Proposal for an ideal school

Education - Concept Proposal

CONCEPT PROPOSAL for IDEAL EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM Goals, Objectives, and Theoretical Perspectives:

The overall goal of the proposed school would be to increase student learning and preparedness for developing their intellectual capacity in ways conducive to their fulfilling productive roles in society. The specific objectives through which this goal might be achieved involve expanding the concept of academic education to include a much broader range of talents and avenues for learning than the traditional narrow focus on linguistic ability and symbolic logic.

At the heart of this approach would be the theoretical perspective emphasizing the current trend of incorporating the suggestions of Howard Gardner of the Harvard University School of Education. According to Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences (2000), the limitation of traditional academic programs on reading, writing, and mathematics neglects five other specific aspects of human cognitive intelligence: namely, visual-spatial, body-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, musical, and naturalistic (Gardner, 2000). The proposed school would also incorporate the suggestions of numerous researchers according to whom hands-on active learning is much more conducive to genuine learning, long-term subject-matter retention, and the development of independent critical reasoning skills (Adams and Hamm, 1994).

Finally, the third element of the learning format of the proposed school would be increasing the autonomy of students with respect to designing their curricula. Ideally, this approach would minimize direction from educators beyond that necessary to guarantee the acquisition of proficiency in the essential skills necessary for them to fulfill adult responsibilities. That would include channeling their respective academic talents and aptitudes into potential areas of interest much earlier than typically encouraged within traditional academic programs.

Program Models, Visions of the Child, and the Roles of Teachers and Technology:

Possible models for the concept school would include the New City School in St. Louis, Missouri and the Gardner School in Vancouver, Washington whose motto is "Teaching for Understanding" (Gardner, 2000). In general, educational approaches featuring the Multiple Intelligences concept conceive of the child as an individual whose greatest capacity for learning may be through any combination of one or more of the eight types of cognitive abilities.

According to this view, the role of educators includes the responsibility to help students discover their potential intellectual strengths so that they can be exploited for the sake of learning. In principle, the idea is simply to provide equal academic benefit to all students instead of (in effect) favoring students whose strengths happen to lie in verbal- linguistic skills and mathematical aptitude at the expense of their classmates whose strengths and greatest capacity for learning lie in other areas. Other models for the proposed school include increased use of hands-on active learning instead of the traditional reliance on the passive learning-by-lecture model and rote memorization of facts from textbooks.