Photo by Adam Winger on Unsplash

Hearing Jeff Hopkin’s talk this week took me back to one of our first reflection posts on the film Most Likely to Succeed, which was a documentary about another innovative tech school called High Tech High. That school seemed so far out of reach to me when I watched it, but it was in much closer in reach than I thought. Jeff’s Pacific School of Innovation and Inquiry (PSII) is right here in Victoria and the school is taking strides into a very similar direction as High Tech High with unstructured classes, student inquiry based learning, and rule-breaking!

For both High Tech High and PSII, what boggles me the most is the trust that the parents have with signing their children up with such radically innovative schools and I give a big kudos to them and the students themselves. However, It also says a lot that someone like Jeff, with so much experience in the traditional public school system would veer off the conventional tracks completely to start up a school like PSII. It says a lot about the currect school system, which I went through, which most of you readers went through, and will work with. It makes me question how I was taught and how students are taught now.

I wrote about this in my Most Likely to Succeed reflection as well, but I personally see the issues of the educational system rooted in expectations, expectations of a post-secondary education/degree. Because students are expected to know this and this in grade 5, they must learn this in grade 4. Because students need to get into university, they must know this and do this and get this grade. Students are trained to get a degree that they’ve been convinced guarantees stability. This is why I really like Jeff’s approach to avoid the BC curriculum in PSII. Schools like PSII and High Tech High are experimental, and pioneering. They’re examples for the future and It may take a long time, but I can see a future where these innovative schools will become the traditional system for all of BC and perhaps Canada.

“Students who only know how to perform well in today’s education system—get good grades and test scores, and earn degrees—will no longer be those who are most likely to succeed. Thriving in the twenty-first century will require real competencies, far more than academic credentials.”

Tony Wagner, Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era