My wife and I run a micro-school in Mumbai, India. We recently celebrated its one-year anniversary. Our kids go there along with 15 others. As we like to joke, we are doing small-batch, locally sourced, artisanal education. I also run a tech startup where we are building a product in the learning space. Both of these were born as a result of the pandemic when schools shut down and we saw up close what happens in the name of education.
Having kids sacrifice their childhoods to passively sit in classrooms while one heroic teacher after another attempts to pour knowledge into them is utterly bone-headed. We have known this for a long time now. Many passionate educators, from John Holt to John Taylor Gatto, have written articulately and angrily about this.
We now have lived experience of what a different education can look like. On a daily basis we see how kids can flourish and learn when allowed to actively explore and engage with the world. Worksheets and textbooks are poor substitutes for rich, multi-sensory experiences where learning happens pretty much by default.
Before you think we are anarchist hippies rejecting all systems and institutions outright, I want to add that we are both “well educated” and products of what I’ll call the conveyor belt model of education. I have an undergraduate degree from an IIT, a PhD in neuroscience and I’ve co-authored two non-fiction neuroscience books. Ours is a considered rejection of what many, many parents feel is an evil but necessary treadmill.
Here’s the truth. We do not need this treadmill to learn and be educated. We do not need this conveyor belt to package and transport kids to success in an adult world.
“The most important single factor influencing learning is what the learner already knows. Ascertain this and teach him accordingly” — David Ausubel
Most teachers will recognize this rendering of Bloom’s taxonomy. At the top of the heap of our educational learning objectives is the ability to create. At the bottom we have rote learning.
Currently, both teaching and learning largely operate at the bottom level because of systemic reasons: standardized curriculum and stringent assessment [1].
We are creating map memorizers, when the world needs explorers.
This is not a recent realization [2]. We’d obviously love for all learners to high five each other at the summit. But translating these ideals into daily practice is tough. Great teachers are just good at this sort of thing. They can assess where a particular student’s interests and knowledge gaps are and artfully construct bridges to steer their understanding. Unfortunately, great teachers do not scale.
To add to this, this mode of active learning is devilishly difficult with large student-teacher ratios. This calls for small sizes where empowered teachers are able to actively engage one-on-one in small group settings. This in turn means it cannot be replicated easily without greatly increasing costs.
All that has changed now.
The latest generation of
