In this article at Edutopia (also PDF), Alvin Toffler, ever forward-thinking, offers his radical vision for the future of education. He says, not surprisingly, that our system was created to prepare children for employment in the industrial age, an age that has long since passed.

While the Washington Office of the Superintendent of Public Instruction has discussed “personalizing education,” Toffler sees far more structural and systemic imperatives for personalizing education:

Toffler: New technologies make possible customization in a way that the old system — everybody reading the same textbook at the same time — did not offer.

Edutopia: You’re talking about customizing the educational experience.

Toffler: Exactly. Any form of diversity that we can introduce into the schools is a plus. Today, we have a big controversy about all the charter schools that are springing up. The school system people hate them because they’re taking money from them. I say we should radically multiply charter schools, because they begin to provide a degree of diversity in the system that has not been present. Diversify the system. link

Personalizing education, especially at the high school level and beyond, is a great idea. Ever the radical visionary, Toffler says we need to “shut down the public education system” in order to fix it. Logistically, however, Toffler’s proposals would require us to not only rethink public education, but the structure of life and work in our society. His vision of schooling:

• Open twenty-four hours a day
• Customized educational experience
• Kids arrive at different times
• Students begin their formalized schooling at different ages
• Curriculum is integrated across disciplines
• Nonteachers work with teachers
• Teachers alternate working in schools and in business world
• Local businesses have offices in the schools
• Increased number of charter schools

Proposals such as Toffler’s often fail to differentiate between reforms needed at the elementary, middle, and high school levels. For example, personalized paths to college and/or work may be a meaningful goal for high schools to pursue, but how would this benefit elementary students?

While it’s possible that more flexibility and freedom could result in better outcomes for students, it’s also possible that removing any of the standardizing forces (such as fixed arrival times and entry ages) would, in a system with 47.7 million students, lead to more chaos rather than personalization.

Mr. Toffler is correct that our education system was designed to serve an industrial-age society. As such, it is highly efficient, with relatively high student-to-teacher ratios. While affordable, these ratios do not correspond to norms in the world of work. Consider, for example, that a manager in corporate America would never be expected to have 150 people reporting directly to her – yet millions of middle and high school teachers have this many or more students for whom they are directly responsible each day.

Mr. Toffler is also correct that our schools are not working for a large number of students. However, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that they are working for many more. While we need many more alternative schools to help meet the needs of all students, we don’t need to remove the benefits of traditional schools from students who are thriving in our system.

Any radical restructuring of public education must take two mandates into consideration:

• The need to educate all children
• The need to operate on a realistic budget that society can sustainably provide

Making secondary schools more like colleges could help some students, while it would surely allow others to slip through the cracks. Making schools more like company offices could better prepare students for the world of work, but it would also be orders of magnitude more expensive.

Perhaps the question of funding will eventually resolve itself, if society comes to see the payoff of quality education.

Edutopia: You’re advocating for fundamental radical changes. Are you an optimist when it comes to public education?

Toffler: I just feel it’s inevitable that there will have to be change. The only question is whether we’re going to do it starting now, or whether we’re going to wait for catastrophe.

Read the full article at Edutopia