“How should schools prepare for the future?” First off, let’s ask a different question.

No one knows the future. It is a complex combination of unknown advances in technology, social, cultural and very significantly — ecological change -that could alter the entire way we live our lives. For example, if people are forced out of coastal cities due to rising waters or if resources dwindle to a certain point, the entire way we live our lives -our most basic priorities- may change dramatically.

Therefore, it is best to shape the system so it is more agile and can adapt with greater ease and speed to information we receive about changes in the rapidly changing present — and rapidly changing future world.

Surely, play-based, project-based, self-directed learning that involves parents and communities has proven itself as dramatically impactful in positively shaping a child’s intellectual, social and emotional growth.

So, how do we create an infrastructure in which teachers can adapt more quickly to what we know not only about the future but about growth and development? Where teachers can shape their curriculum, not to antiquated values, but the values of our time — values such as happiness, compassion and strong communities.

The best way to do that, I believe, is to return to a model where teachers have greater ease and flexibility to adapt the curriculum to their unique communities and students.

Micro-schools, full or part-time, independently-owned schools where one teacher is also the administrator — are a powerful model for an agile learning system.

In order to make this system available to all, we would need to provide vouchers for small private schools and learning experiences that did not come with certain expectations attached.

These learning experiences could be judged based on their quality and results. Once that opinion was passed, it would not be up to the state to constantly monitor and make demands of that school (as they do with the UPK program in NY)

While I believe adamantly in Universal Education for all, public education is sadly more often used as an opportunity to indoctrinate students into the values of the time, the values that best serve the governing authority (in our current time — our own government and the large corporations that influence it)

Shaping our schools to environments that are community centers and spaces for learning where adults are there to take care of the children and facilitate their learning, but where children mostly direct their own learning through the readily accessible information available through the internet is another model.

While there are critiques of the university system, I imagine a similar system for children and adolescents, where they had a central place to learn, but could choose topics that interested them and engage in meaningful extracurricular activities could be of great value.

Children are naturally programmed to grow and develop in our changing world. The less we can do to hamper that process and restrain their autonomy, the quicker they will learn and grow.

Learn more about other play-based, self direct learning schools.