The Purpose Of School In An Era Of Change

Post date: Feb 14, 2016 7:33:48 AM

A curriculum-first school design is based on the underlying assumption that if they know this and can do this, that this will be the result. This hasn’t been the case. We tend to celebrate school success instead of people success. We create “good schools” that graduate scores of students with very little hope for the future. How can that possibly be? How can a school call itself “good” when it produces students that don’t know themselves, the world, or their place in it?

So then, here’s one take on a new definition for a “good school.”

The Characteristics Of A Good School

A good school will improve the community it is embedded within and serves.

A good school can adapt quickly to human needs and technology change.

A good school produces students that not only read and write, but choose to.

A good school sees itself.

A good school has diverse and compelling measures of success–measures that families and communities understand and value.

A good school is full of students that don’t just understand “much,” but rather know what’s worth understanding.

A good school knows it can’t do it all, so seeks to do what’s necessary exceptionally well.

A good school improves other schools and cultural organizations it’s connected with.

A good school is always on and never closed. (It is not a factory.)

A good school makes certain that every single student and family feels welcome and understood on equal terms.

A good school is full of students that not only ask great questions, but do so with great frequency and ferocity.

A good school changes students; students change great schools.

A good school understands the difference between broken thinking and broken implementation.

A good school speaks the language of its students.

A good school doesn’t make empty promises, create noble-but-misleading mission statements, or mislead parents and community-members with edu-jargon. It is authentic and transparent.

A good school values its teachers and administrators and parents as agents of student success.

A good school favors personalized learning over differentiated learning.

A good school teaches thought, not content.

A good school makes technology, curriculum, policies, and its other “pieces” invisible. (Ever go to a ballet and see focus on individual movements?)

A good school is disruptive of bad cultural practices. These include intolerance based on race, income, faith, and sexual preference, aliteracy, and apathy toward the environment.

A good school produces students that know themselves in their own context, one that they know and choose. This includes culture, community, language, and profession.

A good school produces students that have personal and specific hope for the future that they can articulate and believe in and share with others.

A good school produces students that can empathize, critique, protect, love, inspire, make, design, restore, and understand almost anything–and then do so as a matter of habit.

A good school will erode the societal tendency towards greed, consumerism, and hording of resources we all need.

A good school is more concerned with cultural practices than pedagogical practices–students and families than other schools or the educational status quo.

A good school helps student separate trivial knowledge from vocational knowledge from academic knowledge from applied knowledge from knowledge-as-wisdom.

A good school will experience disruption in its own patterns and practices and values because its students are creative, empowered, and connected, and cause unpredictable change themselves.

A good school will produce students that can think critically–about issues of human interest, curiosity, artistry, craft, legacy, husbandry, agriculture, and more–and then do so.

A good school will help students see themselves in terms of their historical framing, familial legacy, social context, and global connectivity.