The beginning of the end for the industrial schooling system?
23-June-2007
permalink comments (7) forum (7) email this"Knowsley Council in Merseyside, which - for years - has languished near or at the bottom of exam league tables, has abolished the use of the word [school] to describe secondary education in the borough.
It is taking the dramatic step of closing all of its eleven existing secondary schools by 2009. As part of a £150m government-backed rebuilding programme, they will reopen as seven state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, learning centres with the aid of Microsoft - which has already developed links with one school in the borough, Bowring.
The style of learning will be completely different. The new centres will open from 7am until 10pm in both term-time and what used to be known as the school holidays. At weekends, they will open from 9am to 8pm.
Youngsters will not be taught in formal classes, nor will they stick to a rigid timetable; instead they will work online at their own speeds on programmes that are tailor-made to match their interests.
Children will be able to study haircare, beauty therapy, leisure and tourism, and engineering as well as the more traditional academic subjects.
They will be given their day's assignments in groups of 120 in the morning before dispersing to internet cafe-style zones in the learning centres to carry them out.
The 21,000 youngsters of secondary education age in Knowsley will also be able to access their learning programmes from home."
I see this as the first big crack in the present model of schooling which dates from the first industrial revolution. And it won't be the last.
7 Replies (comments)
1 Seeing the Future of Education
Thanks for such a heartening story!
2 Wow! I would love to keep tabs on how this will work...
3 A bold step forward
4 Not everyone happy.
Graham, the story has been picked up here and there in the Blogosphere. There was a discussion in Difference Zone at Treforest, http://difference.weblog.glam.ac.uk/2007/5/18/school-s-out-forever back in May, which shows the divisions that plague the world of educational reform. and Mr. Read who is closer to Knowsley than many of us has some comments http://mrread.blogspot.com/2007/05/knowsley-curates-egg-when-you-read.html5 A thought
Finally someone moves on the chess board!
Hats off to the brave people who are not only questioning the status quo but moving on. No new innovation in education has ever been subjected to such "proof of value" as ICT.
As Marshall Mcluhan once observed:
The children of technological man respond with untaught delight to the poetry of trains, ships, planes, and to the beauty of machine products. In the school room officialdom suppresses all their natural experience; children are divorced from their culture. They are not permitted to approach the traditional heritage of mankind through the door of technological awareness; this only possible door for them is slammed in their faces.
At last there is hope that the wedge is in!
6 Mr Read
7 A desperate version of Thomas Edison
- If there's a model of education clearly associated with the early industrial revolution, it's Joseph Lancaster's monitorial school system, which was rejected in favor of self-contained classes.
- If I were a parent in Merseyside, I would be irate that the council might fob off this mess with claptrap about a new paradigm (that's probably the only buzzword missing from the Independent article). Mr. Read is correct: Cuban gives us plenty of reasons to be skeptical of this move.
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