>>Look at the spread of that simple, but very effective teaching tool, Khan Academy, and the new paradigm they espouse for it.
Learn at home at your own pace, with the ability to go back to steps & concepts you do not fully grasp. Come to class to work your “homework” problems, even collaborating with classmates, while the teacher circulates, observes, corrects...TEACHES!<<
The Khan Academy is a very interesting development, and I believe several schools (or at least teachers within those schools) will soon take up his model. The term that’s being used to describe it is “Flip the Classroom” because the traditional model of lecturing in school and then reviewing by doing homework is “flipped.” Instead, kids first study the Khan lectures at home, and then, in the classroom, do the problems they used to do as homework, but with the teacher available to guide individual students as they encounter difficulty. (I suspect though that, in time, the lectures will be viewed during the school day, at school.)
Anyway, what they are finding is that, in math for instance, kids run into difficulty at different places, with different concepts, and that the old model would leave kids “in the dust” because they couldn’t progress, but the old model would continue on, losing kids along the way. In the new model, kids who are stuck are identified, and don’t progress to the next lesson (at home) until they get “unstuck.” They also find that nearly all kids successfully complete the curriculum under the new model. In other words, nearly all turn out to be capable of learning math, a scary subject to many under the present model.
As for homeschooling, the Khan Academy would be perfect for it, as long as the parent or older child acting as tutor was able to stay ahead of the child by understanding the curriculum themselves. (It’s hard to tutor when you’re lost yourself.) Since most of this could be done online from home, I could even see self-styled online “tutors” helping kids at home and getting a solid reputation for success.
The time will come when parents in a community realize that there’s someone they can hire online who is succeeding at getting 8th graders through an entire high school math curriculum in a year using the Khan Academy and the tools available there for student evaluation. When that day comes, public education had better be changing fast or it will be losing “customers” at a rapid pace, especially if there’s a successful voucher movement underway by then. We might well return to the one-room country school model in that environment, where 20-40 kids of all ages gathered near their homes in a couple of rooms with wireless internet, each owning an Ipad, the older tutoring the younger, all under the guidance of one or two adult tutors, with something like the Khan Academy providing the initial instruction.
And the political philosophy of those tutors would be well known to the parents of the children, I might add.
“I could even see self-styled online “tutors” helping kids at home and getting a solid reputation for success.”
We traveled a lot when our kids were growing up. We would play “cow poker” for awhile to entertain the kids. When that got tiresome, I started giving our 6 year old daughter math problems to do in her head. By the time she was in high school, her math teacher was asking her to tutor the teacher’s college student daughter. This was all prior to “online”, of course.
BTW, excellent analysis!