Education beyond conventional wisdom
The Issue: Need for more classrooms as population increases over the first quarter of the next millennium.
Our View: The NMI should weigh such future cost versus the establishment of cyberclassrooms.
A renown professor in education was on his way to a meeting of global educators in Geneva when he realized that he must have passed the turn to the venue of the annual event. He turned around and found the hotel a quarter of a mile down the road.
In his presentation that morning, the professor explained his experience earlier in the day of passing the road to the future that is here today, now! Similarly, the NMI seemed to have gone past the road to the future of education and must turn back its vehicle to ensure that it finds the right venue to discuss and determine what it needs to do about education in the next millennium.
Indeed, this undertaking is a monumental task in light of the need to critically review, with journalistic mind set, the cost benefits of conventional approaches to education versus the establishment of cyberclassrooms. In other words, if current trend and requirements of education is to prepare pupils so they acquire literacy in computer and technology, then it stands to reason that serious review is made of the future of education beyond conventional wisdom.
Recently, the NMI was loaned some $16 million in bond money to build classroom facilities in all three inhabited islands here. While we understand the urgency of such facilities, are there funds earmarked for instructional capital equipment such as computers and does it include the installation of both hard and software programs in all classrooms in the NMI? Or would such cost fall under the regular annual appropriation for the Public School System or did we overlook such item in the rush to build these badly needed facilities?
If the focus is to continue building more classrooms, then it seems that we subscribe to driving past the road to the future of education seemingly oblivious to what lies ahead. We would have missed, in grand fashion, the benefits of cyberclassrooms that is linked to the information superhighway now being used in nearby Japan and Asian countries. Exploring the benefits of cyberclassrooms will definitely open up more windows of opportunities for posterity where we would have allowed redefining and refining education to meet the challenges of all that technology would have shaped into a way of life in the 21st Century. As such, the NMI can’t afford passing the road to the future. Si Yuus Maase`!
