Avoiding deja vu: new ideas for education in the 21st century

Abstract

What does the school of the future look like? If you’re asking that question, you’ve framed the issue incorrectly already. Maybe the school of the future isn’t a school at all. A better question would be, what does education look like in the 21st c.? How is it possible that in the last 200 years, everything in the world around us has changed radically except education. Even given the actual opportunity afforded us given the massive disruption caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, all most schools did was move traditional school online: students logged-in to zoom or google classroom and a teacher was there, primarily at the center of the classroom in much the same way as in school buildings. Many or even most students “joined class” with their cameras off, as a symbolic representation of tuning-out their teachers in the same way they would tune out in a traditional classroom. As we get deeper into the 21st c., we owe it to students to use technological tools available to us to transform education.