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User-centered conception is a way of approaching product design that can be applied to all fields. With this approach, designers identify the users of a product, their needs, and expectations to define a specification of what the product should enable.

Once the specifications are defined, engineers can design concrete solutions. The selected solutions can be very different but all of them should meet the identified needs and specifications.

Some products benefit greatly from user-centered design. This is the case for the automotive and aeronautical industries and more and more for mobile applications.

Other products do not benefit from it, often because they do not evolve much. This is particularly the case for schools and education.

Every country in the world is faced with the problem of educating its people. children have to start going to school to be educate at a very young age. School will follow them for a very long time to make sure that they can get a job and have a certain level of knowledge in various fields.

Yet all education systems are decried. The way schools work is pretty much the same everywhere: lectures are given to several students divided into age groups. The lessons will be evaluate so that the teachers can certify whether or not the students have acquired knowledge.

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Children and teenagers are forced to attend long hours of classes that are not following the biological and psychological rhythms of humans. On average, only 10 minutes of an hour’s class are retained.

Teachers and school directors are under great psychological pressure. The lack of money, the difficulty to interest students who have no choice but to be there, and the difficulty to manage classes of dozens of students sometimes lead to depression and suicides

The purely “knowledge” aspect of the school is now being challenged by the Internet through videos posted on Youtube or online course platforms. The video format has the advantage of condensing the courses into short and synthetic formats. Moreover, videos can be replayed endlessly, which allows you to learn at your own pace and to review courses.

But school as we know it cannot be replaced by online courses. The Covid crisis of 2020 showed that school has many more functions than simply transmitting knowledge from teachers to students.

What might a school designed with a user-centered design approach look like? This requires an understanding of how the current school functions, identifying the direct and indirect users of the school and understanding the needs that need to be reconciled.

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School systems:

The current school system comes from the Enlightenment period. At that time, education and knowledge were notions that philosophers wanted to put forward in society. It was decided that all children should learn common basics: reading, writing, speaking, calculating.

The school became compulsory from a certain age and until a certain age. At the beginning, many children stopped after primary school and went to learn a job. Gradually the age where the school was compulsory was pushed back until 18 years and the end of high school.

After the world wars, it was necessary to educate children massively. The classrooms became fuller and fuller and have never been empty since.

Almost all developed countries operate on the same principle: lectures by a teacher to a class of students of varying sizes for 6 to 8 hours a day, almost every day. Students are regularly tested through written or oral exams to verify that they have learned the lessons and acquired the knowledge they should have at their age.

From secondary school onwards, classes are specialized and divided, and students have to go from one teacher to another and from one room to another according to a set timetable.

After a certain age, some students are allowed to go to an apprenticeship, a vocational high school or to continue in a general high school, which means to deepen their theoretical knowledge.

Traditionally, studies are considered a reflection of intelligence. A good and intelligent student will study, a bad and stupid or limited one will do a manual job. This is a cliché, very intelligent people may not study and vice versa.
This cliché tends to disappear as many engineers and graduates end up giving up their jobs to learn a manual trade in the end.

What will vary from one country to another are the educational programs and school rhythms. Some countries have much more intense programs than others, such as Japan or Korea. Some countries emphasize manual activities or sports like Norway or Germany.

Since the school system is more or less the same everywhere and it is the teaching methods and programs that change, one can imagine a competing system that would apply to all countries.

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The real purpose of school

The school is not a place of teaching, it is a place of socialization. The school fulfills a special role in society: non-mature people are grouped in common places, under the responsibility of adults in charge of supervising them, educating them, keeping them busy. Children and teenagers meet daily and experience friendships love betrayals and social experiences that will shape them in their future life.

This social aspect is the element that proves that school will never be replaced by online courses and videos. Parents need a place where they can leave their children safely all day while they work. Children need places to socialize, even if they are forced to go.

During the Covid crisis, we saw how difficult it was for students to attend classes at a distance and be isolated from their friends.

The many “users” of school:

The students:
ages 5–18, students have specific needs based on their ages, the class they are in. The students are composed of subgroups with particularities: disabilities, ethnicity, culture, learning abilities, sociability, popularity, etc.

The needs are numerous, but the main ones are:

• To make friends
• To prepare for adult life
• To find a vocation
• To have fun
• Not to be bored
• To pass the imposed tests
• To learn to collaborate

The teachers:
they are the people who will frequent the schools the most and in this sense could be perceived as the main “users”. Teachers are also heterogeneous in their relationship with children, the pleasure of practicing their profession, their specialties, the age groups they will have to manage. Their needs are linked to the exercise of their profession in good conditions.

Some needs can be:

• To have disciplined classes
• To interest the students
• To have the means to teach in good conditions
• To not have to deal with disgruntled parents
• To follow a program following their values
• To be paid fairly.

The parents:
parents work and organize themselves around their children’s lives, dropping them off at school, picking them up, worrying about their grades, but most of all they are happy to know that their children are looked after and safe under the responsibility of adults and surrounded by friends. On the other hand, parents tend to blame their children’s failures on the teachers.

They need:

• To see their children succeed in school,
• To have their children looked after,
• To know that what their children are being taught is appropriate and in line with their values.
• They also want their child to be treated properly through meals, breaks, not to be harassed.

The value taught in school are a double edge sword. It’s important to protect children, but we recently saw it go to far as parents are pushing to ban and even burn books judged inappropriate.

Governments:
Governments have a say in what students are taught, in the systems of access to education — successive reforms are made by ministers and governments who are more or less progressive and promote certain ideas to society through the programs that teachers are obliged to follow.

How to solve the current problems

Starting from the needs of each user in order of importance:

At the basic level, teachers need to be trained to deal with several dozen children simultaneously, learn to attract attention, speak without violence.

The greatest difficulty of the teaching profession is to manage the social life of the classes. The programs must be built with the teachers to ensure that they are tenable with the real conditions of the field.

Competition with new technology must be the way to new teaching methods such as the flipped classroom, which relies on online courses and meetings with teachers to ask questions and go into depth on topics.

Programs must not be changeable so quickly by governments, just like classroom operations.

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Schools must have staff in charge of accompanying and supervising children. This is already the case today, but more advanced means should be put in place to avoid conflicts, to protect the children in a republican framework, to give meaning to their presence at school.

These elements require the involvement of students in the life of the school they attend and a follow-up by professionals such as psychologists, guidance counselors, social workers, etc.

The social aspect of the school is not sufficiently taken into account or developed by politics. The reputation of schools is therefore built on the people who attend them and the teachers who are more or less able to manage the students.

The students want to socialize, to be able to live common experiences in groups. They also do not want to be bored, so it is necessary to change the way they study so as not to remain on the model of the class hour. Classes should be taught in a way that is not boring. Grades are an unnecessary pressure, they should not be punitive but serve as a benchmark of achievement.

School should also allow students to discover what they like or don’t like and to invest in it. It should also allow to define career plans from a certain age and not close itself to studies.

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The programs and operations of schools must be independent of governments. If this is not the case, the programs are too unstable because they can change overnight depending on the minister of the moment. Programs must reflect republican and teacher values.
Teachers must be trained to deal with students. Managing children, defusing conflicts, dialectics are all elements that must be mastered to become a teacher.

Schools must have the means and the ambition to ensure a socio-psychological follow-up of the students, to anticipate and prevent psychosocial risks, in particular school harassment.

The schools must also ensure the animation of the social life of the students by involving them in the life and the projects of the schools and by giving them the possibility to have fun. This includes cleaning the premises as in Japan, personalizing the classrooms, providing sports facilities, and organizing events throughout the year.

Schools must also act as a buffer between teachers and parents to avoid direct conflict.

Parents need places where their children will be cared for and safe. They want knowledge to be given to them and that knowledge to be able to get more education and jobs. Programs need to be explained to parents so that they understand their merits even if they do not agree with family values on issues of censorship or religion as we have seen in some states recently.

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Lot and lot more research need to be done. An American, French or Japanese school may have the same structure, the relationships between students, between students and teacher, the importance of grade, the freedom given to student outside the school, and many more aspects differ.

A whole new philosophy of educating youngsters must be decided to be the basis of a great system designed based on the user centered conception.

A school redesigned for a better user experience would be a safe place without restricting students, with lots of social activities, short classes, facilities that protect teachers, and teachers better trained in classroom management.
These are things that many institutions are already trying to implement with the resources at their disposal. In-depth studies of what is feasible and what is not need to be conducted because whatever solutions are chosen, school systems need to be improved.