Spiegel
“The classic chalk-and-blackboard teachers are preparing children for a world that no longer exists.” ~Maurice de Hond
Eleven “Steve Jobs schools” will open in August in the Netherlands. Some 1,000 children aged four to 12 will attend, without notebooks, books or backpacks. Each of them, however, will have his or her own iPad.There will be no blackboards, chalk or classrooms, homeroom teachers, formal classes, lesson plans, seating charts, pens, teachers teaching from the front of the room, schedules, parent-teacher meetings, grades, recess bells, fixed school days and school vacations. If a child would rather play on his or her iPad instead of learning, it'll be okay. And the children will choose what they wish to learn based on what they happen to be curious about.
The schools will be open from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 on every workday. The children will come and go as they please, as long as they are present during the core period between 10:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. The building will only be closed for Christmas and New Year’s. The children's families will be able to go on vacation when they please, and no child will have to be worried about missing class as a result, since classes in the traditional sense will be nonexistent.
Only in exceptional cases will a teacher direct classes in groups. Normally, the children will learn by calling up a learning app on their iPad—which will be turned into a sort of interactive, multimedia schoolbook—whenever they want.
Photo: DPA
The program is more patient than any person ever could be and turns learning into a game-like experience, partly with the help of amusing noises and animations. In each exercise, the children are corrected the way players are in a computer game. They don’t have to work through entire chapters, as they did in the past. The goal is to enable them to reach the next level in the learning program at their own pace. The teacher’s role is to help them, not as conveyors of knowledge but as learning coaches. “The interaction between the child and the teacher remains the foundation of the lesson,” as Kleinpaste puts it.
As such, the school day never really ends. Pupils are welcome to keep working on their iPads at home, on weekends or on vacation. But as much as the program offers freedom and continuity, it also comes with a substantial monitoring component. The iPad keeps teachers and parents constantly informed about what children are doing, what they have learned and how they are progressing. If a math app is neither enjoyable nor successful, the teacher simply orders another one. The supply of educational programs never runs dry in Apple's online app store.
Arithmetic, reading skills and text comprehension are the core subjects in the elementary school. Good handwriting has been downgraded to a secondary skill, nice for industrious pupils but not truly relevant.
Every six weeks, teachers, children and parents decide together what is to be achieved in the next learning period. To do so, they meet at school or virtually via Skype. The era of the 10-minute parent-teacher meeting once a year is a thing of the past in the Steve Jobs schools.
And when they are not working on iPads, the future principal insists, students at Steve Jobs schools will lead the lives of perfectly normal children. Drawing, building things, playing and physical activity are all part of daily life at the schools.
“It isn’t as if the children will just be sitting in front of a screen here,” Kleinpaste promises.
The initiator of the iPad schools is the well-known Amsterdam public opinion researcher Maurice de Hond, 65, a man with an affinity for digital life. He is proud of the fact that he has known how to program computers since 1965. His daughter Daphne, born in 2009, pointed the way for him.
"At home, Daphne learns naturally, according to her own pace, interactively and using multimedia tools,” says de Hond. Why should she feel “like she’s in a museum” when she’s in school, he asks? The classic chalk-and-blackboard teachers, he adds, “are preparing children for a world that no longer exists.”
