| > A radical version of this may see public education transitioning more to the tutoring system still used at Oxford today – students pick up and reference the knowledge needed for learning prior to meeting in small groups with their teachers in academically rigorous conversation. 1,000% no. This is, and will continue to be, the model of many expensive elite prep schools. Public schools? They already have a staffing crisis due to a couple decades of stagnating wages while both inflation and Baumol’s cost disease ran rampant, with Covid as an acute stressor that made things even worse very fast. Are they looking to fix that? Not really, no. They’re coping by reducing the school week to four days and looking to replace as many teachers as possible with computer programs and cheap teaching assistants (why have foreign language classes when you can stick kids on DuoLingo? Real example). The next step, which they’re already talking about, is how to start using AI to take pressure off staffing for core classes. This means fewer teachers per student, not more. This is happening in lower-paying rural schools first, for obvious reasons, but it’s the future for the whole system. > There are less radical options that we can also begin to employ now without re-hauling our entire education system; the ‘flipped classroom’ is a simple modification where students watch videos (or, perhaps use an AI) to get the basics of a concept down, and participate in hands-on projects in class. Yep, this is what public school kids are going to get, though the “hands on” part with a real teacher isn’t making it as a major feature of the system. Is it as good or better than what we had before? Doesn’t matter, we can’t afford that anymore, this is what we’re getting. Fancy private school kids will continue to get the thing we already know works well, but is expensive. |