Apr
21
Continuing Education for Adults
Filed Under Plainfield News
Courtesy of Gerry Hawkes; Woodstock, VT who wrote:
I was in Plainfield yesterday and stopped by the McNellis’s to look at some work for them. We had a nice visit and the topic of how we might improve local education came up.
My wife is a middle & high school teacher in Woodstock, so I have had many years of involvement with teachers and students. I have great respect for most teachers and am impressed by the character and ability of many of the students, but have concerns about the inefficiencies and irrelevance that can often be found in our traditional system of education, in particular the many bureaucratic regulations and mandates that drive up costs and often frustrate good teachers. This said, our two children received wonderful educations in the public school system coming from a home environment which encouraged them to learn.
I have often thought that it would be most beneficial if our secondary school system could become a community school system, open to residents of all ages who wished to update their skills or just stimulate their intellectual curiosity, not just to teenage students. I can see many advantages to this, such as:
- Adults with updated skills should be able to boost their income thus improving the economic and social base of the community
- Senior citizens who attended classes would have intellectual stimulation as well as increased social contacts and would be better able to be happy, contributing members of the community
- Adults coming back into the school system for skill upgrades would illustrate to the teenage students the importance of obtaining a good education
- Having adult students from the community (there probably never would be a lot) would give community members an inside look at how the education system works or doesn’t work. This would be much better than relying on second hand and inaccurate accounts
- Older, adult students (particularly senior citizens) could contribute many valuable life experiences and lessons to the younger students
- Teachers could find older students an educational asset to help them make what they teach more relevant
- In lieu of paying for classes, some of the adult students could exchange class time for services such as study hall or lunch room supervision, thus relieving teachers of these duties so that the taxpayers would get more teaching time for their $ rather than using teachers for these non teaching duties
- If our secondary schools could become true community educational resources, I believe it would help uplift community spirit and the local economy
- Intergenerational understanding and cooperation should improve.
- Learning in an intergenerational setting should help lower substance abuse and crime rates among our youth and a provide our older citizens with a greater sense of purpose and belonging
- With community involvement, learning should become more relevant and broader in scope while, costly, inappropriate educational practices would be more likely to fall out of favor
These are just a few ideas to help us think about making positive changes in our educational system. I have never vetted these ideas in any forum other than a few casual conversations, so they have never been critiqued. I am sure there are practical reasons some of these ideas would not work, but I am also sure there are many that would, if the system can be changed. What I hope this does is to get people thinking outside the box, for ways we can make our educational system far better while reducing costs and/or uplifting communities so that they can afford the education they would like to have.