Nothing so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

The title of this week's entry comes from the tag line that ends most newsletters for Veritas Varsity.  The quote is from Victor Hugo who, though living 200 years ago, aptly characterized our conviction that we're on to something big with this social experiment called Veritas.  A more recent writer, Gregg W. Downey, editor of eSchoolNews, in an October editorial talks about "the avalanche of change" that is inevitible for our school system in America.  We're trying to ride the crest of that avalanche, so to speak, with the innovations we've implemented this year.  What about you?  What are you doing to prepare for this coming avalanche?

In his editorial Downey suggests that earlier movements for educational change died for lack of sustainability (or as likely, due to resistance among educators); i.e. after the 1957 scare resulting from the Soviet launching of Sputnik, or after discovery in 1983 that we were A Nation at Risk in danger of being overwhelmed by a tide of mediocrity.  Yet both these (and many others beside) crises faded into the proverbial sunset, having blazed across the educational landscape for a few years with only a few ongoing, lasting effects (No Child Left Behind?).  Yet Downey is sure -- as sure as Thomas Friedman that the world is flat and getting flatter everyday -- that this time there will be no running away from lasting change.  What's different?  The advent of technology -- hardware, software, the internet, digitilization and "the whole nine yards" that threatens to snap the constraints that have bound educators to date.  And like with Mother Nature's avalanches, there's simply no running away from this.  Just as outsourcing and off-shoring have permanently changed the landscape of business in America, so too education is in for a rude awakening if it seeks to continue doing business as usual.

I told my Veritas kids this past week, in one of my not-so-infrequent musings on why we do things the way we do at Veritas, that I'm convinced high schools in ten years will look very little like what is seen today.  I think more teens will get their high school diplomas online in virtual school programs.  Traditional schools will combine live student to teacher interaction classes with distance learning and virtual school offerings.  Why struggle hiring a chemistry teacher when you can go online and get the benefit of an expert in the field for less cost to the school or district?  Indeed, the concept of leaving home and going to a centralized location to be force-fed an education that might or might not be consistent with one's personal goals and needs will be one of the first things to get swept away in the avalanche that is coming.  The social structure of school as we now know it will seem very distant in the not too distant future!

Will schools still be places for gathering hundreds or thousands of teens together for a canned instructional program?  I think not.  Why should my teen take the same curriculum as my neighbor when he or she has none of the same goals or interests?  And make no mistake, a student's individual interests will play a larger than life role in the selection of courses taken in the regimen of this 21st century school.  Everything else is being individualized and personalized in this new techno-age, why not my teen's high school graduation plan?  The state-mandated tests that today assure standardized, most would say marginalized, instruction will be as passe as writing a letter to a friend across the country or world.

Doubtless, there will still be school campuses, per se; they just won't look a lot like the ones currently out there.  Districts passing bonds to erect new multi-million dollar complexes should really be looking for more relevant ways to spend that money, because these mega-campuses are also going to go out with yesterday's printed newspaper.  I'm hopeful, expectant rather, that schools like Veritas Varsity will still be needed in this new age.  We congregate daily, not for the purpose of standardizing instruction among our students, rather to collaborate with each other, discuss with each other, learn with each other, and encourage each other.  There is also the "real world" aspect of the program.  By getting off campus every week and including extensive domestic travel in our semester routine one focus for coming together becomes to go out together to see and experience our world.

A brave, new world is indeed coming.  Not the one imagined by Aldous Huxley perhaps, but one that I'm convinced will be as brave and courageous as it is new.  Say what you will about Veritas, we hardly cling to the status quo and although we make no claim to have discovered Huxley's (or anyone else's) new world just yet, we're certainly willing to take a few tentative steps in that world's direction as we seek to ride the avalanche that is coming to a safe harbor, rather than get uprooted or swept away by it.