Factory Worker Education System

History

99% to this day, private and public, education system operates the same way as 150 years ago: teacher standing in front, students sit at desks, passively acquiring knowledge. This model assumes that most of the knowledge that is to be acquired is factual and descriptive - it can be transmitted through words and based on memorization and comes from a central authority and is time-boxed. You can not teach ethics in an ethics class, you can only do that through experience.

What is the purpose of education

Parents want kids to have agency of their life with a good character -> having the power and courage to live to their potential. Currently instead we teach them to be compliant, rule following, without question.

They had a training session where they asked students before higher education to think about their visions in 10 years in 7 areas of their lives. This was a 90 minute session that reduced dropout rate with 50%!

School systems fundamentals around Europe and US did not change in the last 150 years when it was made with very different goals in mind. The purpose was to create obedient soldiers/workers and is named the "pressure model". People who drove these schools were actively working on eradicating the will of people in the system.

Somewhere in 1894 a bunch of heads sat down and came up with what should kids learn, and how, organized them by strict age groups that's never found in nature and subjects to learn: biology, math, etc... that gives the false sense of these fields being more isolated than what they actually are.

Typical reasoning against change: "Well I went to a school like that and I turned out fine". (... no, you probably did not...)

How would the alternative classroom look like?

Nowadays we do not need the teacher as a transmitter of knowledge to a child. We have better ways with technology.

30 kids 6.5-11 age group 1 adult. The more adults get in, the worse it gets. Adult is a facilitator, not a "performer".

Introduces a dilemma/problem: first 15 minutes is crunch time of a problem/dedicate to a discussion. They already start out with a real world problem, where they can be the hero. There are always 2 sides of the argument, some times defined arbitrarily on purpose.

Young people are embedded in stories, they live it every minute. The wake up with motivation: imagine being a young person and feel that the world needs your spirit. Let the kids know that they are on an important journey.

Don't discussions end up by the 11 year olds dominating the 6 year olds?

For that they have the Rules of Just Conduct that ensures that kids understand that elders need to let the younger to be heard too.

How does not it end up in bullying?

Bullying is the product of the classic environment and does not happen, when you are building a tribe that's based on mutual accountability and peer-to-peer learning. They see the others not as an enemy, but someone you try to help to get the tribe forward.

Exploiting our tribal nature

Learning of the younger is the most efficient as they see the 10-11 years old discuss the morning problem - they can affiliate with them more. They are organized in squads of 4-5, led by an elder leader elected by the group. They have the power to impeach their leader. They as a group define weekly goals and evaluate them at the end of the week. They do this on their own!

Do younger kids want to be leaders?

Yes, it's kind of the rite of passage. They start out with a lot of social work and as the older ones move out to the next age group, they want to fill their places.

Freedom to

Kids put into the system where they have to sit in a desk for 7 hours a day preventing them to play is just plain wrong.

It's not that young kids are distracted, it's that

adults fail to engage them with meaningful/right problems.

If they find that thing interesting, they can concentrate for very long periods of time! Gamification itself gets the job done most of the time for this age group.

Mentoring

Every kid has a mentor: keep asking what they found the most entertaining, challenging? Mentors are the older ones (12-16 years old!) - they take 10-15 minutes like a standup on Mondays and ask them questions like: what did you accomplish? What do you want to accomplish? "Setting their eyes to the horizon."

They have a list of questions for that which does an amazing job, at age 7 they start out with the time horizon of "what am I going to do this afternoon" and then it transforms into them being completely capable of estimating precise achievements for the year!

Schedule for the day

Skill Works

They use Kahn or Beast academy: self directed course structure, optimized for personalized learning with gamified, engaging materials.

Goals of different level of schools

They redefined the educational goals for the different age groups.

Elementary school
Middle school

Learn to work 3 hours a day! 11-13 years old, they already do their first apprenticeship, where they find their heroes.

High school

Have a proper idea about what you want to do with your life.

Evaluation

People do end-of-week reviews. The environment also eliminates trolls. They get a sneak peak into group dynamics rather than evaluating performance, so they know if there is a problem.

Their goal setting is not measured to the absolute. They always measure it compared to themselves: how many points you have now, how many points you will make this week, and finally, how many managed to get by the end of the week? Goal setting is a betting game already - and they get radically better at it this way.

They get freedom as a reward: they have more free time next week and they can decide what they want to work on. They also have agreed and helped developing the reward system, they have a say about how it works, they weren't just told this is what it is. They own and agree their challenges.

How are the students attending the Act school perform on standardized tests?

Comparison gets tricky when you use the classical system as reference, for multiple reasons.

  1. They do one standardized tests a year though, with no administrative support for it. On there they perform 2.5 grades above the standard school system.
  2. however these kids tend to come from families that understand the importance of education, which is a huge filter.
  3. they measure only "classical" skills like math, they are not measuring skills that are hard to measure, like social abilities or maturity

Therefore if the parents already have an understanding of this, you can already guess that in some way they belong to a "similar" group.

Who studies here?

Kids coming from a mixed socioeconomic background but in the US any school that charges tuition is leaning towards middle class, however many come from worker classes, where it's a stretch to make the tuition. The selection process is more based on whether the parents are understanding what they are getting into.

Tuition: $10 000 a year, that's less than $1000 a month. It's covering all the costs. In NY State the average cost per student per year is about $39 000 a year. Their projections is that they can go down to $4500 per year.

Does this prepare the kids for real life? As life is not fun, many times.

What does it teach? Resolve conflicts one-on-one - which in classic schools are solved by moving kids to another class, reinforcing the behavior, plus by the end of middle school they have learned to get 3 hours of focused work done. This is more than most adults are capable of.

Conflicts

In life conflicts are inevitable. If there is a conflict, they get together with a peacemaker and have a resolution session. It's conducted by an elder (12-16 years) using a conflict resolution template. The young learn early on that they will get a fair shake from this person. If needed, they get a 30 minute cool down time before.

Reading

They start to read with Monosory, or they guide them through the process with Lexia - it's very efficient. Later they get to choose what to read, books are organized by difficulty so kids can do it gradually. Once done reading, they write a review, then pitch the books to the rest of the tribe, who can get inspired by these sessions. They usually voluntarily choosing to challenge themselves by newer and harder books.

Kids love comic books, and can be really good and engaging, let them do that as long as they are carried away by the story, the goal is reached: make them love reading.

But how are they going to meet with "that great book I was forced to read when I was a kid?"

If you make them read books they are not interested in, they start resenting not only reading but the person who forced them to do that.

Arguing parents who want their kids to read "that great book": ask them:

What's more important? Your kid to be exposed NOW to something she is totally not interested in, or setting them up to the future to make them love reading for the next 60 years of their life? (... so they might actually encounter that themselves along the way)

You can show them good books but they have to make the decision to read that. Give them challenges that are harder and harder.

How does a year looks like?

A year starts with a 4-6 week session where they plan the year. Books have badges and they make a badge plan about what books they want to read. They make SMART goals:

Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time bound

They start when they are 7. They make a contract with the student, signed by the student, the parent, the school, and they review this at around half way in to see if the goal is still within range, if they estimated it wrong. They also reflect on themselves in the end of the school year.

People are terrible at knowing themselves - this iterative process helps them to much better assess their skill and capabilities.

The year is broken up to 4-6 week challenges, where they work on one topic, and at the end they present their work to parents/teachers, so they get used to how life usually is. They do not have homework, he says this is all done within the school framework.

Apprenticeships hands on

Kids collect inspirational figures they learned about, someone who has inspired them, then name it a "hero". They make a list of these people and write up in what ways they were inspiring. These people are encouraged to be locals, or at least within reach too and they start reaching out to some of these people at around age 11.

Their task is to first write them an email describing in what way they are inspiring, one that gets opened, then if it gets a response, they ask for a phone call for 5 minutes, then a 10 minute in person meeting.

Later in High School, they get on the next great adventure: they go out with the deliberate goal of seeing how and what that person is doing, getting them closer to the real world work, asking for apprenticeships. Trying out the profession is very important: they get hands-on experience on how real-life work looks like.

Who fits?

For parents: who understand properly what they are getting into.

For kids: whoever is not blatant disrespectful. Older girls are the most problematic.

Apparently study shows that antisocial behavior after age 4 is pretty much impossible to change. It's more often counter productive and makes the kid even more antisocial.

A game is an activity where the incentive rewards are lined up properly. The player will engage in it volunteeraly.

A hero is the one who does not run away from problems.

Most North-American pre-schools get kindergardens right: have fun, be social, do not take it too serious. There is a flip that happens in school with testing, preparing to college...

Work products are presented to get feedback to each other and parents sometimes.

If chaos is too big in the studio: there is a problem with the material.

Marketing a school like this is counter productive.

Teaching skills vs knowledge: what is more future-proof?

Tribal feedback: No blame, the feedback has to strengthen the group. It's not about good/bad, it's about gradual improvements. Opinions are communicated in a respectful way, so they do not get personal.

Learn more at daringtowonder.com

My personal take on it

As I was listening though the podcast, I felt profound anger and sadness towards my young self's education. I remember many "victorian classroom" examples from our first oral presentations, through the humiliations with black points, simple carrot-and-stick games that hardly ever worked with me, rather than giving me an engaging problem - which many time I even sought out for myself-, to the lack of conflict resolution practices, how all my anxieties were not addressed and I built up so many cramps about the school environment, people being blatantly disrespectful towards each other and the teachers, failing to address the core of the problems, having an authoritarian leadership, never working on proper projects, always just passively consuming pointless information (throughout university). In the end, that system was a great mirror of society there: lack of empathy, desperate living in delusions without having the power and authority to properly ask why things are actually happening.

As Valery Legasov from Chernobyl put it: "this is the cost of lies".

Of course there were some nice parts too, but if I think of my high-school Computer Science teacher getting angry at me for knowing more than the others, through the math teacher breaking my motivations down into "you should not know that yet" - what I perceive is a very sick environment where things only work accidentally. Of course, they did not have a proper model.

During high-school I worked a lot on personal projects, wanting to build a game, and no-one was there to help, count it as schoolwork, I always had to borrow time from everything else, making me feel overwhelmed as I should have been making friends or studying history though reading a book to remember pointless dates.

No matter the good parts, I feel like my life has been limited by these people who were limited to their backgrounds, and what I achieved later on was more of the product of luck - namely that I developed a reflex to flip the table when I feel that something is not right but not quite being able to address why...

So in short: if there is any way I can improve on how kids are being raised into a more life loving, productive members of society with better conflict resolution skills and better moral standards, I am all for it, and based on what I heard in this interview, I believe it is possible to do it light-years better than what I was forced to go though, from elementary school to university.

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