We give Thomas Steele-Maley credit; if he’s right, and no one will know for years exactly how right or wrong he is, he has dreamed up a model for a 21st-century education.
If he’s wrong, it will be an interesting dead end.
Either way, it’s a bold stroke and we applaud him for it. We also commend Jake Maxmin and his family for being bold enough to seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to shape a new course in curricula.
A veteran educator, Steele-Maley no doubt already knows the new standard in education involves laptops, online research and programs and back and forth dialogue between teachers and students, often by out-of-class email.
The model that served most people older than 30 – the traditional method of one teacher doling out information through a monologue in front of a classroom of students, who are expected to regurgitate that information in some fashion fit for testing – has by and large gone the way of the dinosaur.
Benefits of Steele-Maley’s concept, and there are potentially many, aside, we understand the classic home-schooling concern that one-on-one attention may guarantee a first-rate education, it does relatively little to develop a young person’s social skills. We are interested to see how Steele-Maley’s GlobalCiv program addresses that.
Maxmin has a point when he says learning should be something people want to do, but we don’t know how much “fun” can or should be involved, and we strongly disagree that one should devote their high school years to “fun learning,” leaving the hard work of getting along with people you may not want to deal with and doing things you don’t want do to for later in life.
We hold that social skills are best developed earlier than later, before young people enter the real world, where the problems are arguably greater and the stakes are definitely higher.
Nonetheless Steele-Maley’s concept is new, it’s different and it’s bold. On that score, we applaud him. Time will tell if it works or not.
