Much of the discussion of 21st century learning is about individualized instruction. Closely related to this is the question of control or self control. If individual students are going to learn different things at different times, in different ways and in different places, the obvious question is about who will make all those decisions; who will have control of the instruction. There are at least four possible agents in this story; government, teacher, parent and student, so it is multidimensional problem.
Variables: What is learned, when, where, how
Agents: Government, teacher, parent, student
Here are some of the dimensions of this question:
Influence of Parent
On one dimension is the influence of the parent, with home schooling at one extreme and residential schools at the other. (Parenting is all about the gradual process of parents ceding authority to children while teaching them to handle that authority responsibly, and I am considering only a small part of that process. Some of the research into self-regulation shows that the most important growth occurs before schools have any influence at all.)
Low Influence of Parent High
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Home School Residential School
Influence of Government and Teacher
The continual conflict between the Ministry of Education and the BCTF involves the question of government and teacher control. That is a dimension rational beings are best to leave alone.
Influence of Government Influence of Teacher
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Influence of Student
My interest is the dimension showing the amount of control the student yields. The extremes may be residential schools. Government/Church Indian residential schools specialized in taking all control away from the student (making them totally vulnerable to abuse) while A.S. Neill’s Summerhill has been operating in England for ninety years on the premise of students having maximum control. Self directed learning schools (such as Thomas Haney and Frances Kelsey) have made concerted efforts to move along this dimension.
Low Influence of Student High
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Indian Residential School A.S. Neill's Summerhill
Is this a useful way to think of 21st century education?
A multidimensional problem like this would best be displayed on an eight dimensional scatter plot (4 variables to control, 4 agents to control them). Since these are rather difficult to create or understand, I will try to show my thinking with a very simplistic chart. I will try to show all four variables, but only one agent: the student. So the question is how much control the student has over his own learning. (It may be reasonable to include the influence of the parent along with the student in this comparison.)
While I am putting some values in this chart, they are only very rough guesses and are not to be given much credence. My point is that this may be a useful way to think of schooling and ask the question: Is this what we mean by 21st century education?
