Readers here are likely familiar with my “high school every fifteen years” schtick. That’s not a fixed number, and in fifteen years what “high school” means can change a lot. In another sense I’m saying: you’ll have to return to mastering the basics periodically no matter what. But wouldn’t it be swell (nice) to have institutional support?
Let’s look at that vista quite literally. What do we lean in high school, a lot of us (not me, but I’m generalizing): how to drive. My daughter got support through her high school, which contracted out to professional driving teachers. I went to a parents-of-young-drivers presentation and learned how the basics of driving were nowadays taught differently. As a boomer, no one ever told me to keep the headlamps lit (they were gaslit in those days — JK) even in the daytime. Plus we spread the side view mirrors wider in the new paradigm. Trainees think about the car inside an invisible box and so on…
Now imagine investing all the billions we’ve put into driverless cars, robot-piloted, into driver re-education programs instead. These could be fun experiences. Maybe the focus is parallel parking. You’ve been driving for years but hate to attempt that maneuver. Or maybe, for you, it’s the stick shift you never mastered. I remember my earlier confusions with a stick shift (I got good at it, though not to a race car driver level obviously). Imagine a parallel universe in which adults went off to practice car-driving as routinely as they go off to practice golf swings or shooting bullets at live animals. I know, crazy right?
You could go to high school, as a fifty plus year old, to learn sailing a small sailing boat. I got to learn that in my teens at a Club Med. I learned a lot on that trip. Black Sea, Romania.
Clearly I’m blurring the meaning of “high school” quite intentionally. People picture desks in rows and columns with a teacher up front, like a preacher or something. My School of Tomorrow doesn’t operate like that usually. I’ve given talks in colleges and high schools, but where I talk most is on YouTube, which is par for the course. Today’s teachers use social media. Unless they’re stuck in a rut because they haven’t been back to basics in a while. Those are the folks poised to leap frog those actively publishing today.
Now that people live longer, what’s somewhat more evident are the intergenerational alliances that form when people two or more generations apart are getting updated on the latest. For the oldsters, it’s in part review, but it may seem rather alien how they teach it today. For the youngsters, it’s a first exposure, but they’re free to examine how the stuff used to be imparted. A first responsibility of pedagogues is to awaken a sense of what it takes to self educate and / or to educate others; pedagogy and / or andragogy become topics in their own right.
