The past two and a half years have brought disruption after disruption to America’s K-12 schools. It’s been … stressful. But these disturbances in our education equilibrium have also given us a chance to step back and ask, “What is school for?”
The New York Times has a series of articles relevant to the subject title: What is School For?
Published Sept. 1 2022. Normally there’s a paywall for NYT online stuff, but supposedly this link HERE allows “no charge” reading.
Is the way we do schooling chosen as the best among many possible ways, or is it just a continuation of what has been done for decades upon decades… rolling along through inertia and the easy status quo? And how much of “what is school for” is determined by parents going into the workplace, or working from home?
Presumably we are in the midst of finding out some of that as employers try to call employees back into the office, and employees push back.
If parents work from home, they are at least partly able to supervise their kids at home too. If parents are spending their days at the workplace away from home, then parents will clamor for kids to be “back at school”.
And what if the future is some much more blended reality, with some combination of at home and out of the home for both the parents and the kids?