Role of Schooling in 2025 and Authentic Learning Experiences

The fact is, teachers’ roles are on the brink of upheaval. With the Internet becoming increasingly accessible through more and more avenues every day, students need less and less to be taught facts. They do not need to wake up at six in the morning every day to be taught things they can look up on their smart phones. I do not mean to say that teachers are being made obsolete. What I mean is that the idea of a teacher as a source of information is quickly becoming outdated. Instead, teachers are becoming “learning guides.” In fact, I am pretty sure that schooling in 2025 will be more of a guiding force than an instructional one. While schools will not need to teach students concrete information, they will need to teach students to think critically - particularly how to be able to discern between solid and questionable information, how think and act ethically (particularly with information), and how to be disciplined in their work. Schools will become less of an assembly line, churning out state-approved students one by one, and more of an outfitting store, setting them up with the equipment they need for whatever life path they have ahead of them.

I think this will lead to a lot more independent studies and individualized learning. Students will not need to be in classrooms that have them all working on the same project. Instead, they can be in classrooms where their learning guide (teacher) is there to help them learn the critical thinking skills they need to go out into the world. These skills include understanding how to determine not only the credibility of a source, but also the bias each source presents, and how these factors affect the information given. Students will need to learn to synthesize information and formulate their own ideas and opinions on it, in an easily communicable way. This may include some writing lessons, however writing technique will likely be taking a back seat to communicability – that is, how well can people understand what they are trying to say?

With these predictions in mind, teachers of today need to be thinking ahead as to how they can prepare their students for this rapidly approaching future. Not all students are ready to be sent out on their own just yet. We have done such a good job, as a culture, of coddling them throughout childhood that abruptly turning them loose would be disastrous. What we can do, however, is begin to fade toward these more independent classrooms. Allowing students to spend more time in individualized study, especially online, will prepare them to eventually take the reigns in their learning. Students that may need more guidance will still have full access to the teacher, and will benefit from maintaining much of the instructional time. Over the course of their academic careers, however, they should become comfortable with the idea of being released onto the Internet with an individual goal or project in mind.

One thing that is particularly important during this period of change in education is the abandonment of tracking. By reuniting students into one classroom, all students can be pushed to succeed. While this is a dauntingly difficult situation for a teacher today, the increased use of the Internet for learning will allow students to essentially differentiate themselves. Depending on their own needs, students can find their information through visuals, text, or a combination of the two, all of which are available in a variety of levels of complexity.