Schools for the 21st century
Education is one of the main driving forces behind the social and economic development of societies. Schools, which have always been designed to prepare young people for the challenges of the future, now face the difficulty of anticipating what those challenges will be, knowing that they will certainly be different in almost every way from those of the past.
In recent decades, the move from industrial societies to knowledge societies and today, in some cases, into creative societies, has led the most developed countries to reform their education systems in order to offer parents and students a greater diversity of educational options.
This study, by Alexandre Homem Cristo, presents these new school models in different countries (USA, Sweden, England, the Netherlands and Denmark), addressing issues such as:
- How they fit into the respective education systems
- Examples of schools where innovative methodologies have been put into practice
- The funding models for these schools
- The effects they have had on their students' academic performance
- The effects they have had on social, ethnic and academic segregation in their communities
- The effects they have had on their educational systems.
Through this study, Fundação Francisco Manuel dos Santos seeks, firstly, to enlighten the reader about the multiplicity of options and alternatives for the education of children and young people around the world in non-tertiary education; secondly, it seeks to encourage reflection on these models of organising education and new models of schools, so as to open up lines of interest for future reflection and research, not to suggest that Portugal should correct the problems of its system simply by importing the success formulas of others, but to bring more in-depth information about some of the possible solutions to the problems it faces into public debate on Education in Portugal.
