[FRIAM] My plan to disrupt education

[uǝlƃ ☤>$]

I'm a bit surprised nobody has replied to this. I can't contribute much, being ill-suited to formal education. But that raises a point. If we divide causation into 2 types, which I'll call "push" and "pull", structuring a school like what you seem to be doing will require canalization. Your purpose is to put in place a (complex) estuary, as it were, that balances the student's natural pull (desire, curiosity, etc.) against some set of heuristics you want to push, to instill ... the topology of the estuary.

There are similar schools in various places, I suppose mostly liberal arts schools. And, in my travels, I've run across people who have *still* not found a path through the tangled canals that were "pushed", no matter how accommodating. Similarly, I've found people (like a couple of old roommates at aTm) who simply want someone to tell them what to learn so they can move on, get a job, have kids, and retire.

So ... admittedly having only barely guessed at your plans ... how do you plan to balance the push and pull? Must all your students be super go-getters? Or will you plan to knead the lazy and shiftless ones, too? Will you use classifiers like Myers-Briggs to route some into the arts and some into STEM canals? Or rely exclusively on implicit self-classification? And since you plan to facilitate both poor and wealthy students, how do you plan to handle some in-group/tribal influences like the draw some of our poor get towards gang membership or even working the family farm?


On 10/27/21 11:25 AM, Pieter Steenekamp wrote:
> The public education system in South Africa is largely broken. For those who can afford it, we have very good schools, but the majority cannot and the education options for them are bleak.
> 
> I plan to do something about it.
> 
> This is my second attempt. About three years ago I started a school as a proof of concept with a radical model to have very high quality yet very low cost education and it failed miserably. (I managed to make plans for the kids and I don't believe any suffered from the experience - I pulled the plug before too much harm was done). I've thought, and discussed it a lot, and I'm ready to roll out my second, very different attempt.
> 
> The basis of this is that there are plenty of resources available for free, and provided you manage the environment properly, kids can and will teach themselves.
> 
> My plan is a model with two legs, both legs offering very high quality education, but the first leg is relatively expensive and has "bells and whistles" to attract the wealthy and the second is bare bones to make it affordable for those kids whose parents can't pay.
> 
> The profit from first leg schools then cross-subsidise the costs of the second leg schools. 
> 
> The concept for both legs are copied from https://www.khanlabschool.org/ <https://www.khanlabschool.org/> , adapted for local conditions of course. The second leg schools will just be a low cost version, but the education offered will still be world class.
> 
> Our academic year starts in January. I'm working flat out to have my first school of the first leg open in January 2022. Then to have the first school of the second leg open in January 2023. Then to learn from the experience, adapt and roll it out so that every child in South Africa has access to world class education in five years time.


-- 
"Better to be slapped with the truth than kissed with a lie."
☤>$ uǝlƃ