Scott Spears, retired public schools superintendent.

His prediction: 

“Prediction 11: The notion of schooling will be structurally dramatically altered through the use of diagnostics related to the acquisition and improvement of basic cognitive skills (such as brain processing speed, attention, memory, and sequencing), along with prescriptions employing emerging brain fitness software exercises, beginning in the earliest grades and progressing through high school.

Schools will be structured around the acquisition of foundational cognitive skills, related physical fitness to support brain fitness, student awareness and knowledge of brain function and responsibility for one’s own fitness. Schools will be much more organically structured along the learning needs of individuals, will be a community repository and asset for access to continuing brain and physical fitness programming, and will continue to provide important content knowledge acquisition experiences delivered through integrated experiential learning, custom-designed for the individual learner, and varying by time and place as needed.

Group learning gaps will close as the playing field levels in the acquisition of the basic cognitive skills required for high levels of success and learning. “Special education” as such will first disappear in the middle and later grades as students receive early intervention for cognitive skill development and as the plethora of currently diagnosed mental disorders are better understood as brain function issues that can either be prevented or remediated through neuroscience-based interventions, and will finally entirely disappear as a function of the design of individual learning plans for every student.

The nature of schooling is thus liberated from the current model of emphasis on content acquisition to become more focused on the teacher-student interface of interest-directed learning undergirded by the skills necessary for high-order thinking and learning.”

When I contacted Scott to inquire about the main obstacles for this prediction to come true, he responded:

“The obstacles are many because this is such a disruptive, new technology that is difficult to explain to so many in education who have no “frame” beyond what they believe about teaching and learning from their undergraduate preparation.”

Scott: many thanks for your thoughtful comment. We will mail you a hardcopy of our Market Report titled The State of the Brain Fitness Software Market 2008. Looking forward to more of your contributions! 

Posts related to this prediction:

- Learning & The Brain: Interview with Robert Sylwester

- Brain Connection: Eric Jensen on Learning and the Brain

- Are Schools (Cognitively) Nutritive for Children’s Complex Thinking?