Georgina Echaniz-Pellicer

MAS 713. Learning Environment

Future of Learning Group, MIT Media Laboratory

How would Schools be in 20 years?

Recently, schools have been experimenting a wide amount of changes in order to provide a better education for children. Most of these changes imply introduction of new ideas, materials or devices into the same typical school classrooms and schemes; generating some sort of pressure by attempting to get all these modifications into the unchanged model. Here is where a systematic approach about schools and the whole idea of Education should be done based on three major topics: Why? What? and How?

1. Why?

To talk about the first characteristic to take into consideration, is necessary to go back two or three centuries and look for the primarily reasons that people had to establish schools. There are a lot of purposes that explain the creation of schools and their maintenance; some of them might be the need of a physical space where children can socialize and learn basic skills for their future education, hopefully professional. There are some people that really believe that school are necessary because parents do have to work and is convenient that their children stay in a safe place where the can also learn. I would say that the general concept of “school” is related to the assumed idea about the responsibility to educate people. From this statement we can determine an important aspect of the school, which lead us to the second step in this approach: the content.

2. What?

Regarding the second characteristic, we should try to answer the question: what do people need to learn so they can be educated? We focus now on what, and of course, why do we need to learn. After the establishment of schools, there were a number of issues that have been added to the typical school activities. For example, different skills for life, foreign languages (Bilingual-School), and a broad variety of workshops related to technological or manual activities. All these activities have being shaping the school main goal through the years; so the current structure of school has evolved until the model we know it these days. This evolution is not just happening once, or in a given time; evolution is happening everyday and everyplace. Therefore, we cannot conceive education as a static concept; on the contrary, education is an active process that forces schools to constantly adapt the content of what is taught to the contemporaneous needs and challenges. As a result, the content that should be covered in every grade and in every school definitely has to evolve as the historical context does, and if possible, beware future needs and requirements.

3. How?

What we now concern about is how are we going to convey that content, or how are students supposed to achieve that knowledge. This is the third and last characteristic of this systematic approach, and the most controversial due to conservationist ideas about the way that people should be educated and the refuse to make use of technological means to support knowledge acquisition. But technology applications are no longer the futurist idea of doing things; technology innovation is here and is changing our life, including how we communicate, how we make bank transactions, how we travel, why it should not change the way we learn? Since every year kids are less interested in school and get lower grades (according to results of 1994 Education Evaluation in Mexico[1]), I think that introducing new methods of learning related to technology is a good strategy to get children motivated to continue their studies, not only in primary or secondary school, but also professional. We must not believe that a computational class covers the challenge of introducing technology to the learning process, and that there is no other useful application for new equipment and tools.

As a result of this analysis, there are certain characteristics that we specifically want to find in a School, but not necessary exist in present ones. Therefore, I think that schools in twenty years will be a place where children can:

Spend their time,
Socialize with each other and even with adults,
Learn about basic subjects,
Learn different skills for life,
Get motivated to continue studying,
Propose what else they want to learn,
Discovering and find out new knowledge by themselves,
Learn about technology and how to apply it to their activities,
Get knowledge of past and history,
Get prepared for present needs,
Get ready to face future challenges.

The most important issue is that schools are going to be like kids want them to be now. In twenty years, they are going to be the ones who make the decisions; they are going to be the educational consultants, the teachers, and the educational authorities. What we can do now is to encourage them to provoke that evolution, to pursue their dreams.

[1] IFIE, at