Models of Education for Children

There are a dizzying number of theories out there about American education. Smaller classrooms are the solution one day, the next, iPads. Glenn Harlan Reynolds of Instapundit takes on these ideas and makes his own predictions in his new book, The New School. I talked with him about his conclusion that the future of American education is rooted in technology, choice, and customization.

Modeling, explaining, and demonstrating are essential teaching activities if all children are to learn to read and write. Teachers model the reading and writing processes by engaging in them while children observe. Reading aloud to children, for instance, provides a model of how reading sounds and how stories go. Composing a list of things needed for a project provides a model of one function of writing. Talking about how a newspaper story made us worry provides a model of response to text. Models are essential, but models do not give children much in the way of information about how proficient readers actually accomplish such feats.

How do online courses meet today’s needs?

My daughter did almost all of her high school on online school. We found that pretty satisfactory because that way we didn’t have to do the homeschooling. She was able to do it selectively. As an example of the kind flexibility that technology brings, her way to do a class was to spend three weeks nonstop on a class. She finished a year’s worth of work in one class in three weeks of intensive effort instead of little dribs and drabs along the year the way they do in public school. And that’s something you couldn’t do without a technological platform that lets you move at your own pace.

Well, things change when there is more pressure to change than there is ability to resist the change, and I think we are approaching that point. I quote Herbert Stein, “Something that can’t go on forever, won’t.” I think we are getting pretty close to that. I mean there are really starting to be signs of change and in fact everything is happening faster than expected. I shipped off the manuscript for this book in June and I have been reading stories in the Chronicle of Higher Educationand Insider Higher Ed and stuff and it’s like, “Oh no this is happening too soon! This shouldn’t happen until after my book comes out! What if everything I predict happens before January when the book comes out?” The thing about this is this kind of change tends to happen kind of like the quote about bankruptcy in The Great Gatsby, you know, very slowly and then all at once. I think that we're coming to the end of the “very slowly” phase and getting to the “all at once.” I think there is going to be fairly dramatic change and a lot of new models. Some of these new models won’t work that well and some of them will, and there will be a period of where are we now? And then it’ll work out.