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Education changes as area evolves. Buildings, studies, techniques all adapt for students’  benefit.

SENTINEL STAFF

Over the course of Keene’s two and a half centuries, few elements of local life changed more than education.

Once voluntary, elementary and secondary schooling eventually became mandatory. Once costly, it became largely free. Where seven or eight years of schooling was once generally enough for most jobs, today college — and, in some cases, graduate school — is needed for many occupations.

Once mainly a matter of straight academics, formal education has evolved into a window on life and its experiences, with classes about sex, etiquette and the world of work, and with professionally-trained counselors standing in the wings. Once barred from the general classroom, children with disabilities are now given a wide range of services and supports in school.

The 19th century school’s focus was on “readin’, ’ritin’ and ’rithmetic,” but today’s schools remain active long after the last bell has rung, with organized athletics, social clubs and a variety of activities filling students’ calendars.

Schools have gone through a complete cycle, from being places of few books — it wasn’t until 1852 that all Keene schools were supplied with dictionaries — to places where the emphasis on textbooks was heavy. Today, the books are disappearing again as a move toward multimedia and Internet services means a move away from needing books at all.

And where education was once a very local experience, partly because students had to walk to schools, education today is largely a regional phenomenon, thanks to cars and buses that easily travel over many miles of paved roads.

For example, more than a hundred years ago, the small town of Westmoreland maintained almost a dozen schools for its students, with buildings every few miles so students could easily reach them. By the 1950s, there were fewer than five schools in Westmoreland and soon after the town built Westmoreland School: a single building to house the town’s entire kindergarten through 8th-grade population — about 180 students. Older students travel 12 miles each way to Keene High School.

A few decades ago, Troy, Marlborough and other small towns in the region maintained their own high schools. Today, it’s cheaper and easier to send students to regional schools elsewhere — Troy students now head to Monadnock Regional Junior-Senior High School in Swanzey Center with students from seven other towns and Marlborough, like six other towns, pays tuition for its older students to attend Keene schools. This fall, Winchester will begin sending its students, too, to Keene High.

Beside avoiding duplication of services, regionalization helps taxpayers afford facilities and services that one-room schoolhouses can’t justify: computers are more likely to be bought or a new cafeteria built if the cost can be divided among 500 families rather than 50.

But there’s a negative side to regionalization as well: the geographic breadth of regional school districts can discourage parental and community interest. That can mean loss of support at both homework time and when proposals for those computers and new cafeterias come up for votes.

Teaching methods change

Learning is no longer a cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all thing; instead, teachers focus on integrating learning into a variety of activities. Textbooks and tests are still used, but rote learning has often been replaced by hands-on activities, group learning and other programs designed to give students variety and appeal to different learning styles and skill levels.

Nor is education a matter of fit-in or fall-out. Schools have a wide variety of programs aimed at stopping students from dropping out and bringing them back if they do.

But the biggest change has been in special education, which has grown to huge proportions as schools work to find a way to educate all students, regardless of their disabilities or problems.

Services range from giving a dyslexic student extra time to take tests and providing reading tutors to adding elevators to school buildings so wheelchair-bound students can go to class with their peers. It means providing interpreters for deaf students, nurses for medically fragile children and one-on-one aides for emotionally- and developmentally-disabled students.

And increasingly, those special services are in the regular classroom. A few years ago, most special education students were taught in special, self-contained classrooms. Today, the watchword is education in the “least restrictive environment,” which means teaching special education children in a way as close as possible to what regular students receive. (Extensive local reports on special education can be found in the “Special Reports” section of SentinelSource, The Sentinel’s online service, at www.keenesentinel.com)

Extracurriculars

After school, there are more activities than ever for students, with a variety of clubs, sports and other extracurricular activities for students; for example, at Keene High School, the approximately 1,600 students can select from 72 different groups, including drama club, ice hockey, student council, soccer, speech club, a newspaper, band and the color guard.

In the past few decades, one of the fastest growing areas has been girls’ sports, fueled in large part by a change in federal law — referred to as Title IX — which required equality in sports and educational opportunity in public schools. Sports offered to girls have to be on par with boys’ sports, and the facilities and funding given to one have to be given in equal measure to the other.

Schools have also become the center for much of what used to be handled in homes or society. Programs such as Head Start reach out to low-income children years before they get to school. Once in school, other programs provide free breakfasts and lunches, medical and dental checkups, even before and after-school day care to needy students.

In recent years, schools have begun “social curriculums” — programs that focus on teaching social skills and rules of society that in the past were taught at home.

Along with their math and English lessons, students are taught how to respect one another, how to tolerate differences and how to behave in school and in public. Programs are designed to give students an adult they can go to with problems and to encourage them to volunteer in the community.

Schools no longer assume students will figure out life after school on their own. Instead, school-to-work programs introduce the work world early, with job shadowing, internships and other work-related activities. Students get a chance to see what the field they’re thinking of going into is really like, and they get a peek at the sorts of skills, behaviors and attitudes they’re expected to have once they’re working.

The tenor of school has also changed. Safety and security are new concerns for school officials.

Initially, the concern was protecting students from potential kidnappers and barring undesirables from school grounds. More recently, concerns about school shootings in other parts of the country has led to more formal security measures.

Today, schools are also preparing for the worst and taking actions that would have been inconceivable a generation ago. Officials hold “intruder alert” drills and putting together policies on what to do if someone comes into the building with a gun or attacks another person.

Most schools today require visitors to check in before wandering the school and many require them to wear badges or be escorted while in the building. When layout allows, many schools keep all but one or two doors locked to outside, funneling visitors through doors that are within sight of office staff.

What’s in the future?

In sum, education at the beginning of the 21st century is a far more elaborate, varied thing than it was 200 or 100 years ago. And the bets are that education is likely to continue to change.

“The American high schools were designed around (the 1890s) and it hasn’t changed much since,” said David S. Hill, who leads the Keene State College education department.

Technology, especially computers and the Internet, is having a big effect on schools. Students have at their fingertips resources and information that would have required trip after trip to the library just a few years ago. Easy student access to computers and easy-to-use software means the days of hand-written essays and hand-drawn charts for reports are on the way out.

As schools are renovated or expanded, the plans are different, too. In the past, the stress was on  more classrooms, a bigger library or a bigger cafeteria. Today, construction plans would add computer rooms and Internet hook-ups, specially-equipped vocational and technical education rooms, upgraded girls’ sports facilities and improved accessibility for handicapped people.

As for curriculum offerings, expect change there, too.

Consider, for example, how curricula have changed in the last century. The following comparison shows courses taught at the Keene Academy, the precursor of Keene High School, in 1890 and classes taught at the high school today.

1890: Spelling (the most popular course), grammar, algebra, geography, geometry, Latin, French, Greek, chemistry, botany, music, surveying and U.S. history.

1999: World Perspectives, English, environmental science, Spanish, French, Latin, food preparation, woodworking, creative writing, band, biology, physics and computer-assisted drafting.

Hill predicts that education in the future will focus a lot less on a student’s chronological age and more on what he or she is able and ready to learn. There’ll be more acceptance of different learning styles as well, he said.

Few people will hazard a guess as to what will be taught in schools after another hundred-year interval, but several trends are already showing.

Hands-on learning is likely to continue in popularity and practical learning — computer training and specific job skills that can be used in the workplace, compared to more abstract, liberal arts learning — is likely to grow.

But, unlike the job skills taught in the past, which focused on preparing graduates for a manufacturing-oriented worklife, students will be prepared for high-tech, service-oriented fields in a more global economy, experts predict.

Take, for example, the trend to block scheduling. In block scheduling, class periods are longer — four classes a day, usually, where there used to be seven or eight. Students take fewer classes, but they have more time to study the subject and work with teachers on a topic. The system is gaining in popularity as schools look for ways to fit more creative and more in-depth programs into their schedules.

The demographics of schooling are bound to change as well. Special education laws require schools to provide services for disabled students until they are 21 years old. Other programs start school services as young as 3 years of age.

And increasingly, under the banner of lifelong learning, public schools offer a variety of classes to the members of the public, no matter what age, in such varied subjects as basic reading, math to dancing, foreign language, cooking and car repair. There’s a bit of circularity there, for until the middle of the 19th century, many students in local schools weren’t children at all but grown adults who hadn’t had a chance to attend school when they were young.

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