Good Day Punks!
Back again with another worldbuilding post, this time in the efforts to explore a better education system. To understand a better time, place, and methodology for learning, and how these understandings can be incorporated into a new reimagined world. It’s time to take our schools to school with the latest worldbuilding post:
Solarium - The Pursuit of Learning
I generally think that we do ourselves a disservice by limiting our learning potential to the times and place of the classroom. There is much more that can be gleamed by integrating the learning experience with the world around us. Would you agree? Would you rather education be part of a rigid, maybe convenient schedule? Would love to know your thoughts as I use this post and all the user comments to generate a writing prompt and flesh out more of my worldbuilding.
Whether you comment or not, hope it was at least a thought provoking read and I greatly appreciate your time! Have a great day! :)
An interesting read, I think most of us agree that modern schooling isn’t really working for a lot of kids. If interest and real world focused education is going to work though it would need to be a community project rather than individual works. So much of early education is the social skill building and basics about the world that at least at first I think it would need to be fairly structured/standardized (sharing, courtesy, basic reading/math, etc.) Does anyone know if this sort of is being or has been tried on any large scale?
If you look into Montessori schools, they are a mix of a structured social environment for that early social skill building and working with nature/natural principles to help kids actively learn about the world around them through interaction and working together with others. I actually meant to mention that style of learning within my writing, but that train of thought got caught up in another station.
The Montessori style of education is well worth looking into, and I really hope that governments and communities around the world see the value in adopting that type of learning environment.
Thanks for the tip! I had heard of Montessori schools before but only in the context of fancy private schools. In the ~5 minutes of top level reading there are some really interesting ideas there, it’s definitely something I’ll be looking further into. A couple of friends have been lamenting the state of public schools here (Ontario, Canada) so alternate learning styles have been top of mind for me.
IMO Private schools are kind of “pay to win” in education (technically lots of aspects in education are quite like that at least in the US). I do wish public schooling adopts different learning styles (such as Montessori schools)
Completely agree higher salaries and less bureaucratic breathing over the shoulder attracts better teachers out of the public system and into private schools where only the privileged have access. But frankly who can blame them; here in Ontario the teachers spend more time without a contract than with one and our government tried making it illegal for education workers to strike last year. Wouldn’t surprise me if they tried the same thing when there’s a strike next month.
One of the interesting aspects of Montessori is the mixing of age range. Not total, but there are age ranges that work well together and teach from each other. One teacher for 30 students is hard when the teacher has to teach each of them, but if the environment is set up in a way that kids can teach each other (with the teacher checking everything is alright of course) you gain in efficiency and the kids learn a ton of social skills that the typical models do not teach.
Another thing that is happening at our local school (public, non-Montessori but the teachers are top-notch) is that teachers take care of not making level groups but affinity groups and try to mix levels within a group, and insist on the diversity of teaching paths.
I have mixed feelings about it because I am fairly familiar with educational neglect, having been trapped in an strongly underfunded rural Midwest high school where the football coach was also the history teacher and the science teacher and the music teacher (and from secondhand info, the agriculture science teacher) just gave the fuck up on us (we only had one of each of those).
But I’m already convinced that most testing and grading are, in fact, bullshit, as per yootube attached: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-SZ_FPZew&t=3s
