Most discussions on the future of school focus on education reform. Authors and policy analysts ask questions like, how can we change existing institutions to improve on their outcomes? We get discussions like those around federally subsidized student loans, funding for schools, school vouchers, the viability of charter schools, and what ought to be included in exam standards for coming years.
These questions, while valuable, miss the broader point of education and the marketplace today. We sit at a pivotal moment in the history of schooling and education. Thanks to a number of market forces, primarily led by leaps in technology and its relation to education costs, it is finally possible to realistically remove education from school (as we know it) for the population at large.
Once upon a time, unless you were aristocracy or a member of a philosophical class, the most common way for you to get educated was not to craft your own curriculum with the help of a mentor or coach but to go to school. Assuming you weren’t needed to keep your family alive by farming, collecting food, hunting, or working a factory, you went where other children in your class went: to school. The idea behind the community school was economies of scale. It was easier to have one teacher teach 20 children at once rather than split up time and resources among those 20 individually.
Via Miloš Bajčetić, Stephania Savva, Ph.D