Captain's Log: September 2024

September 19, 2024

What do kids learn when there’s no classes, no curriculum, no tests, no grades, no homework, and no age segregation, when they are free to move and talk as they will?

The biggest things we have seen are communication, negotiation, and problem solving.

And it is beautiful.

The major problem I kept running into was this: If school was to accomplish what it purports to accomplish, it would need to be very different. So why is school the way it is?

I cannot expressed how confusing this was. It was too much cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance might be the best teacher.

I don't know what I googled, but that's when I found Jon Taylor Gatto's blog. He would go on to publish his blog posts, and it would become his magnum opus: The Underground History of American Education.

This is the book that changed my life.

Every morning I read the next post and shared it on Facebook. Within a few months, all of my teacher friends unfriended me. Why wouldn't you want to read your field's origin story?

And I left Harvard. I guess you could say, I got what I came for...

...because now I'm enjoying the fruit of the seed that was planted all those years ago, the opening of my own Self Directed Education center, the Spokane Learning Co-op. We've been open a week and a half and are already serving 13 families and 22 kids, with more parents inquiring every day. We've got kids who've been homeschooling all their lives, and kids who are brand new to it. We've got parents who are just lovely, who are co-creating a community around what it means to help kids grow up with their curiosity, creativity, and self-esteem still intact.

A lot of people are curious about Self Directed Education. The biggest question I get is: "What do they learn?" The biggest things that kids learn in an SDE environment are how to communicate, how to negotiate, and how to solve problems. It doesn't get much more interdisciplinary -- or USEFUL - than that. I honestly think it's a mistake that conventional schools (public and private) focus almost exclusively on academic skills, and spend very little time on even the foundations of working-together-to-solve-big-problems skills. I don't know about you, but I think we'd all be better off if working-together-to-solve-big-problems skills came first and were prioritized. I don't know about you, but I think we'd all be enjoying life on this Earth a lot more if school hadn't convinced us that working together to solve big problems was for some strange reason something bad called "cheating." Hmm.

These past couple of weeks as the director of my dream school have proven an unrivaled bliss.

I cannot express the satisfaction that comes from working together to solve big problems. I am thankful for the big problem Harvard gave me.

Thank you, Harvard.