While nice, neither of these strikes me as truly disruptive. The downside is that to achieve the best educational environment, you'd have to open a school which doesn't scale nicely unless you plug into existing "world APIs".
I guess you could start by opening a co-working space with a supervising adult (not teacher, this adult will be there to ensure that the kids aren't killing each other).
There would be teachers accessible via video calls but most of the time would be spent reading or doing work, not passively listening/watching. If you pool these teachers together, you will be able to teach even the most obscure subjects.
In this system, everyone is literally going at their pace.
I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-learning from very early on.
It's not like you can create self-learners by making students go through a process that's fundamentally as anti-self-learning as possible.
This will also make switching schools extremely painless. You will transition to a new desk. It's like a gym membership, you can totally have two if that's convenient for you for whatever reason.
For sure, but the point is that YC is welcoming to educational disruption even if the submissions so far haven't been very impactful.
I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-learning from very early on.
I grew up in a very traditional system that would remind most Americans of the 1950s, and it hasn't impacted my self-learning ability at all. I'm fortunate in that my parents liked books and I was able to read by age 3 and as long as I can remember I had firm opinions about what I wanted to read. I'm not altogether convinced by your vision of students as intellectual tabulae rasa that can be variously configured as drones, autodidacts, or innovators.
A student's home and socioeconomic life can have as much or more impact on their intellectual development as the kind of school they attend, and the idea that perfecting education will automatically nullify other factors is a rock on which many would-be reformers have come to grief.
I grew up in a very traditional system that would remind most Americans of the 1950s, and it hasn't impacted my self-learning ability at all. I'm fortunate in that my parents liked books and I was able to read by age 3 and as long as I can remember I had firm opinions about what I wanted to read.
Poor people's children self-teach. They definitely learn. They don't necessarily learn the culture and values that would allow them to function gracefully in the modern economy.
A student's home and socioeconomic life can have as much or more impact on their intellectual development as the kind of school they attend, and the idea that perfecting education will automatically nullify other factors is a rock on which many would-be reformers have come to grief.
People's subculture/tribe and actual community are a tremendous part of who people are and how well they can access resources and knowledge in the world. Religious and various civic organizations understand this. Often governments only understand this as a source of strength for their "opposition." Opposition movements and rebellions understand this.
Most significantly, school reform programs like Harlem Children's Zone understand this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlem_Children's_Zone To fight poverty, you have to involve the whole community on your side. If your initiative is fighting the community, it cannot fight poverty.
I don't know whether either of these set out with the idea of creating the Primer, but they seem similar.
Osmo - https://www.playosmo.com/en/ - seems pretty cool. Uses the iPad camera and packets of materials for interactive learning experiences. It could evolve into something like the Primer.
"One Laptop per Child" has/had similar goals while not being nearly as advanced/cohesive as the Primer.
I think you're exactly right in that the "world APIs" for education are the limiting factor. The major issue is that the assessment process is directly tied to the learning process within a single institution, leading to both being done incredibly inoptimally. It leads to the necessity of standardized tests and exams, and accredited institutions, which limits the potential learning opportunities available to the very few that are recognized on national or global scale.
If a "global assessment API" was decoupled from learning institutions it could capture educational experience as generated by any environment, from standard public schools to non-traditional schools, and we'd see a much more diverse set of educational experiences arise and be able to coexist fairly, meaning that individuals could better shape their individual academic paths without compromise and still be able to operate in the greater academic network.
A universal assessment system can exist in a very scalable way if its built upon social consensus. It would be absolutely impossible given our current models of assessment, especially the ones used on a national or international level. They are just simply far too expensive to begin to capture the breadth or depth of potential experience in academics in a meaningful way.
Today though we have the technology (i.e Ethereum and other decentralized technologies) to (relatively) easily design and deploy incentivized _secure_ systems for social consensus. It would enable systems like the one you're talking about to actually enable not just the teaching of the most obscure subject, but the _recognition_ of them too.
This is something I have been working on building for a while now. I truly believe its the answer to the flaws in our (global, not just American) education system and will be necessary for a truly effective, and universal, one.
> The major issue is that the assessment process is directly tied to the learning process within a single institution, leading to both being done incredibly inoptimally.
Very good point. There are no feedback looks between the two subsystems which makes them both suck.
One point I'd like to raise though is that I'm not sure if it's really optimal have 'assessments'. I have some fundamental issues with assigning numerical values to things that are sometimes hard to judge numerically.
I think that a much better system would be that each student's work is stored in the cloud where it's accessible and everyone can judge for himself.
And I think that we should move away from test to projects that are largely designed by the student under the guidance of teachers.
I don't think assessments are fundamentally numerical. Assessing is at its core simply about recognizing experience and I think systemized ways to do so would be incredibly valuable, as opposed to an ad-hoc system where everyone builds their own judgements. While that is more flexible its also far far less efficient. Companies hiring, other educational institutions, all need a way to efficiently parse experience without having do it themselves, and so a systemized assessment network I think will be necessary.
Experience could even just be a boolean value, has or doesn't have, instead of anything numerical. Or there could emerge separate numerical systems for each area of knowledge. The important part is that the system is based on social consensus of people who actually possess the experience, so that its the most relevant and applicable system possible.
I guess you could start by opening a co-working space with a supervising adult (not teacher, this adult will be there to ensure that the kids aren't killing each other).
There would be teachers accessible via video calls but most of the time would be spent reading or doing work, not passively listening/watching. If you pool these teachers together, you will be able to teach even the most obscure subjects.
In this system, everyone is literally going at their pace.
I think that fundamentally the main objection to this system is that some people learn better in a classroom setting, to which I reply: 21st century education needs to make a transition to turn graduates into self-learners. This can only be achieved with a system that fosters self-learning from very early on.
It's not like you can create self-learners by making students go through a process that's fundamentally as anti-self-learning as possible.
This will also make switching schools extremely painless. You will transition to a new desk. It's like a gym membership, you can totally have two if that's convenient for you for whatever reason.