SCHOOL FOR THOUGHT

Thinking outside the big school box

Here’s a wonderful story from BC about a kindergarten in a retirement home: it’s good for the seniors, it’s good for the kids; and it saves money. Let’s hope this idea spreads - not only in terms of locating kindergartens in other retirement homes but also in terms of thinking outside the big school box.

We could have half-day high school placements - automobile service centres for tech students; newspapers for aspiring journalists; YMCA’s for jocks; university research labs for kids with a scientific bent, and so forth. We could have home-schooler support centres which offer supplementary courses like French-as-a-second-language, choirs and orchestras, and sports teams. We could have one-room schoolhouses in remote - and not-so-remote - communities. We could have hi-tech learning centres which offer individualized computer-aided learning programs and distance learning programs that allow students to learn from home.

The possibilities are endless once one grasps that the modern big-box school is a fairly recent invention - and that it doesn’t have to be like this.