I like Janet’s four functions of schools worth saving, but would add another – at least until parental workforce participation changes significantly. We need schools as child minding centres. Given that the care of our children while we work (the cart) is an important social and economic need, we might as well make their time away from us as worthwhile as possible. That’s where education (the horse) comes in!

It is a bit of a radical position but some of the questions it raises are valid.

I agree with Janet and the importance of community service – learning about yourself whilst serving others – an incredibly important and scaleable skill that our kids need and schools can provide.

What we don’t seem to do too well is to actually create global classrooms. Even though we have devices that enable us to collaborate on a scale that was not thought of when we were at school (or at Uni!). Kids have in their disposal the opportunity to collaborate globally and to learn in a personalised manner that enables them to operate in their preferred modality of learning – but as schools do we take advantage of this?

So many times we are still restricted by boundaries we have put in place such as to cover content, follow that new digitised text book or use the technology as a really cool typewriter. It seems that we have potential to build on the strengths of our school communities, but are tentative to let go of the apron strings that are based upon our experiences of school all those years ago.

Save – human interaction; expand from single age to multiage.

Save – physical activity; expand to include dance, and activities other than ‘playing with balls’.

Save – community service / service learning; expand to involve students in solving the real world problems in their community.

Save – posing really difficult problems to solve and allow students to tackle them together.