Alvin Toffler, the author of books about change like "Future Shock" and "Revolutionary Wealth", propounds a list of attributes for the School of Tomorrow. Alvin feels that current educational methods cater to the needs of the Industrial Revolution era. The industrial method of working needs all employees to walk into the factory at the same time, work in tandem in the factory line, and mass produce goods. The same model is employed at the schools too. All children walk into the class at the same time, simultaneously take the same set of lessons, and maintain military discipline.
Alvin Toffler envisions a new model of education that caters to the current Knowledge Era of workers. Children can start schools at the age they prefer - one child may start school at age four and another at age eight.
It's (the new school) open 24 hours a day. Different kids arrive at different times. They don't all come at the same time, like an army. They don't just ring the bells at the same time. They're different kids. They have different potentials. Now, in practice, we're not going to be able to get down to the micro level with all of this, I grant you, but in fact, I would be running a twenty-four-hour school, I would have non-teachers working with teachers in that school, I would have the kids coming and going at different times that make sense for them.
The schools of today are essentially custodial: They're taking care of kids in work hours that are essentially nine to five -- when the whole society was assumed to work. Clearly, that's changing in our society. So should the timing. We're individualizing time; we're personalizing time. We're not having everyone arrive at the same time, leave at the same time. Why should kids arrive at the same time and leave at the same time?
The textbooks are the same for every child; every child gets the same textbook. Why should that be? Why shouldn't some kids get a textbook -- and you can do this online a lot more easily than you can in print -- why shouldn't a kid who's interested in one particular thing, whether it's painting or drama, or this or that, get a different version of the textbook than the kid sitting in the next seat, who is interested in engineering?
I think that schools have to be completely integrated into the community, to take advantage of the skills in the community. So, there ought to be business offices in the school, from various kinds of business in the community.
Alvin Tofflers School of Tomorrow:
These are the fundamentals of the futurist's vision for education in the 21st century:
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