Students Create Models for Schools of Future

The start of the new year may be the only time when it’s common for people to give serious, structured thought to the future. But, for some kids in the San Fernando Valley, it’s an ongoing topic.

During the fall semester, David Silverberg, a social science teacher at Oakwood School in North Hollywood, put his seventh-graders to the task of figuring out what schools of the future should be like.

The assignment is part of a yearlong course that also explores the future of other social structures, but thus far the kids have focused primarily on schools. And, according to Silverberg, 40 of his students have come up with educational visions for the future “drawn from places we adults haven’t gone yet to find solutions.”

The Oakwood preteens designed school buildings and courses of study for children of their own age as well as those as young as 2 and in college, to be located in places as diverse as underwater and outer space.

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Working in a team, Jessica Levey, Caroline Wolf and Sophie Beer-Dietz created--on paper--Maple Elementary School to be built in Boulder, Colo. Their mission statement for the school declares: “We the people of Maple, believe that each child has a special talent of his or her own. The talent may not be found on the surface, but through thorough research of oneself, the talent will be uncovered.”

The notion that each student’s individuality should be nurtured is not a new pedagogical concept, but it was taken up with gusto--and even a touch of poetic fervor--by many of these seventh-graders.

Nina Minkowski’s and Kate Doehring’s mission statement for their future school viewed children as “candles waiting to be lit” and said that “most schools snuffed out the flames instead of helping them grow.”

The statement went on to assure prospective enrollees that the school realized that not all students would be “intelligent” by society’s standards. “Some are mathematically capable, some artistically gifted, some are spatial, however they all have one thing in common: They love what they do.”

To give talents room to grow, some students sought to eliminate problems posed by such mundane things as, say, gravity. One group put their school, a college, in orbit around the Earth.

This institution, Moon II, is a college geared toward science with classes in medicine, engineering, astronomy and technology. The school’s neighborhood certainly might help them keep their minds on their studies.

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Science isn’t the only subject given such specialized treatment. At the hypothetical Broadway School of the Performing Arts, prospective students are promised that the school will never limit the number of plays in which students can perform during a year.

Two of the schools give full rein to enrollees’ aquatic ambitions. At Liberty School, the range of water sports is mind-boggling: swimming, jet skiing, water-skiing, knee boarding, sailing, windsurfing, water tubing and water sliding. It also has an underwater biology lab. And the name of the Calabasas Arts Science Swimming School reflects a curriculum of academics and the school designers’ favorite sport.

Teacher David Silverberg didn’t have to push the kids to release their imaginations, do solid research or write this assignment. He’s seen from their general behavior in class that seventh-graders these days are not slackers.

“They’ve already been taught to use the Internet,” he said. “They think they can have an influence on the world, and they demand to be included in the decision-making process.”