News | Friday, 13th May 2011
Will computers be the end of schools?
Professor airs her views in TES
Pupils could now be educated alone via computers. So will there be any point making them gather in bricks-and-mortar buildings in future? Professor Keri Facer, of the University's Education and Social Research Institute argues there is.
Read her arguments below or see her column published in today's Times Education Supplement.
THE FUTURE for the school, in some visions of the next two decades, is that it should disappear.
One of the founders of the online School of Everything has suggested that the focus of education reform should switch to lifelong learning and that "schools will be 10 per cent of education policy in 20 years' time".
Taken to their logical extreme, such discussions are leading to suggestions that the school itself will simply be dissolved into the learning landscape and replaced by personalised learning environments.
Riel Miller, who was senior researcher at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's International Futures Programme for a decade, has explored what might happen if education moved away from focusing on supporting "large factory schools" towards providing help for individuals to learn, announcing the end of compulsory schooling by 2020.
School is 'history'
In this scenario, he imagines the following major milestones: "By 2015, half of high school students have opted out of the compulsory system. By 2020, the old classroom school is a historical vestige."
I want to make a different argument. I want to argue that the potential for socio-technical changes to amplify massively social and economic inequalities in the coming decades is significant. This means that, more than ever, we will need schools that are physical, locally accountable organisations, committed to building viable and sustainable futures for everyone in their communities.
For fear of stating the obvious, any consideration of the relationship between education and the future needs to acknowledge that educational institutions cannot be considered natural and unchanging phenomena.
Digital cultures
The next decade promises to bring some significant challenges to the way we think about schools. First, children's participation in digital cultures raises a set of questions about how and whether we should police the boundary between formal education and informal learning.
Second, the potential to set up online schools combined with an impoverished national debate about education is opening up the possibility for a fragmentation of state education, raising questions about who should govern schools.
Third, the "ecosystem" of education outside the school is becoming increasingly complex. The web is also populated by thousands of more specialised and less professionally produced videos made by a new groundswell of "folk teachers".
These individuals have particular skills that they thoughtfully and precisely document and then post on YouTube or similar sites for everyone to access - whether it is advice on turning a heel when knitting a sock, managing a tricky bit of fingering on the guitar, or bleeding a radiator. As new folk educators are beginning to make their presence felt and as workplaces become sites for formal accreditation of learning, questions are raised about the institutional and economic arrangements that should underpin education.
Shared values
All of these developments have the potential to challenge the monopoly of schooling over educational processes. These developments also open up radical new futures for schools, teachers and the relationship between schools and communities. They open up the possibility of schools fundamentally detached from "place" and connected only by shared educational values. They open up the possibility of schools radically distributed across cities and workplaces and fragmented into millions of personalised learning environments.
So why argue the case for "a school" even as it becomes theoretically possible for the first time to equip individuals to wrap their educational resources around themselves and to personalise their learning to meet their own needs?
The oppression of standardised teaching and curriculum, and the exclusionary and sorting practices of schooling, after all, might be overcome by the use of digital technologies to allow individuals to construct their own educational pathways from a range of different education providers and resources. For some children, their survival is predicated upon their withdrawal from hostile schooling experiences.
Last public spaces
The reason we need to continue to invest in the school as a physical space and a local organisation is because I believe it may be one of the most important institutions we have to help us build a democratic conversation about the future. A physical, local school where community members are encouraged to encounter each other is one of the last public spaces in which we can begin to build the intergenerational solidarity, respect for diversity and democratic capability needed to ensure fairness in the context of socio-technical change.
Moreover, the public educational institution may be the only resource we have to counter the inequalities and injustice of the informal learning landscape outside school. The school is also potentially the most powerful local institution to help resist possible futures of breakdown and dispossession that seem increasingly possible.
Far from being irrelevant in a world of digital networks, the local is an important sphere for achieving change that has an impact on people's lives and for building children's social and educational resources. It is often at a local level that substantial budgets are allocated and decided, often in ways that are determined by special interests.
Face-to-face meetings encourage relationships of reciprocity and care; acting at the local level may encourage greater participation because people care more about what happens in their own areas; and the local is a site in which differences of age, ideology and religion cannot be avoided. The local, in other words, is a place where we are forced to learn to live together and in which important decisions are made.
Contact with those who know
All of these reasons suggest the need for a public education institution rather than a landscape of atomised, personalised learning environments.
There are also other, equally important reasons - not least that while everyone learns and everyone teaches, there is such a thing as expert professional knowledge in education.
Those who have specialist disciplinary knowledge of a particular subject may be lousy at helping other people understand it. There is a powerful argument for retaining schools as sites for important professional learning among educators, as a network through which insight into learning sciences can be shared and as important resources to enhance the overall quality of teaching and learning in the wider educational ecosystem.
Finally, barring revolution and complete breakdown, there will continue to be a need for social institutions that provide care and protection for children and such an institution is likely to be tasked with an educational role. In that case, we may as well ensure that it works well.
Reimagine school
Given these concerns, we would do better to rethink the role of the school than to proclaim its impending doom. It is therefore the time both to defend the idea of a school as a public resource and radically to re-imagine how it might evolve if it is to equip communities to respond to and shape the socio-technical changes of the next few years.
The trajectory of this evolution will be dependent upon schools' responses to five major challenges - how they adapt to changing intergenerational relationships, how they address the networked individual, how they engage with new conceptions of knowledge, how they locate themselves in relation to growing inequalities and how they see their roles as actors in democratic debate.
