Chapter 13 - Planning tomorrow's schools

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Planning tomorrow's schools	459

set up with a particular vision of how it can help its students march confidently into the instant-information age.10 Every student in every class has the opportunity to link with the school's overall computer network. CD-ROMs are a fact of life. And the school doesn't even own a printed encyclopedia. All of its big reference library is on both interactive video discs and CD-ROMs - instantly accessible to anyone in the school, and in a variety of forms: so that pictures and facts can be combined for printouts, photos can be married with information.
  Every student at the school is already a computer programmer, and his own curriculum designer.
  Lester B. Pearson School, a Canadian high school, is another thriving in the computer age. It has 300 computers for 1,200 students. And it has one of Canada's lowest dropout rates: 4 percent compared with a national average of 30 percent.11
  Even more spectacular results are shown by Christopher Columbus Middle School in Union City, New Jersey. In the late 1980s, the state test scores were so low and the absentee and dropout rates were so high among the children of the school district that the state was considering taking it over.12 More than 90 percent of children came from families with English as a second language.
  Bell Atlantic, the area telephone company, agreed to help by providing computers and a network linking students' homes with classrooms, teachers and school administrators. All were connected to the Internet, and teachers were trained in using the PCs. The teachers in turn set up weekend training courses for parents.
  Within two years both the dropout rate and absenteeism had dropped to almost zero, and the students are scoring nearly three times higher than the average for all New Jersey inner-city schools on standardized tests.
  Highly-advanced computers have the ability to serve as both tutors and libraries, providing instant information and feedback to individual students. "Virtual reality" technology already enables anyone to participate in experiences as varied as history and space travel.
  This type of technology will make it possible for each student, of any age, to tailor an individual curriculum and eventually to actually experience each lesson. Interactive computer-satellite-video-television and electronic games technology provide the combined catalyst that will finally force a much-needed change in the teacher's role: from information to transformation. And every school system in the world, if it's not

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