The Role of Schooling in 2025

Synthesis Paper #2

The Role of Schooling in 2025 will be different than today in terms of two major differences: technology and extremely diverse class room.  It will be up to schools to provide all of its students with equal learning opportunities despite cultural background and provide technological experience despite social economic status.

As mentioned in Synthesis Paper #1, technology makes information much more available and therefore downgrades the necessity of memorization of content.  This is only true however, if all students have access to the technology, which even in 2025, may not be the case.  Schools to the best of their financial ability should provide students with time to use the internet and computer both during and after school hours.  If assignments are designed to use internet browsing or would provide one student with an advantage over another, it is up to the school to make sure everyone has equal access.  This of course heavily relies on government funding, but computers and internet are becoming more affordable and accessible and hopefully will be less of a problem as time progresses.  The schools would be doing students a disfavor by not allowing them to have proper access to technology that they will be using in college or the business world after they graduate.

Multi-cultural education should be the goal of all schools and teachers in an increasingly diverse nation.  To help students from different cultures, teachers need to set up an environment that allows them to be successful while maintaining or developing a sense of cultural competence so they maintain a proud stance on their identity.  Taking these tasks further, teachers should be responsible for integrating various parts of all cultures into classroom instruction, which will relate to all students while simultaneously raising awareness of each culture to the students of different races and ethnicities.  By the same token, schools should also have it within their curriculum to bring to light the down side of prejudice, racism, hate and so on, so again students are taught to be more open minded and tolerant.

As a future social studies teacher, I have it a lot easier than most to include this in a curriculum.  Spreading cultural and inter-national awareness is inherently part of social studies, along with the negative of prejudice and racism.  The focus in a history or social studies curriculum in 2025 will be to spread the topics around, and not just focus on the same white faces that were more common when I was in middle and high school.