Future School: My Verdict(:

Around one to two weeks ago, there was a principal’s dialogue held during the Sec 2 assembly. The topic was about Future School (FS) and the forum discussion was supposed to explore the pros and cons of FS. Now, I would like to state my own opinion, and at the end, I will give my final opinion about FS, and whether it should remain in our curriculum.

I will touch on the advantages of FS first. The whole idea of FS was so that students were allowed to bring their laptops to school and use them during specific lessons. The main advantage of this, in my opinion, is the fact that with the laptops, students will have access to virtually boundless sources of information on the Internet, which makes researching much easier, faster, and needless to say more efficient. For example, during an LA lesson, the teacher would be teaching about the correct grammar to use in our compositions. Now, we know that there are many forms of grammar, and trying to print out worksheet after worksheet would not only deplete the school of it’s resources, but also makes revision very troublesome, when the student is unable to find the information he needs for his revision. Our LA teacher had utilised the power of the Internet, and had found a website where virtually every part of English grammar could be found. Don’t know the right grammar? Go to the websites! Unsure whether you had made a grammatical mistake? Check the website! This makes learning much more efficient, and information can be accessed with a click, instead of rifling through your plethora of notes.

Next, FS also enables for easy discussion among groups. During a group online lesson, the teacher can instruct the students to create a Google Docs for the whole group, and the group members can go in and contribute information. When another member spots a mistake in a certain sentence, he can help edit the mistake on the spot. What makes things easier is that Google Docs has a chat function, where group members can use to discuss the project. This not only creates a quiet and conducive learning environment, it also facilitates discussion and progress, which will help save precious time for the teachers.

Of course, nothing is perfect, and despite having many benefits, FS does comes with cons too. Having elaborated upon the two main benefits (in my opinion), I will now move on to state the cons of FS, and at the end of this post, I will give my final verdict, on whether I think FS should be implemented in our curriculum.

The main problem with FS, in my opinion, is the fact that students may and will become too reliant on the Internet to conduct research. The rationale of this thought this simple: When a teacher asks the student to do research on a particular subject, which is the source of information he would look for? Definitely the Internet. However, what happens if his laptop experiences a crash, or even worse (but more likely), the WiFi and internet connection had crashed? Then, the student will be provided with a hard choice of priorities: To wait for his laptop or the internet connection to be fixed, or to use alternative sources of information? Technically speaking, the latter is much more feasible, but the problem here is that after using the Internet for such a long time, the skill to search for information in alternative sources like library books and journals would become extremely foreign to the student. Will he know which section of the library to look? Will he be able to cleverly differentiate essential information from useless ones? Will he be able to use the content page and glossary, for instance, to minimise the time used? All these are especially important points to note when searching for information using the traditional paper and print, but after probably years of reading digitalised information, I suspect that most students, myself included, will find the task of using books and printed text as sources difficult. Therefore, I would like the readers to consider this pressing issue: In times of technology failure, will us students manage to improvise and come up with alternative but nonetheless efficient ways of confiding research? The answer is up to you to decide.

The next problem that I will raise is not as influential as the above, but is still something that should be taken into consideration. It is a popular topic of discussion among students and teachers alike: Abuse of laptops for gaming. With every student supposed to bring their laptops on certain days, there is a high chance that despite the additional load, he will continue to bring it on other days, be it for gaming or something untwisted to academic work. Gaming is a prevalent problem in schools, even in ‘elite’ schools like HCI. With FS, students would have an excuse to bring their laptops to school. Let me raise a common example: The student wants to play computer games at home, but his parents disallow him from doing so. What does he do? Yes, you guessed correctly. He tells his parents that he needs to bring his laptop to school, and in school, despite the numerous warnings and rules, he goes on to play to his heart’s content. This is not only detrimental to a student’s holistic and academic growth, but also negatively affects the class morale. Knowing that someone in your class is a black sheep and ruins your class reputation would be disturbing to the gamer’s classmates. This is why I bring up this problem of gaming: It not affects the individual himself, but also affects the people around him, making them lose concentration and get scolded as a class for something that they are not to be blamed for.

After bring up two pros and cons of FS, I would like to give my thoughts on whether FS should continue to be in the curriculum. In my opinion, yes, it should remain part of the curriculum, albeit with a few tweaks. For starters, instead of solely using the Internet for research, I propose that the teachers introduce tasks that challenge the students to use both hardcopy and softcopy. That way, us students can be trained to adapt to the sometimes unfavorable conditions in school. Also, to combat the problem of excessive gaming, may I suggest that students who are identified as gaming addicts be taken out of their class and placed in a separate class, where only the traditional “chalk and talk” would be used. After they have gone through one term, assess if they are able to combat their gaming addiction and if they are, transfer them back to the FS classes. Overall, FS is a great initiative that can encourage us students to acquire essential lifelong skills, but at the same time has a few loopholes that can be countered with the right measures.

Thank you,
Roystan (: