Richard Incorvia is a teacher at the Maharishi School of the Age of Enlightenment’s middle school who likes video games. He decided to turn his class into a role-playing-game. I’ll leave it up to him to explain as he does so well on his website, lessonadventure.com. He has a collection going on on Kickstarter to further develop his project. Awesome stuff!
I recently posted a request here on education4site.org and other places for examples of how education/classrooms/schools have been portrayed in science fiction literature, movies, etc. I got some great responses and have included them in a comment to my original post. I’m familiar with many of the sources but don’t particularly remember all of the references to education since I wasn’t really looking for them when I read them. I hope to take a better look at them when I get the chance (most of my sci-fi library is packed away in storage in Iceland, where I am not).
Michael A. Burstein especially caught my attention. I was not at all familiar with his work. Burstein’s first published sci-fi short story, TeleAbsence (published in 1995), is an excellent example as it is entirely about schooling in the future. Not surprising, considering that, in addition to writing science fiction, Burstein has been a science teacher and editor of science textbooks.
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On the Horizon, a journal focused on the future of learning and work, has issued a call for papers for a special issue on “Borderless society: The ‘new’ work and education”. The special issue will be edited by Dr. John Moravec and will explore the educational needs for the emerging “knowmadic society”, i.e. a society of workers who are, “creative, imaginative, and innovative person who can work with almost anybody, anytime, and anywhere.” See the full call for papers here.
Due dates are:
Submissions of title and 250-word proposal due: July 1, 2012
Notice of acceptance: July 13, 2012
Papers due: December 1, 2012
Review result notification: January 15, 2013
To submit a paper:
Submissions to this special issue of On the Horizon should be sent to the guest editor at moravec@gmail.com.
I’ve written before about how science fiction shapes our visions of the future; for ex. Asimov’s Laws of Robotics and the Star Trek communicator as inspiration for the cellphone. But, how have schools and classrooms been portrayed in science fiction? Is there anything there that might give us some ideas about how we might want to shape education? I can’t remember a lot of examples of schools or classrooms in science fiction except for a meager handful that aren’t very inspiring.
I remember seeing a Star Trek episode (don’t remember which series or which show – but I’m going to guess that it was Deep Space 9) where there was some imminent danger and a bunch of children had to be confined to their classroom. I was surprised that, despite all the attention paid to the evolution of technology in Star Trek, the classroom that was shown was pretty much exactly as you would expect to see if you walked into a classroom in the US today.
I came across another reference to school in Star Trek; this time a Vulcan school. Karen Henke, on the Future of Education Network website, describes a scene in one of the Star Trek movies where Vulcan children sat alone in pods and repeated what was said to them by a disembodied voice.
Other examples that I can think of are mostly intended to be critical of schools and thus portray them as staid institutions where facts and acceptable knowledge are forced upon children. For example, Bradbury’s Farenheit 451:
With school turning out more runners, jumpers, racers, tinkerers, grabbers, snatchers, fliers, and swimmers instead of examiners, critics, knowers, and imaginative creators, the word ‘intellectual,’ of course, became the swear word it deserved to be.
In Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld series describes a world where everyone from Earth is resurrected, except for young children. In one of the final books it is finally revealed that the young children have been resurrected on another planet, named Gardenworld, where they are raised as “Ethicals” and eventually help transform Riverworld into a suitable home for the resurrected humans.
I have vague memories of some other mentions of schools and classrooms in science fiction but, because of my habit of moving from country to country every few years, I don’t have access to my sci-fi library right now. So, I can’t leaf through the books to check.
Do you remember any interesting portrayals of schools or classrooms or other forms of education from science fiction? Post them here. Help me get a collection of examples together.
One more quote for my still non-existent quote-of-the-day series:
To create anything — whether a short story or a magazine profile or a film or a sitcom — is to believe, if only momentarily, you are capable of magic.
Tom Bissell – Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation. Via Brainpickings
Is this finally a reason for educators to join Google+ (or get active – I joined long ago but don’t use it)?
Click here to read more about Googles Education on Air conference on Google+.
