The national and international economic landscape is changing rapidly. As the Internet becomes an increasingly significant part of business, the ability to connect ideas and people around the world will be critical.
However, as the world moves forward, the education system has remained remarkably stagnant.
At least that’s the idea behind a new global high school that was created in Lincoln County and is set to spread to other parts of the world.
“To be successful in the new US economy – the information economy – collaboration is key,” said Thomas Steele-Maley, the former Lincoln Academy teacher behind the new high school.
For the last 11 years, Steele-Maley has been working to design an education model for high-school-aged students that reflects the modern world and takes advantage of the opportunities for global networking that technology provides.
The result, a program called the Institute for Global Civic Culture (GlobalCiv), is a one-student pilot project now in its 5th month of “classes.”
This new model for high school education will move from the pilot project to a network of programs based in different locations around the world. Each of those programs will then work together to allow students to collaborate and explore international issues.
So far, Steele-Maley has recruited people in Uganda and New Zealand who are currently working on developing GlobalCiv programs in those countries.
The test pilot is Nobleboro student Jake Maxmin, who, until this spring, attended Lincoln Academy. Maxmin will finish his high school career in GlobalCiv and serve as a test subject for and co-creator of the program’s study format.
“I knew this was once in a lifetime,” Maxmin said. “It’s something I couldn’t pass up; it’s a chance to shape my own education and help shape other people’s education.”
Since June, Maxmin has been studying in what will be year-round, 12-week-long, project-based blocks. Each block focuses on a single project, designed around local, national and international issues.
Within that project, Maxmin studies all the subjects normally associated with high school as they relate to the issue he’s working on.
“The goal is an education that’s wall-less,” Steele-Maley said. “We’re integrating subjects and taking learning out of the classroom.”
For GlobalCiv, “walls” refer to the physical walls of a school building but are also a metaphor for what they see as limiting factors in traditional education formats. Steele-Maley is hoping to remove the walls that divide subjects into individual classes and restrict education to the classroom.
As Maxmin studies various subjects, he works on those subjects in an applied sense with local scientists, business leaders and educators who are experts in each field.
By removing traditional schedules and reorganizing the student/teacher relationship, Steele-Maley hopes that students will experience learning in a larger context and see study as a part of the world around them.
“There’s a point where this stops being about school, and starts being about what do I need to learn; how can I better the world?” Maxmin said.
One aspect of the program Maxmin is particularly excited about is an intergenerational book group, whose oldest member is 98. The group meets regularly to discuss books and topics designed by Maxmin.
Based on Maxmin’s experiences over the next year, GlobalCiv will be tweaked and redeveloped. In June 2011, Steele-Maley hopes to add four to 10 new students to the program.
It hasn’t been determined at this point where those new students will come from, or what exactly their education will look like.
If those new students are from the US, they might work solely online or might need to relocate to the Midcoast, Steele-Maley said.
It’s also possible that those new students will be added to one of the GlobalCiv programs that are being developed in Uganda and New Zealand.
“Eventually, we’d like to see 40 to 50 students around the world working on different projects and collaborating on a global scale,” Steele-Maley said.
The goal is to set up GlobalCiv programs around the world, in which students work on similar projects. Within each program, the students will focus on issues as they apply to them locally. Then the students will collaborate globally on the issues in an international context.
“We want to allow students to gain all of the essential skills that we – the state of Maine and as a nation – deem necessary for high school students, while also allowing them to direct their own learning and work on local, national and international problems,” Steele-Maley said.
If the students are working on sustainable agriculture as a broad topic for their project, students in Nobleboro might study the science behind local farming, the economics behind the industry, and state and local ordinances as a civics lesson.
They would then collaborate with students in other parts of world, such as the program in Uganda. This allows them to learn about what sustainable agriculture means in a Ugandan context, but also to collaborate with the students in Uganda on sustainable agriculture as an international issue.
Much of the direction that GlobalCiv will take – as well as its success or failure – will depend on Maxmin’s experiences during this first year.
“I’m excited more than nervous,” Maxmin said of the added responsibility of being the pilot student. “At first I was concerned about losing the social aspect of high school.”
On Sept. 10, following his ecology class – a trip out on Damariscotta Lake – Maxmin was bound for soccer practice with the Lincoln Academy varsity team.
“I still find ways to hang out with my friends,” he said.
As with home schooling, critics of the program argue that students in GlobalCiv will miss out on key socialization components of traditional high school.
In a program in which students direct their own learning, they miss the experience of working with and for people they don’t want to work with, and on tasks that they don’t want to work on.
“That’s the real world,” said Waldoboro Police Chief Bill Labombarde. “In life, you have to deal with people, and high school taught me how to do that.”
GlobalCiv is obviously not for every student, Steele-Maley said. The program will be vetting prospective students in an attempt to ensure that only students who will benefit from the format are accepted.
Maxmin agreed that he would be missing certain elements of traditional high school, but for him, there’s no love lost.
“Those problems – dealing with people and doing things I don’t want to do – are not limited to high school,” Maxmin said. “Life is like that, but high school shouldn’t be. I have my entire life to learn those skills, but learning, especially at my age, should be fun and should be something that you want to do.”
GlobalCiv is currently in the application process to receive accreditation as a high school, which would allow them to award diplomas to students completing the program.
There’s no precedent for a high school like this, so the likelihood of them receiving accreditation is still up in the air.
Whatever the outcome of the accreditation application, Steele-Maley and Maxmin are unconcerned about GlobalCiv’s ability to produce students with the capability to be accepted and succeed at a collegiate level.
They’ve been working with several top-tier universities and said that there’s a growing acceptance of non-traditional students.
“I’m learning a more specialized set of skills than most high school students,” Maxmin said. “I think it’s going to be better preparation for life than I would have gotten anywhere else.”