Caught this by accident on Discovery Channel and got hooked.
I previously read about the mad competition and hot-house preparation that kids (and parents) undergo in India to gun for top Kindergartens, but I never expected the same cut-throat reality in New York.. but it IS New York afterall, what was I thinking! If you feel like watching 4-year-olds being subjected to three IQ tests (to gain entry into the privates), interviews being masked as play dates, and parents stressing out over self-inflicted pressure, the whole documentary is available on youtube :)
“Every education system in the world is being reformed at the moment. But it’s not enough. Reform is no use anymore, because that’s simply improving a broken model. What we need is not evolution but a revolution in education. This has to be transformed into something else.”
Imagine if we could channel a relentless focus and attention on the learner, and tailor a personalized curriculum around each student? An individualized form of instruction taking into account multiple intelligences of each child, and the sensitivity of how each child learns best? Two progressive schools are pioneering in this direction.
The Krishnamurti Schools
“The ignorant man is not the unlearned, but he who does not know himself, and the learned man is stupid when all he relies on are books, on knowledge and on authority to give him understanding. Understanding comes only through self-knowledge, which is awareness of one’s total psychological process. Thus education, in the true sense, is the understanding of oneself, for it is within each one of us that the whole of existence is gathered.”
“When there is that intelligence that is born out of compassion and love, problems will be solved simply, quietly.”
I’ve been fascinated by the depth of Krishnamurti’s philosophy and his pursuit of educating the integrated human being. Integrated – it is a concept I still don’t fully understand. To be integrated in mind, body and soul; to be integrated in thought and action; to be integrated with the environment; or to be integrated in understanding the wholeness of life without being a specialist or idealist in just one domain?
Krishnamurti was an advocate of breaking away from psychological zones of safety – from the institutions, religions, and techniques that that put an end to independent thought and spontaneity. These forms of authority breed fear, and block an intelligent and unbiased understanding of life.
With such a level of disregard for authority, and a heightened sense of self-awareness, he then built his own philosophy of education from ground up. One with mentors that designed a curriculum around each student, one that brought back the art of inquiry. I have more questions than I have answers, about how these philosophies have been translated into execution, but I’m very intrigued and hope to pay a visit this Summer. One of his schools, Oak Grove, hosts a teacher’s academy for educators to visit and learn his methods.
The School of One
Fast forward, and we’re now living in a data-driven world. What if we leveraged technology and applied mass customization to education? This is exactly what The School of One has done, collecting data to profile each student, and then applying smart algorithms personalize a customized syllabus. I’m glad that small group and large group instruction have not been lost in the School of One, because I don’t believe technology should ever replace human interaction and discourse.
A great video has been put together of their Summer pilot, and I’m really excited by the potential of where we can take this. No longer does a tailored curriculum denote cottage-size schools as technology has enabled scalable, yet personalized instruction.
Taken Together
it’s interesting to contrasts these two methods, a century apart in conceptualization, but both based on the same ideals of putting the focus once again, on the learner. Fundamentally, the awareness of self has to complement academic rigour, and one should not exist without the other. What a joy it would be to marry these two methods!
Do you know any other schools which have an individualized curriculum?
Adam Wheeler has become a celebrity for cheating his way into Harvard. What a cunning fella! For the rest of us who went through some semblance of an education, we all know there are the right moves. To what lengths would students go if all they cared about were their grades, without blatantly impinging on moral integrity? These are the realities of educational systems which have managed to establish the paper-chase as being the most important thing in a student’s life. As much as we have many passionate teachers out there, and equally keen learners, systems are the ultimate driver of behavior, and it is important to realize how rampant these practices are on the ground. I hear them being discussed among the high achievers in college, and have experienced many of them in school. These will only continue and evolve as long as the system does not align objective to incentive.
Welcome to the life of a grade chaser.
1. Choice of Subjects
Always pick the easiest topics if you have a choice. Take a level-one Japanese language class even though you mastered the language in high school. Intentionally do poorly on the aptitude placement test so you are assigned a more basic class. Study past-year statistics of classes across the board and pick those in which more than 70% of students score above an A-. If there are multiple professors offering the same module, pick the one with an easy professor. Even better, if he’s known to be constantly traveling to give conference keynotes, you get more holidays! Once you pick the right subjects, half the battle is won.
2. Impression Management
Ask good questions in class (although you might already know the answer). Borrow homework and notes from seniors so you always turn in perfect answers. Make your answers neat to show you’re conscientious. Ask your professors even more questions outside of class. In some systems, this sets the impression that you’re a star student, and when you get anything below an A-, you have the liberty to simply waltz into the professor’s office to demand a grade-raise. A quick Google search even revealed a how-to guide on changing your grade.
3. Stay only within the syllabus
Because there’s no other incentive not to. Past-year papers (more affectionately known as ten-year series) give you model answers so that every hardworking student can produce the correct responses from a cookie-cutter. Exams are then a mere test of conscientiousness rather than intellect or understanding. There are only so many types of questions that can be set, that you soon learn the frameworks, and can spot topics and questions. In the event that no syllabus is present, and there are two sides to an argument, always respond with what your professor wants to hear, or what is politically correct, even though you might be strongly convicted of the other stance.
4. Exam Strategies
There’s a whole industry of books written about taking exams that I’m sick to the stomach. On the softer side, you learn from your teachers the “how” of answering questions more than the what and the why. You learn that graders are human too – they make mistakes, want more family time, do it for the money, and get bored marking thousands of cookie-cutter answers. Your sole purpose is then to make their job easier. You learn what keywords they’re looking for, write them bigger and highlight them so the grader doesn’t have to read through every single word and will not miss your answers. You thank them at the end of the paper to make them feel a little more appreciated and might just give you a few sympathy marks.
5. Project Politics
Form a dream team in which you can take classes together and group up for projects. If you don’t happen to know anyone in class, get impression management right – A very nuanced strategy is to dress smart and ask a few questions in the first class, that magically gets other bright kids attracted to you to group up. Two things then happen, you either free-ride everyone else’s work and intellect (especially if there is no peer evaluation component), or spoil the market by going over and above what is required for the project. Take note especially of the project assessment criteria and nail it according to the grading weightage.
I’m not even going to talk about the art of cheating (a higher level of creativity), which is far more rampant than I imagined – more than 90% of high school students and 92% college students cheat on a regular basis according to David Callahan. I hear from friends who went through China’s education system, that you’d be sure to be at the bottom of class if you didn’t cheat, they were left with Hobson’s choice. It’s simply baked into some college cultures.
And so we continue to use standardized tests to measure students across the nation, but what do they really measure? Is there seriously no better alternative? The tragic protagonists are the genuinely motivated learners who can’t be bothered with fitting into the system and are hence not rewarded by it. They are soon either forced to succumb, or are shadowed in comparison to those who simply make the right moves. Sometimes, they can’t fathom why in all earnestness, and are driven to depression and suicide.
At the end of a formal education, many who have been duly rewarded for their efforts have mastered three skills extremely well 1) pattern recognition 2) finding loopholes in a system and 3) gaming the system inside out. It’s such a great way to prepare generations of young people for life ahead, and I can only laugh at the irony to see so many of our systems broken and being exploited.
Before you criticize the younger generation, just remember who raised them.
A startup founder, TEDster, couchsurfer, and liberal - those are the labels. At the heart, I'm fueled by ideas, passionate about creating solutions, and enjoy working with young people to make change. I write about education, the trail-blazing people I meet along my journey, and other fascinating observations in life. More
