Tagged: Ontario
Ontario Already Built a School for the Future. Then We Forgot About It.
What Thornlea Secondary School’s forgotten experiment can teach us about education in the age of artificial intelligence
I recently discovered that the high school I attended for Grade 9 was not originally designed to be an ordinary high school.
Thornlea Secondary School in Thornhill, Ontario, opened in 1968 as a deliberate experiment in educational innovation. Long before today’s debates about artificial intelligence, personalized learning, student agency and the future of work, a group of Ontario educators was already asking a more fundamental question:
What should a school become when the world it is preparing students for is changing?
I find that extraordinary, partly because I attended Thornlea without knowing any of this.
To me, it was simply the school where I studied computer science using LOGO Turtle and DOS, joined the orchestra, took creative writing, journalism, photography and drama, swam competitively, studied Shakespeare and experienced meditation and visualization in physical education. Only decades later did I discover that I had briefly entered a school built from a very particular philosophy of learning.
Now I cannot help wondering whether Thornlea helped make me who I am.
Not in the simplistic sense that one year at one school determined the direction of my life. Human beings are shaped by thousands of influences. But environments do not merely give us information. They give us permission. They show us which kinds of curiosity are welcome, which connections are possible and whether learning is something we receive or something we actively pursue.
I became a writer, traveller and philosopher whose work moves between technology, psychology, sociology, anthropology, creativity, culture and human intelligence. I have never naturally understood why knowledge should remain divided into neat categories when life itself does not arrive in subjects.
Perhaps Thornlea did not create that way of thinking in me.
Perhaps it recognized it.
Perhaps it encouraged it.
And perhaps that is precisely what education should do.
The ‘little things’ that matter in life, a bit of humor for Monday
So we decided to go to Cooper Marsh on Sunday with our younger children. It is one of my favourite places to go with the littles. I have pushed many a stroller through the muddy walkway and pulled many a wagon. We’ve fetched shoes thrown over the edge of the boardwalk, pulled out rubber boots stuck in mud and carried a tired toddler to my exhaustion many a time. But not this Sunday, we decided to bring Maya (our black lab) with us for the walk. It must have been winter brain that made me forget but you are not allowed to bring dogs there, not even if they are on a leash.
Photo props: http://www.ourhometown.ca/news/NL0028.php
So we hopped into the car and decided to go to our favourite local beach. While driving I noticed a frog, a really big frog, at the side of the road. I mentioned it to the family and my husband insisted that we turn around and go see it (I think he thought I was bluffing when I used my hands to describe how big it was but he assures me that is not the case) So we turn around and find Mr. Frog. By this time he is in the middle of the road. Alex jumps out of the car and goes running into the middle of the rural highway and starts flagging his hands at the cars and trucks protecting little (well, huge) Mr. Frog. Continue reading
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