[FRIAM] My plan to disrupt education

Fri Oct 29 15:17:18 EDT 2021

Thank you very much uǝlƃ , I really appreciate your question " how do you
plan to balance the push and pull? "

The long and short of it is that the plan is to be flexible about it.
Encourage the students to pull. Apart from further encouragement, leave
those that pull to continue. But then intervene and push those students
that do not want to pull.

There will be no regular formal classes with a teacher presenting and the
students listening. Each student works according to her own schedule at her
own pace, we do the monitoring and if required the intervention.

Let me explain.
First of all, there are really a lot and very high quality learning
resources online available for free. A very strong emphasis of what I plan
to do is to teach the students how to learn by themselves.
At the start we discuss and agree with each student their individual
education outcome. We monitor this at regular intervals and intervene and
update and modify it if required.
Our model requires from each student to partake in all three of the
following areas, but with different emphasis on different areas for
different students:
a) Formal curriculum to pass end of school exit exams to get a school
leaving certificate. These exams and certification are according to
www.cambridgeinternational.org.
b) Practise communication skills. They must on a regular basis read or
research some topic and then make written and oral presentations about it.
It starts with pushing, for example giving a student a book about wild
animals in Africa and then asking her to do the presentations about a
giraffe. Per student over time this builds up to more complex assignments
where she has to do extensive research and comprehensive presentations.
c) The last one is then both individual and group project work.

Within the framework each student has the freedom to choose what to do and
when to do it. But every student must work hard - if they don't we will
intervene and push them.

For example, if a student has a project to grow medicinal mushrooms and she
becomes very passionate about it and works hard on this project, we will
tolerate it if she does the minimum academic work, as long as she stays on
track to pass her exams. We will also allow her to skimp a bit on the
communication activities, but not skip it altogether.

Pieter

On Fri, 29 Oct 2021 at 17:47, uǝlƃ ☤>$ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> .-- .- -. - / .- -.-. - .. --- -. ..--.. / -.-. --- -. .--- ..- --. .- - .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn UTC-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
> archives:
>  5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
>  1/2003 thru 6/2021  http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20211029/807eb111/attachment-0001.html>