Schooling in the Future

We’ve talked about a ship with children needing family sized living quarters and more medical and dental facilities than a ship without children. The next thing to think about is how long the children will be on the ship. For ships that plan to house children fulltime, some sort of schooling system is needed, but for ships that only transport children and people don’t stay on ship for more than a month or two, a schooling system isn’t necessary.
For those that decide they need schooling they should start with the lower grades, such as kindergarten to 8th grade. There are a few ways you could set up to give them schooling. You could set up a few school rooms for certain ages with a number of teachers or if you have only a few children on ship you could set up one teacher to teach all ages. However, remember that younger children learn at a slower pace and need more guidance than older children. Years ago in the pioneer era all the town children were taught in the same room by one teacher. However the children didn’t start attending the schoolhouse until they were about six and the older children were given reading assignments to do while the teacher worked with the younger children, teaching them to read aloud and do math while checking the older children’s work every once in a while.
Another way to do schooling is by independent study courses set up by a centralized board of education and done on computers. However, younger children will find it hard to learn by staring at a computer screen and pressing buttons. If you’ve been to an American toy store lately you may have noticed a trend that suggests eventually kids will have toys aimed more at education than fun, although the children won’t realize it.