Ideas for a school of the future

Schooling has changed surprisingly little since its origins 5 millennia ago, despite efforts toward massification and inclusion. Research on a wide arch of fields indicates that schools must undergo major transformation in order to benefit from the current science of learning. This chapter outlines some of the seemingly utopic main kernels of this necessary transformation. The school of the future will fully embrace the physiological aspects of learning, and strive to optimize sleep, nutrition, and exercise for children and adults of all ages, so as to improve intrapersonal and interpersonal relationships. Learning will have computer games as scaffold for the crystallization the link between phonemes and graphemes during literacy acquisition, and for the generation of individual learning curves for the personalized tracking of performance. The retention of academic contents will be greatly improved by frequent cumulative tests and other opportunities for retrieval practice, and the use of novelty as an extrinsic adjuvant of learning will be emphasized.