Students in the US typically spend approximately twelve years in school. They start when they're independent enough to put on their own shoes and to use the bathroom without assistance. They leave when they can function well enough to buy their own shoes and clean their own bathrooms without parental assistance.
The most consistently documented outcome of an individual's having completed school to a high school diploma is the ability to hold a full-time job in adult life.
Just showing up on the appointed 180 days per year for a dozen years, gets us most of the skill of getting along well enough with random humans our age as well as many older and younger. We learn to comply with rules and authorities outside of our families' expectations. Just the ability to wake up consistently in the morning and turn out in a public sphere at least minimally washed and dressed is a significant accomplishment.
There's tremendous learning in putting up with your classmates, putting up with teachers, putting up with schedules, sitting still, standing in line, waiting your turn. Waiting, waiting, waiting.
And there's more or less controlled competition in every direction. When do I get picked first? When do I get picked last? Am I your third best friend or your fourth best friend? You're my best friend for ever, and I'm going to the prom with someone else.
The curriculum is obedience, compliance, cooperation, consistency, patience, and self control.
Reading, writing, and arithmetic? I got machines for those now.
Obedience, compliance, cooperation, consistency, patience, and self control? My average is C+.
The good news is: I still have a lot to learn.
All this makes me think: how do I want my grandchildren to learn? As a lifelong educator, I've been watching the collapse of conventional schooling. Hand in hand, conventional work is collapsing. This discipline of daily leaving one's room and mixing randomly with hoi polloi on streets, buses, classrooms, offices is evaporating;
What's next?
For me and for them, I want to visit the townlands and learn the minds of many distant people. I want to learn more languages. I want us to learn in other languages.
What if we learned Mathematics in Arabic, Law and Diplomacy in Mandarin, Poetry in Irish and Japanese.
I learned the Ojibawa elders insist the young learn the traditions by listening and remembering. They don't allow text, much less video and recording. Learning transmits directly from mind to mind.
I want to learn more of my discipline, cognitive science, from the Objibwa elders in their language.
All this will require obedience, compliance, cooperation, consistency, patience, and self control.
Perhaps our brains will have more room for this now that machines can do reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Warm regards,
Francis Sopper