If this doesn’t sound like school, my answer is: Exactly. If you think no one will learn anything, I respond: Well, what is “learning” anyway? Is it “learning” when a sick skate ramp teaches the physics of momentum, friction, and angular velocity? Is it “educational” to recreate an entire desert biome in an ordinary sandbox? Is it really “school” if art class is a brick wall swarming with graffiti and stencils? A teacher can’t give every student personalized attention at the same time — but what if the teacher is placed on a spinning carousel, with students ringing the perimeter? What if?

Even an ordinary swing set is a living lesson in momentum and fulcrums and whatever. Do I even know what a fulcrum is, exactly? No, and that’s just my point — I had to spend my recesses indoors, practicing oboe.

It’s not enough to think outside the box . We must get outside the entire building.

Impractical? Idealistic? Naive? Exactly. We must forget all knowledge so that we can learn again. Destroy the classroom and build a future.

2037

Now more than ever, we must be vigilant in our defense of our children’s future. As any intelligent observer could have predicted, the misguided educational policies of our predecessors produced a generation of children who were ignorant, dangerous, and endangered. Hopscotch is not an effective medium for the periodic table. Dodgeball really isn’t very similar to molecular interaction. We should have known this then, but we definitely know it now.

Students who somehow escaped the educational damages of this curriculum often found themselves physically harmed anyway. Serving lunch on a moving swing? Using the wading pool as an observation tank for aquatic predators? This is no way to treat our most vulnerable treasures.

Nevertheless, we stumbled along this foolhardy path until 2034, when Walter Groon, a third-grader in Tucson, scaled a climbing pole/astronomy tower and then forgot how to get down. After a tense 73 hours, a FEMA squadron lowered him to safety, but the outcry and subsequent lawsuit resulted in a complete dismantling of the playground “school” — a death trap, more accurately.

Lesson learned: Our children are too precious to play with. We must protect and nurture both the minds and the bodies of these young citizens. Chaos is unacceptable; guesswork is outdated; safety is paramount. By amassing comprehensive information, combined with absolute control of processes, we can ensure precise, optimal outcomes. Development — whether physical or intellectual — is fundamentally a matter of input and output; for the desired results, we simply must calibrate the raw material, the incoming data, whether that data takes the form of a book or a meal.

And so I present the classroom of the future: the cafeteria.