One Person Schoolhouse
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Education goes through eras based upon changes in technology.
Human history experienced several eras of education. In the distant past, you were taught survival skills by your family clan. Some clans became powerful, and instructions in management of clan resources became important. As civilization progressed, some wealthy families sent a child to study under a wise instructor or religious leader. Cities needed the means to develop legal, military, and structural experts. Apprenticeship provided some young people a life-long skill. Over time, general education expanded to include more and more people in society. The modern era of education represents the pinnacle of efficient education of the masses.
Several characteristics distinguish the current era of education. Most Americans are familiar with the public education system and university system. We’ll review it anyway to provide a means to differentiate the current era from the coming era of education, the One Person Schoolhouse.
The public school system consists of thirteen grades beginning with kindergarten and continuing with grades one through twelve. Schools are often broken into three parts: elementary, middle, and high.
Elementary schools include kindergarten through fifth grade. Elementary students learn as a group, often with a senior teacher leading them through their entire day.
From the sixth grade on, students learn from specialized instructors who remain in their rooms for the day as different groups of students visit for a session that lasts between forty-five and ninety minutes. The students move from room to room during the day.
Students attend classes to earn credits toward meeting the requirements to obtain a diploma as set forth by the state legislature. In addition to the required courses, schools may require a student to choose a certain number of classes from a list of options. The options presented are for courses that cover life skills, art, music, technology, or maybe sports.
In a typical day, the student may arrive at school around 7:30 AM, attend four to eight classes depending on class duration, and leave school around 3:30 PM. Classes are generally held in lecture form, with students taking notes as the instructor speaks.
The public school system is streamlined to move a high volume of students through 13 years of education. The system is so well established that one could possibly schedule all thirteen years of classes for a student before that student ever sets foot in a kindergarten classroom.
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Public school systems vary in the quality of education they provide, the level of security they offer, and the values they promote. For this reason, parents may seek (or yearn for) residence in a district with a school system that meets their expectations. The desirability of a school district may be a factor in the selling price of a house in that district.
Many educators in public school systems are union members. Unions often influence the operations of a public school
Administrators make up a high percentage of employees in a school system. The complexity of laws pertaining to education, the variety of services offered by a school system other than education, and the need to acquire funding through grants generate the need for administration staff.
Educational facilities double as meal delivery services. Eligibility requirements for free or subsidized meals vary by school district or state.
Public educational facilities must deal with violent children, homeless children, mentally ill children, and abused children. Some children come to school unready to learn, and the school educators and administrators and counselors must help ready them to learn.
And finally, some educators in the public school systems see themselves as guardians of the children against parents who disagree with their ideology. Parents and educators are at odds in some school districts.
That is a short summary of the highly complex educational system in the United States today.
Most private schools mimic the grade-based infrastructure of the public school system. The student can move between public and private schools as seamlessly as moving from one public school to another. Of course, credits must be synchronized between the schools, but overall, it can be done.
This universality of grade-based instruction establishes the grade-based infrastructure as the defining characteristic of the twentieth century era of education. The infrastructure is so deeply established that students who attend college follow the same grade-based, course-driven pattern.
The public education system today (being the middle school, high school, and university systems) certainly has its strengths.
Until recently, educational resources were scarce and expensive and large-scale remote learning impossible. Consolidation of students in close proximity to learning materials and professional instructors proved to be the best use of resources. For many decades, the system has been the most cost-efficient means of educating a large population of young people.
The public school system is reliable. In the event a storm damages the school facilities, the government prioritizes continuity of the daily school routine for the students. Just about the only long-term disruption to the school system is a union-organized teacher strike. Even during the COVID shutdowns, school continued for most students through remote learning.
The public school system offers young people opportunities to interact, make friends, and socialize. That’s a good thing. And educators and administrators identify children at risk and can help them. Again, a good thing. Plus, having students in a common location makes feeding those who might have otherwise gone hungry much easier. Another good thing.
Perhaps you’ve noticed the common thread here.
The core strengths of the American educational system derive from its consolidation of students into a single physical location. With all the students in one place at one time, school leaders distribute the costs of each educator across many students. The government can use the convenience of needy students being in a single location to feed them from one large kitchen. Likewise, educators may tend to special education students efficiently, by bringing them all together.
During the era now coming to an end, the American educational system made efficient use of its resources. The community could get half a century of service from a school building and years of reuse of text books. Equipment bought for the classroom could be used for decades. A school system to drew in all the students, educated them, provided extracurricular activities, and bused them home. At a time when the town library was the primary repository for information and the schools were the primary source of knowledge, this made perfect sense.
So, if the American educational system has so many strengths, why is its century-long era coming to an end? What signals the end of that era? What changed?
Easy access to inexpensive information marked the end of the era of education. The Internet takes credit for a large part of the transition.
Schools no longer have a monopoly on teaching. People can choose what to learn, when to learn, how to learn, and from whom to learn. People can learn things schools don’t teach. Learning from sources other than schools can be more exciting than learning in schools today.
The strengths of the formal school system, the efficiency of bringing everybody into a single classroom to be taught, is now its very greatest weakness. A growing number of people today want to learn something different, at a different time, in a different place, from a different person.
Evidence abounds that the schools have lost their monopoly on education. Put another way, people simply no longer need public education, and it shows. Plenty of resources exist at little or no cost for the student (or parent of a student) looking for an education. Homeschooling materials are now easily attained and match the quality of anything used in public education.
Consider the wide range of educational sources available today
For a few dollars anybody can host a web site nowadays. If you believe you can help somebody understand something, you can create a website to help people out.
People are more than willing to give their time to design and maintain these websites. One such website is Khan Academy.
Khan Academy started as one adult hoping to help a few children to understand their math assignments. KhanAcademy.org is now one of the most in-depth self-education websites on the Internet. What started with arithmetic has expanded to physics, economics, finances, history, and more.
Khan Academy touches people all over the world. Such outreach was impossible during the previous era of education. How would you have created anything close to Khan Academy in 1950? Impossible.
In the 1950s, if you wanted a reference book on a particular subject, you went to your local library. If your local library lacked adequate resources, you traveled to the city or a university for a more robust library.
Libraries held a monopoly on reference books in the past. You physically visited the library, looked up books in a catalog, and walked down aisles collecting them. You repeated your visits every time you needed new information. Sometimes, you traveled to larger libraries with more selection.
And if the libraries you visited did not have the book you needed, you probably just did without. How did you know the book you needed even existed? There was no Google in the 1950s for locating the book containing the information you need. You often accepted what the libraries offered.
Now, you can just order a book from Amazon or download the Kindle version. You can have a book in your possession within mere seconds. With an inexpensive subscription, you can access more books than you could read in a lifetime. These books include educational books for all learning levels of just about every subject.
Private companies offer education outside school to supplement the education provided by the school. Mathnasium is one example of a tutoring service to build your skills in mathematics. Similar companies include Yup and Tutor Doctor.
People seek tutoring for a variety of reasons. Every student is different; so too are their reasons for subscribing to a tutoring service. What is important to note is the number of people interested in these services. Companies like Mathnasium exist only because enough parents believe the school falls short in educating their children that they are willing to pay extra to supplement that education.
Mathnasium, Yup, Tutor Doctor, and many other companies like them offer online and in-person tutoring of individuals in a wide range of subjects. You’ll notice few (if any) tutoring services advertise that they’ll tutor you or your child in a classroom of thirty students. The appeal of these services is individual instruction. Direct one-on-one attention.
Tutoring has become a big business. You can get a franchise if you wish to own your own company.
Education can be fun. Computer gaming software educates by allowing the user to solve puzzles and create things. Educational software you install on your PC was very popular about 15 years ago. Are you old enough to remember the Knowledge Adventure Jump Start games?
Looking back, educational software can be seen as an early indicator of the end of the current era in education. Parents sought engaging software to advance the education of their children outside of school. Educational games offer a compromise between students who resist learning and parents who want to improve their child’s education.
Educational games for the PC seem to have fallen out of favor in recent years. Tablets and smart phones have largely replaced the PC in the households of many families with young children. Games that teach abound for Android and Apple platforms. Many are free (typically supported by advertising) but game software that costs money is usually fairly inexpensive.
Educational software offers the parent a way to keep a child busy while knowing the screen time is spent learning.
Schools offer high-end robotics and national competitions. But you can learn just about anything you need to know about robotics at home on a limited budget. You can buy all the parts for a circuit board and build your own sensors. You can program controller boards to act on the environment around your devices. These skills introduce children to career paths in demand today. No formal education required.
The ELEGOO Uno R3 robot tank and Makeblock mBot projects introduce children to robotics, sensors, and software development in easy-to-learn kits.
The Raspberry Pi is an entire computer on a board that fits in your hand. The Pi line of products is immensely popular with hobbyists. One example of people using their Raspberry Pi in the real world is to manage irrigation in a garden. The technology is fairly inexpensive and an entire industry has grown up around the Raspberry Pi. With a Raspberry Pi 4 kit, you can write programs to read a wide variety of sensors and manage input from controls on a breadboard. Or get multiple sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, temperature, barometric pressure, humidity, magnetometer) on a board and skip directly to software development to read inputs.
You can build robots and write code to make them do amazing things at home. You can attach sensors to inexpensive controllers and program them to report on their environment. Your children may see these devices as toys, but playing with them prepares them for a high-demand career in technology.
Projects for the Raspberry Pi and Arduino, another popular controller board, abound on the Internet. Depending on the projects you complete, you’ll learn about circuit boards, electricity, software coding, mathematics, and so much more.
The programming languages you’ll see often associated with these projects are C, Python, Java, and Scratch. The tools to develop code are free. The software you write for your devices is generally limited only by your imagination, desire to learn, and level of persistence.
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Graphic design software capable of rendering professional-quality images can be acquired for free off the Internet. Gimp, Blender, and Inkscape are powerful software packages, and all are free.
If your youngster is a budding artist, expand their horizons with extremely powerful graphic design software. Tutorials abound on the internet.
You don’t need to attend public school classes to learn how to use this software. Time spent learning graphic design skills can translate into a job in the industry. You learn at home, on your own PC, at your own pace.
Your school may have the budget to stock a STEM lab with multiple high-end 3D printers, but you can learn just about anything you want with an inexpensive 3D printer at home. With software such as Blender or Fusion 360 for personal use you can design objects to print for free. If you cannot think of what to print, start with ready-to-print projects from Thingiverse.
3D printers have come down in price over the years and prices continue to decline. For an investment of a few hundred dollars, you can get a 3D printer you can use to learn just about everything you’ll learn using the 3D printers at school.
3D printers are inexpensive enough to be given as presents for a birthday or Christmas. A child with a 3D printer must learn the design software, how to model an object, how to budget filament, component assembly, and more. All these “fun” projects are preparation for a career in additive manufacturing or engineering.
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People explain hard-to-understand concepts in simple terms on YouTube in short videos. You watch for free. The people who make the videos earn a percentage of YouTube’s advertisement income when you watch.
Imagine you want to learn Algebra. In the public school, you have an instructor. Singular, one. That instructor has strengths and weaknesses in teaching the material. You learn what the instructor gives you, how the instructor educates you, using the tools the instructor provides you.
The educator is expensive. What the educator teaches stays the same from year to year. The school could have recorded an instructor on VHS tape giving a lecture in 1988 and played it to students every year since, and the content would be as relevant today as it was then. Boring, probably, too.
YouTube gives you hundreds or even thousands of instructors for Algebra. People create short videos targeting a single tidbit of Algebra. They compress the content, editing out parts of the lecture that contain no value. They use graphics and visual stimulation to keep the video interesting. Some instructors do a poor job. Others do a superb job. Videos with high-value content rise to the top of the search results list. You get the best videos from the best instructors instantly. You can scroll down the list of videos until you find one that exactly matches your interests.
Some videos were posted years ago, but the latest comments are only minutes, hours, or days old. People voluntarily watch these years-old videos because these videos provide value to them. Somebody found a way to explain a complex subject and people consume it. By skipping from video to video, a person can quickly become proficient in a subject.
This is education in the marketplace. If you create a stellar educational video on just about any subject, you can earn money when people watch it. That is YouTube. Unregulated, unscripted, disorganized, unfiltered, and massively successful.
Would you like to attend a prestigious university for free? Now you can. You get no credit for the course, but you do get an education.
edX offers access to current classes at some of the most prestigious educational institutions in the world. For free. You may audit the course, meaning you receive no credits. MIT offers thousands of archived courses for free. Coursera offers thousands of free courses.
Universities that offer free courses cannot offer their entire catalog of courses for free. They have bills to pay, too. And some courses offered online are dated. The point here is that technology grants us the means to archive courses and offer those courses for free or at low cost. Some university open courses to any who wish to learn without concern for credit. Perhaps they hope a percentage of students auditing courses will transition to paying students.
Nothing has the potential to disrupt education like virtual reality software. The ability to simulate real-world scenarios makes every hands-on lesson memorable. And the student controls the pace and direction of the learning session, repeating lessons as necessary (something not possible in a classroom of thirty students).
The popular Meta Quest 2 virtual reality headset has over 76,000 reviews on Amazon. VR is mainstream now. You might associate VR with games, but VR has the potential to be so much more. Manufacturers will continue improving the technology and software developers will offer educational applications that take advantage of the technology.
Virtual worlds like from the movie Ready Player One are decades away. (The book, The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything, by Matthew Ball, provides a great introduction to how much work must go into setting up something even close to the worlds you’ll see in the movie.) But even the technology of today is more than adequate to allow for great advances in education.
Mathematics provide us a perfect example of how virtual reality teaches. For the user of the equipment, consider the amount of mathematics that go into simulating building a house. How much concrete? How long to cut lumber? What angles to cut the lumber? What are the load limits?
If you miscalculate the volume of concrete needed, the program shows the gap between what you have and what you need. In a classroom, it’s just a wrong answer on a piece of paper. In a simulation, it’s an experience.
And education also comes from writing the software and designing the virtual worlds. If you already own a VR headset and a decent PC, you can probably develop software for it yourself for little or no expense. All the skills you acquire developing your own virtual world can translate into a career in the field.
Education based inside virtual reality frees a student to learn anywhere they have a high-speed Internet connection. The student can “walk” down a street in another country and “dissect” a virtual animal and “build” a skyscraper, all in the same day. VR challenges the rigidity of formal education by offering vast experiences to anybody.
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Websites such as Udemy, O’Reilly, and Pluralsight offer video and interactive courses on a variety of technical subjects.
O’Reilly gives you access to so much software development expertise, one could consider the content on the website an alternative to college for a well-motivated individual. You could build your own “four-year degree” program to match your desired career path. All that’s missing is the degree.
The courses, books, and videos on these websites provide immeasurable assistance when studying for a professional certification.
Not everybody excels in a “let’s all work in groups” environment. The quiet learner can appreciate the abundance of material available on each of these websites for self-guided study.
The ability to look up just about anything of a technical nature on these websites highlights another benefit to the learner. People learn by doing but sometimes need a hint or examples. Having full access to these websites means the learner can skip from book to book, video to video, collecting ideas for how to solve a problem. Educators traditionally encourage memorization, but the world has grow beyond the average person’s ability to remember everything. Rapid discovery, knowing how to quickly find a solution on the Internet and elsewhere, is a skill well-suited for the real world.
You can learn a language through software, websites, or video communications.
When you think of learning using a smart phone, you might expect a modern version of the old Jump Start games. But a smart phone provides other ways to learn. Astronomy applications are not actual games but can be plenty fun and are certainly educational. You can install an application that maps the stars in the night sky, then learn the names of the stars and identify the planets. This beats looking at pictures of stars in a book! (And a decent telescope costs very little nowadays, if you want to continue your education.)
As strange as it may sound, a simple graphing calculator is a toy to a child. Whether you give them an actual calculator or an app on a smart phone, combined with a little instruction on how to punch in numbers, they can see how the graph changes. Children love to learn! A tool as powerful as a modern graphing calculator has never in history been in the hands of the average person to such an extent that it could be considered a toy. The Texas Instruments TI-84 is a mainstay in high school mathematics courses today. This calculator might seem to be rather utilitarian to you, but to a child with a gift for mathematics, it’s an entrance to a whole new world.
Why enroll in a course to study the culture of an other country when you can just go there yourself? COVID restrictions and airline flight cancellations aside, once you have a passport, you could be on an aircraft to another nation just about any time you want.
If you want to learn the history of Athens or the culture of Brazil, just go there! Choose your destinations, book your travel, schedule your hotel rooms, all online. Or, better yet, stay with a local family and integrate into the local scene. You’ll gain so much more knowledge than you could learn in a book or even interactive software.
Maybe you are a Civil War buff. Travel across the nation, visiting Civil War battlegrounds large and small. Follow General Grant’s campaign path. See for yourself the landscape and imagine the armies facing off.
In the past, the best you could hope for was a well-illustrated book or a reel-to-reel video documentary if you wanted to learn about another nation. You went to the library and looked up statistics and facts in the encyclopedia. Most of the information was already out of date.
The cost of travel is historically low. Travel is educational. Education is not about getting good grades. Education is about experience, skills, maturity, understanding. School is not a substitute.
In the previous era of education, you compensated for a lack of access to information through memorization. In the Internet age, knowing how to obtain the information is more valuable then keeping it top-of-mind. There is simply too much to know to remember it all. The information is available in moments from any search engine. Memorization is no longer the most efficient system.
Copyright © 2022 Ken Judkins
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