What the future of education might look like
In the past, the American Educational System was much easier to understand and navigate. Your choices were public schools or private/parochial schools, and those private schools could be either in your general vicinity, or outside of your area to the degree at which your students moved in and stayed there. This was the case for prep schools and military academies. In situations in which students had major infractions against their schools’ policies and had been removed from the traditional educational environment, “alternative” schools were available.
Today, depending on a family’s financial capabilities and the laws of the state in which they live, parents might be able to have their students bussed to successful area public schools, pay for area parochial schools for every conceivable religion, or move away to prep or military academies, just like in the past. Alternative schools still exist for those students who have been removed from the traditional environment for one reason or another. However, now, students might also score their way into a private academic school or “magnet school” that specializes in a particular academic subject, or they may pay to send their children to a charter school that is a privately owned company. Still another new option would be to send a student to a private online school. Brightmont Academy ( ,, https://www.brightmontacademy.com/ ) is one such example. With their one-to-one model, they are a standout.
Sadly, some of these newer educational options have had some… issues. According to a Washington Post article from August 6, 2020,
“...charter school failure rates between 1999 and 2017 found that more than one-quarter of the schools closed after operating for five years, and about half closed after 15 years, displacing a total of more than 867,000 students.”
In the recent past, along with numerous hands-on industrial arts courses, “night school” programs have been completely cut from district budgets throughout the country. These students are high school upper-classmen who may be semi-professional or olympic level athletes in training, professional performers, or students challenged with any variety of learning and/or emotional diagnoses. They could also have an important day job that brings them necessary income, which outweighs their desire to succumb to the tight structures and time constraints of the typical school day.
In this Post-COVID world of today, we now know that some students benefited from the lack of school extras like assemblies, pep rallies, and activities that do not pertain to them, as well as from the smaller environment provided by the online school experience. Additionally, parental concerns about educational biases have led many to pull their children from public schools and create their own home-school environments.
When pro-traditional schooling parents express concerns for non-traditionally schooled children’s socialization, they fail to remember the number of private and park district sports clubs and leagues, as well as trainers, and gyms available to them. There also exist myriad art and academic interest clubs and classes available to community members.
With all of these changes and options available, coupled with the programs, courses, and clubs that have been cut from school budgets, the educator in myself tends to want to look through my own crystal ball to hypothesize as to what the future holds for education. And I’m not talking about just five or ten years in the future, but in a distant enough future in which the entire education system would have changed. For this, I turn to the online, one-to-one model of education.
In my vision, I could potentially see smaller educational communities sprouting up in neighborhoods in much the same way that churches have done. They could deliver a neutral, unbiased, general curriculum under the tutelage of certified, trained teachers that would allow students to move at their own pace and in their own choice of times. These schools could operate on much closer to a 24-hour availability and provide everything from 1st grade through Senior year courses to the courses that are currently covered by community colleges, and they could even train people for things like citizenship, childcare, and essential life skills and job training. Elderly-specific education could also be a possibility.
For school-age students, this concept could allow for more free time and a more flexible schedule. Gone might be some of the early morning fights to wake up growing young people to force them to get to school before they are marked tardy. In an article published by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention ( CDC ) titled simply “Schools Start Too Early,” it opens by stating
“Not getting enough sleep is common among high school students and is associated with several health risks including being overweight, drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco, and using drugs, as well as poor academic performance.”
For adult students, the flexibility could allow those with jobs the ability to advance themselves either in their careers, or into other careers, at the pace and at the times that make most sense for them and their schedules. Additionally, retirees and adults on disability leave could pursue their educational interests in their own neighborhoods.
And these ideas are not so far-fetched. As I said, I believe the online one-to-one format for education, like that exemplified by Brightmont Academy, is already sort of handling these roles. With a little vision and expansion of their curricula, my crystal ball vision may be a lot closer than we may think.
Jamie Bachmann is a former high school special education teacher of over 20 years. He earned his Bachelor’s Degree in Communication Management from The University of Dayton, and his Master of Arts in Teaching from National-Louis University. He is also a lifelong writer, artist and musician. Jamie, his wife, and their numerous rescued felines live in Chicago’s North Shore.
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