Education of The Future
In today’s ever changing job market, it is becoming harder and harder for students to be sufficiently prepared once they graduate. Skills learned either do not apply anymore because of technology’s rapid evolution, or there are more skills to be learned that students missed out on. In an effort to move education forward in a new direction, Microsoft designed the School of The Future in Philadelphia, PA.
The School of The Future is no ordinary school – although it is essentially a high school, it is like a new world to those used to conventional schools. The school is paperless, and there are no textbooks – students do all of their work on school-supplied laptops. One purpose of the school is “to explore better ways to prepare students (learners) for success in our digital world and global economy.”
“Students familiarity with Microsoft programs makes them employable right out of high school, and are able to deal with ambiguity and thinking on the fly,” educator Aruna Arjunan says.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “Education must train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking.” – this seems to fit the model of the School of The Future. With technology at their disposal, these students have the potential to be ready for anything. The school’s first senior class has just graduated, and all 117 of them were accepted to post-secondary programs of all types. That is an amazing statistic.
In a way, it is almost like Microsoft is conditioning the students to work for them – giving them the finest and most creative education possible, in hopes that they will be the finest and most creative employees possible. However, they are preparing them for the broader perspective and letting them make their own decisions.
Could this be a wake up call to the rest of the world? Technology is constantly evolving, in turn making the job market tougher and tougher. Public schools already have a hard enough time getting funding for programs and upgrades, but maybe they can take some pointers from the School of The Future and start heading in new directions.