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    Quarantine: The End of Brick and Mortar Schools

    The threat of ReDS and fuel costs are going to close down physical schools - what then?

    Started by: mudmama Raves:4

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    ReDS in densely populated areas, fuel costs in rural areas currently served by bussing are going to effectively close down physical locations for public schools. What will happen next? Can school boards scramble fast enough to provide the infrastructure to support online and distance education? Do you think that is enough? Do you have a better solution in mind?

    There is already home schooling going on. Surely to add people at an interactive online level would be easier than the brick and mortar model of the past.

    What about families that do not have the necessary resources to homeschool? Do you think online education meets the needs of young elementary aged students? Or those with special needs? Technology is great but online education - screen time education does not access very many modalities of learning. And a computer can\\\'t be a babysitter.

    We're working with CISCO and HP to provide distance education services. Also, now that the OLPC project is cash flow positive and has a decent product we'll be offering discount incentives to people in the US to purchase one. Thanks to MIT's Open Courseware project most of the lecture and notes material is in place. And since the Library of Congress now digitizes it's archives, we have a request going up to the President to allow us to have full access to those resources. In addition we already have infrastructure into the last mile, and we'll be upgrading people to Super Wi-Max where we can. It's not going to be perfect, it's not going to be flaw free, but we're going to give it our best shot.

    I was going to mention OLPC as well. Considering what kind of virus factories schools can be, schooling at home may become mandatory in light of the ReDS situation.

    Distance learning is good in theory, but how well does it work in reality? School is an important social aspect of childhood where children meet with their peers. In addition, direct personal contact with teachers and immediate access for help in school versus the loss of verbal conversation online can mean the difference between understanding a topic and missing the point completely.

    From my experience homeschooling the entire socialization thing is a non issue - homeschoolers are good at networking, organizing playdates getting their kids to soccer with other kids. The problem as I see it is that in the past people who homeschooled were motivated to for a number of reasons (educational philosophy, lifestyle choice, ideology) but in that motivation comes decisionmaking around having a parent at home fulltime, working from home, etc. One of the very real roles schools played in the last century was as a warehouse for children while their parents were at work. I'm not downplaying this role, because we have set up society around the idea that children are occupied by school between 9 and 3 every day. We need major societal changes to accomodate them NOT being in school any more, without shortchanging them - they can't sit in front of a keyboard locked in the house from 9-3. That is not what homeschooling is about.

    Human history (and what we gather from pre-history) shows that traditional schools are the exception to the rule. Communities have sought to educate their young for ages, and often this centers around hands on learning with various community members in various locations. Add to this style of learning the immense tool of the internet, including its ability provide many different forms of useful and engaging content, and I envision communities who teach their children in a diverse number of ways, least of which requires that they attend a traditional brick and mortar school. Both ancient and cutting-edge mesh brilliantly here to truly engage our children

    I completely agree Horizon! The issue I see is that "teaching our own" is not an instinctive drive - it is a learned skill. If you look at the 20th century and how we treated native populations in Canada and the US the residential schools were a tool in cultural genocide. "We" went into Native communities, took the children away at school age and "educated" the Native children in boarding schools. It was pretty effective - they lost their language, their connections with their family and community, their parenting skills (and I see teaching/mentoring as a parenting skill). Several generations later and they are still dealing with the repercussions of that. Today, parents are facing the same thing - they have lost faith in their ability to teach their own, they think there's some special knowledge taught to teachers in education programs. There isn't - they learn classroom management techniques.

    "I'm not downplaying this role, because we have set up society around the idea that children are occupied by school between 9 and 3 every day. We need major societal changes to accomodate [sic] them NOT being in school any more, without shortchanging them - they can't sit in front of a keyboard locked in the house from 9-3. That is not what homeschooling is about." True, homeschooling initially was more about controlling what your children were influenced by than by any real desire to improve their education. Religion, fear of exposure to peer pressure, from what I have seen were the main issues. And true a lot of home schooling parents make an effort to have their kids socialized, but an equal amount don't. I had a student pulled out and "homeschooled" simply because her mother wouldn't get up and get her to school on a regular basis. The mother was facing prosecution, the girl was being held back... "Mom" pulled her out and picked up the required texts and started "homeschooling." People keep their kids home from school if there is a rumor of trouble the next day, do you seriously believe they will send them to school to be exposed to ReDS? And fuels costs? Maybe in urban areas where there is a public transportation system in place kids could get to school, but in rural areas just the gas crunch here in the south over the last couple of weeks has hit schools hard. Schools in their current form are hold overs from the "school plant" concept that was designed to produce nice calm little worker bees for the factories. Moving around at the whim of the bell, not thinking too deeply about worrisome things like Global Warming, depletion of the fossil fuels, war? pish posh... Junk science at least, or a conspiracy by those dang Libruls to try and keep us from having our due at worse. In a society where people are working from home (When they are fortunate enough to have jobs) due to energy concerns and fear of contracting disease from others "home schooling" or distance learning just makes sense. And those who have trouble learning that way will be what those who can't quite keep up have always done... They'll be the worker bees, the criminals and the people who used to be called "consumers." Those who need to be taken care of but aren't able to contribute to society in any real way.

    I know people who use homeschooling as a way of controlling their kids, they are the same people who use public and private school, and punitive discipline to control their kids. Even back in the 1990's they were really in the minority in the communities I lived in. MOST people I knew who homeschooled began because school was not meeting their kid's needs my oldest graduated from a public school IB program, my next child had Asperger's and it wasn't yet on the radar as anything but a behavioural issue so we ended up homeschooling him for several years, by then we werre pretty well won over by the FREEDOM it offered our kids...the sudbury valley model school was our ideal though because it offered an oasis where kids were treated as members of society, not as baggage) for a variety of reasons. Once they started homeschooling they got caught up in other ideological reasons to continue. MOST that I knew were influenced by the unschooling movement, by writers like John Holt, John Taylor Gatto, Richard Louv. TODAY in 2019 a whole lot of people have been suddenly pushed into homeschooling without the supports necessary to make it work well for them. Who'll look after the kids? For migrants how will they learn the majority language where they are? What kind of supports are there for families who do not have access to computers yet? What will have happened to the public library system? Maria Montessori began teaching and developed her methods out of trying to meet the needs of inner city children who were what we would to use a 1970's-80's term be called "latch key kids"...only they weren't 8-12 year olds they were 3-12 year olds. So how can we reach these kids? Suggesting our young grow up to be criminals if they can't learn infront of a screen is griefing - pure and simple.

    One possibility is that, instead of homeschooling with just one or two kids in one household, you could combine several. Like a perpetual study group. If a small group of kids met at one person's house, say, a four or five times a week, it would shrink the fuel cost somewhat and reduce the risk of ReDS.

    Kaza - this is an excellent idea (and the reality is that MOST homeschoolers already do this in some form or another - coops etc. I set up a superstruct the Community Access Educational Resource Centers to help facilitate this kind of small class clustering. I think it combined with distance education podcasts etc would work really well to reach young children who need more hands on and social learning than older kids too.




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