Isn't it time to migrate to on-line educational system for our children?

Isn’t it time to start moving away from bricks and mortar classrooms, and flesh and blood teachers? It’s so awfully expensive the way we try to educate our children. Payrolls, pensions, school books and instruction materials, the building and maintenance of facilities, feeding, bussing, liability insurance, administration and other overhead expenses seem to go in just one direction; up, up, up and up - even faster than enrollment. Let’s face it, we haven’t done a very good job of educating our children this way either – not by evolving world standards, or even by American standards of a generation or two ago.

It would be so much less expensive and so much more effective to buy each child a laptop and wi-fi access and enroll him/her in online courses, tailored to suit each child’s level achievement and paced to suit his/her own ability (with minimum requirements necessary to complete each grade within a year’s time and graduation from high school by age 18).

Maybe we’d choose to have a half year of early traditional education just to teach kindergartners/first-graders the basics of computer use (yes, there are a great number of under-privileged children who don’t have these skills, believe it or not). Just to keep down the traditional expense, children could enter the system depending upon which half year they were born in, thereby keeping facilities and facilitators occupied all year. You could even convince me we’d have to have traditional labs for advanced high school work.

Of course there would have to be a few administrators to choose curriculum and software, and to oversee progress and to tweak things once in a while, but only a fraction of the administrators/teachers we have now.

Just think about it! No more bullying, no arguments over dress code, no peer pressure, no classroom disruptions, no columbines or school yard tussling, no snow days, no busses overturning, no being held back by the slowest student in the class, no teacher sexual advances, no innate teacher discrimination of any kind and no teacher tenure or incompetence (real or imagined) holding our kids back, no corruption of politico’s by teacher unions, no more Texas school boards deciding for the rest of the nation what can be contained in our schoolbooks. There would be consistency of education through material and software and measured progress, and instant (and constant) feedback to the children and their parents.

Obviously I’m not talking about real-time teachers sitting in front of a camera. I’m talking about software, maybe yet to be developed, for each and every subject probably similar to that already in use for teaching at-home students. RosettaStone comes immediately to mind. And I’m talking about testing systems yet to be developed to measure and assure de jure and de facto progress, and to identify children who need individual time, attention and more resources. I think there would be so much money saved that we could easily afford the individual time, attention and resources to be sure that “no child left behind” becomes more than a phrase.

Oh yeah, there are new problems to be faced for sure;

We’d have to abandon our precious Friday night football and other organized sports. Whatever happened to parks and recreation teams? Let the colleges and the NFL start up and fund their own feeder programs.

Proms become problematic, but is that a bad thing? Think of all the money parents would save on prom dresses and such. Fundamentalist parents would no longer have to worry about Bill showing up with Joe, or Mary with Jane. All the trappings of class and status and the envy of such would disappear, as would the after-prom bacchanalia and deadly car crashes. Virginities would be preserved.

I’m sure there are other problems, too, but the biggest problem to be overcome is what to do about all those children at home all day while their parents are at work (or binging). Is this an insurmountable problem? Are we to abandon the superior education of our children because their parents need babysitters? Could we save enough money to afford some type of at-home care for the younger ones? Is it feasible to keep our traditional bricks and mortar system through, say, the sixth grade, and implement an on line system for all other grades?

Yes, there are problems to be sure, and it would certainly take time to migrate away from traditional bricks and mortar, but isn’t it time to start conceptualizing the ideal system and deciding how to get there from here?

Just wondering!

For the record I am neither an educator nor a parent, yet

 

doing online classes isnt as easy as it seems

 

No kids I know that switched to online high schools ever finished their work.

One has gotten a GED though.

There would definitely need to be real good attendance/work monitoring - cause most parents aren't going to do it.

 

and also how are they supposed to make friends if they just sit at their house doing online homework. you make friends at a young age by attending school

 

You can't interact with a computer.

Besides it's lead to a world of weird people who didn't socialize enough as kids.

 

I think the computer time necessary is a far cry less than sitting on a bus being transported to school and sitting bored in a class waiting for the disruptive kids to shut up and the slower ones to catch up (or catch on). Socialize with the neighborhood kids or church (shudders at the thought) or parks and recreation.

 

wrong. you dont learn anything from an online class. ive taken a few and you just google the answers and dont get anything out of it. especially younger kids, they need to be taught in person.

 

1. Nothing beats face-to-face education.
2. Social interaction is a large part of schooling.

 

amyoxl wrong!!!! neodude right!!!

 

See what online schooling produces? =P

 

Hey i go to school ON CAMPUS. I only took one online class for anthropology and it was completely pointless. :devil:

 

Yes, putting that many teachers, bus drivers, cafeteria workers, secretaries, principals, maintenance staff, etc. out of a job is a fantastic idea. Let's come up with some more ways to contribute to the downfall of the economy, shall we?

 

A lot of people don't have internet. You would be singling out a lot because of finical status. This would do nothing good for the school system. You need students in the room. I don't agree with education through some kind of monitor.

 

What a great way to increase the quantity of uneducated kids in the world.

 

It would take place over time. All great advances require migration of people, etc. How many farm workers did we have in the mid 19th century for instance. How many telephone operators, directory assistant operators did we have in the mid 20th century for yet another example. How many IT writers, web designers, etc etc etc did we have 30 years ago?

I already said all those tools and wi-fi access would be given to all students regardless of financial condition, and still give tham a better education for less money

It takes time

 

Would this take place in a school type environment? Or are we talking homeschooling everyone? Because that's not exactly practical when both parents work and it wreaks havoc on a child's social development.

 

You're thinking that there would be no way to monitor or measure progress. How about if there were some way to independently test maybe half way through a course and at the end of it. For instance, bring the kids in to a controlled environment for testing

 

Not in a school type environment, for sure, except maybe for testing. Lets just say homeschooling with controls and basic curriculum.

I already addressed the issue of working parents in the OP. Did you read through that?

I don't agree that social development would be curtailed. I also don't agree that social development occurs in schools, unless you're talking about negative skills such as deceit, bullying, social climbing, disrespect, dishonesty, gang banging, drug dealing, fighting, and a lot of other "social" driven learning

 

Saying that positive social development doesn't occur in schools is downright dishonest.

 

Actually near all social development in most countries takes place in schools. That's where you spend most of your free time from 5-18(21 or 22 for college), it's how you meet most of your friends, it's how you make a personality for yourself, it's how you learn various social graces and navigating different sorts of people.

Especially in suburban towns. Without school there'd be no way for kids to meet each other. My town wasn't even that small, 14,000 people, I don't know what people would've done without going to school for friends, distances are just too great.