The Town Board ruled today that, once the coronavirus pandemic has run its course, all of our schools, aside from those for toddlers, be turned into affordable housing units, thus going far to solve that problem, and, further, that henceforth a new without-walls system of education be created wherein students, through visits to mentors living here, whether engaged in the trades, the professions, or arts, will participate in hands-on learning.
What better way to learn and what better way to strengthen this interesting and diverse community than through a cross-pollination of ideas, the Board said in issuing its edict. Not only will the young be availed of useful knowledge at the feet of their elders, the Board added, but the town’s older citizens will be invigorated too, having to concentrate their minds concerning what it is they ought to impart.
Reasonable rents that the town would receive by the letting of living units in what had been its schools would help underwrite the revolutionary project, and additional monies would come through traditional property taxation, and perhaps through the sale of electricity generated by a vast solar panel park on the prairie where the airport used to be.
There will still be teachers, the Board said. They just won’t be sitting at their desk in front of a blackboard. In fact, they will be super-pedagogic, acting not only as mentors and facilitators but also as valuable links to other mentors. In this respect, it would be a hybrid situation, as it were, with mentors in the community and teachers, as usual, but without classrooms.
This experiment in a new way of learning and interconnecting may well come to have broad applications in a nation that has become so divided, the Board said, inasmuch as interacting in such an informal way ought to broaden minds, form bonds between the generations and classes and races, and thus lessen, if not erase, preconceived ideas and prejudices.
In brief, it could be the foundation for reinventing America.
(Sorry, April Fools.)