School tomorrow

Mr Andy Edwards Queensland Studies Authority Queensland, Australia

It took a little while for western society to recognise what was going wrong. By the time the truth dawned on the decision-makers in the west, so much money, time and political credibility had been committed to the technology-driven, real-life applications model of education they had embraced that the damage had been done. Hardly any of that generation were educated enough to listen, learn, lead or exercise wisdom in the affairs of society. And those few who could have shown the way forward had nobody to listen to them. They blogged, they ran websites and podcasts and wrote to news services but their only feedback came from their detractors and they were called anachronisms and whiners.       

Of course, in the meantime, the rest of the world, which had always understood the part schools played in the construction and maintenance of the social fabric, romped away from the west academically, socially and materially. They hammered away, teaching their little ones the tool skills of civilization, without being drawn into the maelstrom of arguments about relevance and social usefulness. And their little ones learned to speak and read and write and calculate and measure and estimate. And when they knew that, they learned - almost by themselves - to compare and analyse and judge and argue and infer and create and synthesize and deduce. And then they joined the societies whose members they had learned with, and learned from, at school, and their societies prospered and became strong. 

Because, along with the tool skills for learning, the schools had taught these students the notion of community. The schools were microcosms of wider society, with poor and rich, wise and foolish, disabled and able-bodied, religious and secular, ugly and beautiful, bold and shy. Their members became students of humanity for 10 or 12 years while they went to school. They learned how to listen to instructions and how not to be pushed around, how to be obedient and how to cut corners, how to meet deadlines and how to negotiate extensions, how sometimes appearances count for nothing. They also learned how appearances sometimes mean everything, how to trust and how to be suspicious, how to compete and win and lose. They learned how to help, how to recognize injustice, how to be honest, how to be a friend, how to sympathise and how to be humble. 

All the while, the benefits of cerebral microchipping and online choose-your-own-path virtual schooling were lavished on the students of the west. By the beginning of the millennium’s third decade, hubcurriculum delivery was freely accessible to all. The cost of actually sending your child to school, though subsidised heavily by the governments, discouraged parents from taking that path and school closures increased as the subsidies diminished in response to the cost of the war. By the time the first school-free society was proudly announced in 2027, some of the cracks were showing, so obviously that it was hard to feel any sense of elation. The African and Central American flu pandemics had made parents grateful for being able to keep their children safely at home while they learned their lessons and achieved one ephemeral outcome after another. But before long, it was clear that the Lost Generation had been more terribly undermined by the collapse of their own society’s system of education, even than by the war and the flu.       

Finally, enough of them became parents and rose up to demand that the schools be reopened so that their own little ones – the so-called Strand Children – could be given some opportunity to retrieve the situation. At first, the Grand Council of Facilitators rejected the idea out of hand, citing the expense and the unavailability of teachers. But the birth rate had fallen to 29% of the deathrate and this provided a sense of urgency to their appeal. It was politically necessary to educate the Lost Generation’s few offspring or there was a prospect that the Strand Children would become the society’s last members. This, in the global environment of peace and plenty that had arisen since the New Energy Initiatives had doused the fuel flashpoints of the millennium’s second decade.

So the teachers were found. Many came from overseas but a few, who had been trained at the turn of the millennium and had kept their skills sharp by tutoring students, in their homes were still able to help. The money was granted and the schools opened again. The hubcurriculum remained open and freely accessible to all but students used it as a resource at school, rather than the font of all wisdom at home. Perhaps as they always should have. And western society made its first faltering steps on the road to back to reality and viability.