The Future Classroom is Disintegrated
Beyond how Progressives imagined it
Every time I come across this headline on social media, my brain conjures up a stock image:
A room with colorful walls, populated by 10+ students - all of them playing with their tablets, a bespectacled female teacher manuvring a chemical flask emitting rainbow bubbles.
I asked GenAI to give me that image, but the results weren’t exciting. For now, feel free to use your imagination with my words.
A side note: It’s much more accurate + fast. It is prepared by the most energy-efficient device on earth: The brain.
While imagining a future classroom, GenAI failed me in yet another prompt. I trust the text, once again:
A group of laughing children led by an enthusiastic teacher along a field trip. Butterflies, shrubs, a rugged terrain, a theodolite, a binocular - all in a beautiful visual contrast.
Progressives have already talked about it:
These classroom images aren’t random. They represent themes. Themes that reflect the frames of mind of the progressive educationists, who thought of education as an open-ended experiment.
Progressive education is a huge topic. In a few words, it’s like true love: An ideal state. We always yearn for it, and always wonder how it feels. Most of the time, we feel deprived, complaining about the imperfections we are dealt with.
The roots of progressive education date back to a book that was burned in 1762 in France. In his highly radical novel “Emile, or On Education” of the time, Rousseau shook many fundamental beliefs about education and championed the cultivation of free thought in students.
Themes that stemmed from his ideations still live:
Learning by doing: Learning happens by interacting with the real world, taking an active role in the processes and functions a textbook poorly describes.
Learning by dialogs: Inquiries drive curiosity, which breeds knowledge. Socratic dialog achieved it for classical Greeks.
Personalized learning: Broadcast transmission of knowledge serves the economy, but fails to work for every student. Knowledge and its distribution have to be modeled around its consumer: the student.
Independent thinking: One must examine, criticize, refine, and express his/her ideas to add value to his ideals, whether or not in line with the best interests of society.
While perfect in their own accordance, these principles have fallen short of transforming education. The failure is evident in our inability to replace mainstream education, despite two centuries of industrial and technological progress.
It is tempting to think the reason behind this is the economic divide. The economy decides the type of innovation that gets advanced and reaches our homes and classrooms. At the bottom line, the economy decides how many students a good teacher gets to teach.
However, there is more.
How an online education pioneer saw it:
In his semi-autobiographical book “The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined”, Salman Khan (the founder of Khan Academy) outlines the flipped classroom (not coined, but popularized by him) model, which is supported by high-speed internet, smartphones, and content creation tools.
In this model, students will have their first encounter with content online, in a self-paced manner. Next, they will visit a local laboratory/library to perform projects and experiments, aided by mentors/facilitators.
While this model seems like the missing piece of the education jigsaw puzzle, it is far from scale-tested. The fascination surrounding it lies in the possibilities imagined at the inception of Khan Academy: The time when the internet was boosting, YouTube was growing from zilch, and the flexibility of learning (more than the learning itself) looked a liberating factor.
Online learning was (and still is) a disruptive innovation for sure. It unlocked a huge potential.
To aid my professional development during my 30s and early 40s, I learned several skills through YouTube. I am a strong believer in visual learning. I want to go back to school only to learn Physics and CS from 3Blue1Brown. I want to complete my abandoned MBA to not only learn Economics (the subject I loathed) from Aswath Damodaran but also apply it in my solopreneur journey and stock market investments.
Yet, online education remains a disruptive innovation that has failed to disrupt what it aimed to: The archaic education model (at the school level), centered around the transmission of content.
Two decades later, it still looks appealing to those who feel entrapped by inflexible mainstream classroom education. The very reason it’s still considered novel, liberating, or off-grid is the evidence it hasn’t achieved its core offering: the scale.
Millions of students have benefitted from YouTube channels - to achieve what? Better scores in the exams that are rooted in the same outdated content-transmission-centered model. This model is designed by teaching professionals who are educated from the same outdated pedagogy.
The questionable value of EdTech:
Going by the classic definition, an EdTech product should be (mostly isn’t, in reality) designed by pedagogical experts. It is tested on evidence-based studies and should have learning outcomes that are rooted in a well-designed curriculum framework. Example: Duolingo is designed based on CEFR + Common Core.
An educational game that falls outside this classically defined EdTech boundary often beats it by a vast margin. It could teach stuff as a by-product of entertainment, thus also retaining (often, boosting) the motivation to learn - a key driver to excellence. Example: Minecraft was developed as a world-building game, but later adapted for educational purposes by MinecraftEdu.
While this differentiation is very crucial to treat them as separate, it is a topic that deserves its own article.
For the sake of today’s discussion, let’s put them in a single bucket, and move on.
The introduction of EdTech is fresh. It brings eye-candy visuals and captivating audio, powered by scores, trophies, and badges. But surrounding that visible offering, it does something that makes it sellable to parents and municipalities.
It stores, generates, and regenerates data that is valuable to schools and governments. It allows them to gauge themselves against their counterparts and competitors. How much of it is meaningful, most rarely know.
By frequently presenting this data to students + parents + teachers, it enables the measurements that have been considered valuable for decades: Quiz scores, reading time, assignments/challenges completed, and so on.
The problem is that the only metric they thrive on is Engagement, which often means active screen time or number of activities completed. The learning outcome is often absent or is hiding among the diluted matrices such as primitive quiz completions.
So far, most EdTech shies away from displaying the value it creates towards meeting its core educational objective: Effective transmission of concepts, beyond that of the content.
The only value today’s EdTech (even when armed with GenAI) brings is providing an alternate medium of understanding that can complement classroom instructions. It can reinforce concepts in a curious learner’s mind. Every time this happens, it becomes a validator of EdTech’s success, because it provides an outshining peak.
But what about those who are defeated by the tyranny of instructions? For them, EdTech isn’t an augmentation tool to what’s received (and incompletely grasped) in the classroom. Rather, it’s a short-term refuge, a dopamine boost in the form of gamified entertainment.
The future classroom is disintegrated:
Every time we want to simplify something, we encapsulate it.
A classroom is an encapsulated structure for learning. Even when a teacher is taking students on a field trip, the structure exists. The status quo present in the teacher-student relationship isn’t disrupted.
Until the teacher leaps out of her constrained role frame to connect with the child, the gates don’t open. To what extent she can do it mostly depends upon factors outside her control. If a child visits a school with a closed mind (parental divorce, bullying, poor health), no change of environment can alter the learning outcomes.
But learning isn’t constrained within the four walls. Nor it is bound to happen within them. A child struggling to identify numbers on the blackboard can accurately collect money for his family fruit stall - this is a real-life situation in the global south.
We have 2 contradictory situations:
Within the classroom, so much potential remains unused due to the abstracted nature of the classroom structure.
Outside the classroom, learning happens in a fragmented way. It isn’t measured, often fruitless when measured, and can’t be built upon to construct knowledge foundations that are vital to prepare a competent, world citizen.
The only way to mitigate both situations is to expand the span of learning and be mindful of it. The space-time construct we identify as a classroom needs to be destroyed, reimagined, and reshaped in a highly personalized manner.
That also means redefining the rights and responsibilities of the structures vital in a student’s life: schools as learning hubs, governments as overseeing authority, and family as a close-knit nurturing group of people.
Any diversion in this thinking should be avoided. Let’s not get carried by the exciting ideas of our time. Examples: “Imparting more liberty to students across the globe by strengthening their rights” or “Infuse more AI into students’ lives”.
The aim is not to make space for the tech revolution or create boundaries that haven’t existed before. Our thinking has to be rooted in how far we have deviated from our most basic aspirations from education, and how much we have to retrace our paths.
Conclusion:
If you are still reading, I am happy. At the same time, you may have noticed that my idea of the future classroom is filled with negations (about how it should NOT be) - not constructive (as how it should be).
In the history of progressive education, we are at a point of abundance.
More than at any point in history, we have a billion possible paths that we can try and fail to redesign curriculum, reimagine instructions, reshape homework, rethink degrees, and so on.
Rather than getting carried away with these opportunities to construct, the need of the hour is constraint-based thinking. The future classroom should be designed by thinking about how it should not be: Constrained in space and time, governed by the teacher, and regimented by the school.
It will be boundless, augmented by parents, family, and friends. There will be a place for tech, yes. But there is no place for the tyranny of rigid enterprise software contracts. The use of tech should be flexible and empowering. This piece needs work, and it should be acknowledged.
Tech has brought us to a point where the burden of catching up is always on teachers. That must end, or we will be left without good, affordable teachers. The future classroom must lessen the burden on teachers worldwide and also empower other actors to allow limitless learning opportunities.
It’s this never-ending quest of “Neither this nor that” (नेति नेति) that will lead us to multi-faceted, rational, and personalized solutions.