What’s the Best Way To Learn? Whatever Works For Your Kid.

At a moment when New York City Mayor Bill de
Blasio is
rubbing his constituents the wrong way with an attack on the
education options represented by
charter schools, let’s take a break and examine a vision of the
future of education that embraces all sorts of alternatives. Where
de Blasio seems to use your average 1970s-era Department of Motor
Vehicles as the starting point for his policy preferences, a recent
report authored by Goldwater Institute Education Director Jonathan
Butcher looks at the increasingly dynamic and diverse world around
us as a model for helping children learn. Butcher takes it as a
given that children have different needs and should be able to
learn in the variety of ways that suit them, rather than being
plugged into one-size-fits-all institutions.

In
A Vision for Education and the Future of
Learning [PDF], Butcher writes:

[I]magine sitting with your child at the dinner table and
preparing for the new school year. But instead of reading a letter
telling you what school your child is assigned to, you have a menu
of schools, classes, tutors, and extracurricular activities to
choose from, some located nearby and others online. This
educational directory lists such options as virtual classes,
schools that focus on the liberal arts, classes in computer
programming, and even lessons taught in another language.

You select math, English, and art classes offered by a local
charter school, where your child will sit with friends she’s had
all of her life. In the afternoon, she’ll study Spanish and music
online and prepare for the SAT in an evening class at a nearby
private school. She swims on the swim team at the neighborhood
traditional school twice a week.

New technology and bold legislative advances in educational
choice are bringing us closer to the day when this hypothetical
dinner-table exercise becomes a reality for every family. However,
this vision for the future is a sharp contrast to the factory model
of education we have come to accept. We have grown accustomed to
the routine of parents sending their children to an assigned public
school, and these schools employ administrators, teachers, and
other staff who receive their pay regardless of how many children
learn to read or drop out of high school. The question for parents
and their students in the next generation must change from “Where
do we go to school?” to “How do we want to learn?”

Butcher makes the point that children should acquire marketable
skills as they learn—something that equips them to function in a
world that increasingly requires some knowledge of science and
math.

Whatever skills are acquired, and for whatever purpose, he also
suggests using technology to allow children to self-pace their own
learning, so that they’re neither bored nor overwhelmed. That would
involve a significant break from the increasingly rigid model
currently in vogue.

Butcher gets specific about the policy tools that can be used to
achieve these ends, including education savings accounts, online
classes, charter schools, and funding that follows kids rather than
schools. But the specific tools are less important than a vision of
education that recognizes that children aren’t widgets. You can’t
shoehorn them into identical settings, treat them as objects of
cookie-cutter teaching plans, and expect good results.

There’s no one right way to teach children, because there’s no
one type of kid. We recognize the need for options everywhere else
in life, from eateries to clothing stores to places where we live.
There’s no good reason to think that a world that offers hot dog
carts and five-star restaurants, thrift stores and Brooks Brothers,
yurts and mini-mansions, should settle for a single model of
institutionalized education. Nor should we pretend that we’re
well-served by letting the de Blasios of the world choke off our
choices.