to work to sit at a desk and work until the bell. However, the more conspiratorial aspects of this aside, the schooling performs an important role of socialization that would be sorely missed in a world without formal schooling. Students learn how to navigate social situations, manage and budget their time, and deal with rules they may not like. They learn how to interpret feedback and how to improve on their performance. Without schooling, these functions would be left to parents, who cannot create a social environment of peers the way that schools can, or employers, who have much more to lose while waiting for students to grow and mature than schools do.

Finally, the most important role of schooling in 2025 can be summarized in one word: exposure. Schools have resources that parents do not to expose students to information, ideas, and skills. While many students dissect a frog for the first and last time in 10th grade biology, others find their life’s calling in science. Schools can expose students to literature or historical eras that they would not have encountered on their own, showing students a unique view of the world. With technologies or projects that can only be practical on a larger scale, schools have the resources to show students things they would otherwise not see. Though this includes providing access to computers and the Internet that not every student has at home, it also means a full curriculum of things and experiences that need to be organized among large numbers of children – whether that is sports or drama or a school service project. Schooling provides these experiences and exposure to so much more of the world than students may find from the examples they see at home or the websites they may navigate to on their own.

The rigorous and authentic learning experiences that engage students in learning flow from this idea. If the role of high school was to teach students skills, rather than content, and to show them what the world looks like from different perspectives, rather than require them to memorize trivia, students would be engaged through project-based learning that allows them to explore their interests. With a more open curriculum, students could have a variety of opportunities and choices to meet the skill-based goals set for their courses. Removing the strict timetables and requirements currently in place would help teachers of students who might be left out or uninterested find a way to keep them engaged and maybe even excite them about school. And if I could explain in any more concrete detail what that would look like, I would be on a million-dollar book tour right now, not writing this blog post!