Por /By Diane M Nickerson, MS Ed.
Castle Island Bilingual Montessori
Schools of the Future
The future is already here, as we welcome in the New Year! What will the future mean for the education of our young people? Namely, will their instructional delivery match the way we know that they learn? There seems to be a broad consensus that we adults: parents, educators, community members and future employers, all have the same intention for young people; we want them to be successful and productive adults.
Education is meant to enhance each child’s unique potential, establish a school experience based on the development of human well-being, and prepare children for the future. However, the conventional model of schooling established over the last 150 years and the prevalent approach in most public, private, and Catholic schools, offers a structure that is ineffective reaching these goals. Instead, most schools offer: same-age groupings, learning divided into static subjects with whole-group instruction, seated learners facing and listening to an adult authority and competition upheld by standardized testing and grade rankings.
Ulcca Joshi Hansen’s The Future of Smart (2021) shares that the common belief of being smart is “an idea based on centuries of bias about what matters in people and cultures, and what doesn’t,” and proposes that our nations and our children could benefit from a deep exploration into “what our system of education should value most: the complexity and richness of
our humanity and the many different ways in which people engage with and contribute to the world.”