NO, it is self-evident if we look back into our past. Schools were invented only in the early eighteenth century, less than 300 years back; for over 99.9% of human existence, education of children was imparted without schools. Every home, kinship and village community was responsible for educating its children. Education was much more a normative activity, a matter of enculturation of children in the life – social, cultural, economic – of the family (and the community).
The rise of the industrial society created the need for large scale movement of people from their ‘family-occupations’ to industries and schools were created to facilitate the movement. The rapid spread of industrialization galvanized schools as the ‘global format’ for educating children for the new economy and society.
School is a very young social instrument and focused on educating all the children in a society to a common ground needed for industrialization-led globalising economy and urbanization (by default). The need to mass educate was never even a remote imperative in a largely rural/agricultural society with its local-centric economy, strictly stratified roles, no horizontal mobility and tightly-knit community living. Schools were adopted as the model of universalisation of education to fuel an evolutionary development that started over a couple of centuries ago.
School embodies the outcome of the first social experiment in formalizing (or institutionalizing) education of children and there is no going back to informal education systems
of the millions of years of human evolution. However, what must be understood in most certain terms is that schools are going to be the social institutions for educating children for all times to come but everything about school must keep pace with evolutionary imperatives. There is nothing true and critical about the way schools are designed today and they must transform without prejudice to live up to the educational imperatives and opportunities of the information technology intensive knowledge society and economy.
YES, if we look ahead, school is the way to educate children. However, not in the way they are.
In fact, the more important characteristic dimensions of school education – class-wise ‘prescribed syllabus’, teacher-led syllabus transaction, age-wise classrooms, summary progress reporting, school-home divide, divorce from career preparation, gross neglect of overall development, marginalization of talented and gifted children, ‘creation of slow learners’, and the likes – are already comprehensively outmoded for schools across the world and are surviving on borrowed times.
Mention must also be made of the large-scale ‘home schooling’ movement in the USA and elsewhere. Families ‘home schooling’ their children educate their children at home.
One of the authors has had the personal experience of ‘liberally educating’ his only child, a daughter, for four years between Classes VII – X and in 2014 she appeared in IGCSE examination as a private candidate.
Interestingly, Sandeep and his wife Saloni broke the mould of conventional schools as well as home schools and have invented an altogether new model of educating children, which they call ‘liberal education’. Their daughter has done exceedingly well in academics besides being accomplished in numerous co-scholastics domains.
By the way, liberal education is their term for ‘inverted school’ – ‘academics at home and everything else at school’. In general, co-scholastic education needs more physical access to co-learner communities than scholastic education. Sandeep and Saloni do not see schools fading out of glory and are relentlessly working to help conventional schools transit towards becoming ‘liberal schools’.
Interestingly, there is no school* in the world which has named itself as ‘Liberal School’; schools we know today are all about regimentation and schools cannot be conceived if they are liberally organized i.e. if schools are truly student-centric and not teacher-centric. The current school design is almost totally teacher-centric and this has way outlived its utility. It is not for current school leaders to decide the future formats of schools; the national and global communities will dictate the design of the schools of tomorrow (the knowledge society schools). If at all, current school leaders are moral bound to catalyse the change and not resist it!
To summarise, school is now the institutional model for educating children – the place of schools in the education of children is irreplaceable – but schools need to mutate every element of their design to become student-centric!
*Except, of course, the legendary exceptions – Summerhill,
Sudbury and the small club of such schools. However, after over 90 years of Summerhill’s creation, the listing of such schools across the world number in two digit figure.
‘Learn what you are and be such.’
