21st Century Progressive Education
Late last year I had a fascinating conversation with a group of middle schoolers about the technology that is so central to their lives. I mentioned that when I was a kid we did not have answering machines or VCRs and that I remember the very first calculator I used—four functions, bright red LED numbers and completely amazing to us all. I told them that we used to have to get out of our chairs to switch the channel on the TV and that we had to carry change in our pockets in order to make phone calls from the street. How different the world is now and how quickly technologies come and go! The students had a fairly easy time grasping the changes in concrete “things.” Harder for them to grasp the ways in which life and lives have changed—careers that have come and gone, pastimes that have passed and societal norms whose evolution has fundamentally altered everyday human interactions. Our conversation ended with the logical question—what’s next?
“What’s next?” A question we at LREI frequently ask ourselves. The middle school students with whom I was speaking will graduate from high school in 2016 or so. Their kindergarten schoolmates will move on from LREI in 2023. Move on to what? What’s next for them? What options will these, now, children, soon to be young adults, have when they graduate from college in 2027? Most immediately, what sort of preparation must we provide to them for success in a world that we cannot imagine?
We discuss “What’s next” a lot during various administrative and faculty meetings. More formally, and focusing mostly on the high school, we have been examining what new strands our current program, as innovative and demanding as it is, might require in order to prepare our graduates for what will come just a few years down the road. What are the competencies that will allow your children to be successful no matter what the future holds? In order to support this investigation and the creation of new program, we applied for a grant from the Edward E. Ford Foundation. Late last June the Foundation informed us that, through a highly competitive process, we had been awarded a $50,000 grant to support this effort. The grant will be matched by an equal sum from within our community. We will use this $100,000 to fund the faculty’s work in creating the curriculum for the coming decades. While our initial focus will be the high school, we intend for lessons learned to quickly filter down through the middle school to the lower school. We will visit other schools, meet with leading educators in a variety of settings and attend conferences all in coordination with LREI’s historic mission. We are thrilled that the E.E. Ford Foundation supports our vision of 21st Century progressive education. Through our initial research, we have been pleased to find that much of what we hear will be essential in the future is currently at the core of LREI’s historic mission—connecting school learning with life, the ability to work with colleagues, resilience, adaptability, cultural sensitivity, sound reasoning and communication skills and a deep understanding of a variety of content areas. Much of what we have been doing so well for the past 90 years is what will be required in the coming century.
A committee of teachers and administrators is beginning its work. In the coming months this group will team with the faculty as a whole and will invite the high school students and interested parents into the discussion. We are looking forward to this challenging work and to the conversations that it will create.
I invite you to join me to discuss our efforts to prepare our students for the future on Tuesday, October 19th at 8:45 A.M. in the Sixth Avenue cafeteria.
In addition, I invite you to meet Carey Socol, our new Director of College Guidance, and to hear about LREI’s college guidance process on Tuesday, November 9th, 8:45A.M.-9:15 A.M., in the Sixth Avenue cafeteria.