I do not know how school was for you, but I might try to take a guess, especially if your country of origin is in Eastern Europe. Dull classrooms, very little green space around the concrete giant and a lot of books and stuff that you had to learn to squeeze it willy-nilly in your tiny little mind at that time.
It is 2024 and I am wondering how a dream school would look like. A school where children and teenagers would actually enjoy going. A place where they could be prepared for real life instead of being fed academic fodder.
The moment I have put the word dream and school in a sentence my imagination started to ooze with spectacular ideas. I am thinking of a school build at the clearance of a forest. A building which is prioritizing having a lot of green space around it, where children can relax and exercise. Denmark has been quite innovative in regards to education and this country has forest schools which prove to be excellent even for kids with disorders like autism and ADHD. If they can do it, why couldn’t Europe or other continents do it as well?
I think of a school where a lot of the classes could be held outdoors during the good days when wheather allows it. I believe that any school should have a cantine of its own, a swimming pool and a small botanical garden. There should be fun and exciting labs for chemistry and physics , astronomy and cooking, where experience is hands on the most used tool for learning. Children learn the best from doing things with their hands, from seeing matter unfold in front of their eyes. The quality of their thinking is different than ours. What on Earth made us believe that the biology of a child makes him fit to sit still for hours and ingest all of the information that is served to him? I find it absolutely dreadful and sedentary. Children should be allowed to move and explore while learning. The biggest issue with the current schools is that we have forced the child to adapt to the curriculum and to the school’s obsolete norms. It should be the other way around: the school and the curriculum should adapt to the children’s and society’s current needs. A school is putting the foundations for a future society. We need to constantly innovate the learning process.
A dream school should be a place filled with plants and flowers even indoors. Children needs to breathe clean air and also learn to appreciate and take care of nature. A small little farm near the school would allow the little ones to get used to the animals and learn the circuit of food . If we want more farmers we need to start them early on loving nature and plants.
As for personnel I believe that there is too much bureaucracy on the shoulders of teachers. Filling in the necessary papers will soon be delegated to AI or a different type of personnel. Teachers should prioritize the children, not the papers that they need to do. There should be special rooms in which they could have their meals in silence and to feel like they have a healthy rhythm in which they conduct their activity. It would be a great idea to have relaxation rooms for personnel with professional massage therapists that could provide teachers with a well deserved massage if they feel like they need it. Everything that the children and teachers need in order to be well should be inside the school. A lot of parents needs to go with the child for after school in one place, for swimming pool in another one, for tennis in another one. I think of a dream school as a specially designed project to include all of the auxiliary facilities necessary for children to get a various array of activities done: tennis, swimming,football, martial arts, chess etc. We do not need more textbooks and more extra working materials. We need more experiences and more activities that could stimulate the child’s mind in a different way. If the schools continue the model of keeping the child tied to the book and having to read and make exercises out of it, in the end the child will resent the book and the learning process. This is not the way.
A dream school is the kind of place that any adult would dream of letting their child spend hours at an end. The school could conduct different types of activities to include the parents and a lot of the auxiliary personnel should prioritize the parents in the selection of employees. A dream school is a mini society in itself. It should allow children trips to various local businesses in order to give them a taste of real life. You see, we are currently looking at school as an issolated building where kids get smart. That’s not the case. The schools should be connected with local businesses and have a collaboration with them. We do not teach children about pizza from a textbook. We need to take them to a pizzeria and help them watch the real process, the real challenges. Only then they can be prepared for the real life.
A dream school focuses on experiences and diversity. It is a dynamic place where children are being taught by following a simplified curriculum. Complex science, math, biology, chemistry, should be taught later and only to those who show a preference and a skill for it. We need more focus on arts and creative endeavours where children use their hands. There is a very pernicious mentality circulating among adults that is biased towards turning all children into doctors, engineers, teachers, programmers. The brain of the child is a right emisphere kind of a place. It is not made to function so much on the logical side that we have build our schools around.
The success of a society or lack thereof is a mirror of the quality of the educational process to prepare the individual to function in a future society. This is why school should be build to be constantly one steap ahead to the future and continuosly changing.
I believe that one day, many decades from now, someone will look at the idea of a dream school and realize that it needs to be made into reality.
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