Are our schools prepared for the challenges our kids will face this century?  This decade?  Alvin Toffler suggest our schools were built to prepare the rural American child for the industrial revolution.  Get to work on time, enjoy repetitive tasks and essentially fall in line.  Agree?  Perhaps we have advanced somewhat since the late 1800′s and this seems all too familar to much of the work I recall from oh so many years ago.

Today, when I see our dedicated, hardworking teachers struggle to escape from the bonds of top down driven curriculm, I think there must be a better way.   Here is one alternative.
Future School
You’re talking about customizing the educational experience.

“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.

In our book Revolutionary Wealth, we play a game. We say, imagine that you’re a policeman, and you’ve got a radar gun, and you’re measuring the speed of cars going by. Each car represents an American institution. The first one car is going by at 100 miles an hour. It’s called business. Businesses have to change at 100 miles an hour because if they don’t, they die. Competition just puts them out of the game. So they’re traveling very, very fast. Then comes another car. And it’s going at 10 miles an hour. That’s the public education system. Schools are supposed to be preparing kids for the business world of tomorrow, to take jobs, to make our economy functional. The schools are changing, if anything, at 10 miles an hour. So, how do you match an economy that requires 100 miles an hour with an institution like public education? A system that changes, if at all, at 10 miles an hour?”