Kids in school have individual achievement levels, which are different for every subject. They have 0-1800 points in each subject. Each student works at their own pace through these milestones and moving forward when they get near perfect scores.
I like this. If the goal of school is to have knowledge, keeping the list of knowledge you actually have is better than assigning grades. (Grades are only tools, sometimes they become a lost purpose.) It would be difficult to maintain such lists on paper, but we can do it with computers. Not necessarily literally a list; other data structure, such as directed acyclic graph could be even better.
Many students work very hard...
This is just an assumption. It is not something a school can achieve—it depends on the student (and their parents). I have seen students who had great conditions and lot of freedom in school… some of them used it to work hard at great projects, but most of them didn’t. I don’t see anything inherently bad in that—different people have different hobbies—I just object denotationally against the idea that if students don’t work hard on their own projects, then the school is doing something horribly wrong.
Discussions are lead by subject experts.
Where do you find enough experts, volunteering to do school discussions? You will get a lot of applause lights by suggesting that only the best experts in the world are worthy teaching our children, but face it… there are many children and only a few experts; and those experts don’t necessarily have time or desire to talk with your kids.
Students [...] rate each other, which builds a bit of a “global team marketplace.” Project teams need to have an “Average” score … meaning, high-scoring individuals are encouraged to bring in one or two individuals with lower scores to help them progress.
If the students are rated based on their group productivity, and you encourage high-scoring students to make teams with low-scoring students so that they have average team score… I don’t understand how is this supposed to be motivating. If the student does not care about high score, why should they care about how their classmates rate them? If the student cares about high score, then “rewarding” them by team members who will drag their score down is demotivating. I think this is confused, because it supposes that student is trying to get as high score as possible regardless of their experience that getting high score means getting worse teammates, which means getting lower score.
Summary: Good part is the emphasis on tools. And I imagine that “Personal Development” could include rationality lessons. Bad part is the expectation that if we make the school system good, miracles will happen. (And if the miracles won’t happen, it is all the teachers’ fault, right?) While I would love to see a school that uses individual interactive teaching, discussions with experts, team projects etc., I expect that it would lead to 10-20% children having spectacular results, 30-40% having pretty good results, and a lot of children just ignoring most of their beautiful opportunities and blaming it on someone else (stupid teachers, stupid classmates, too difficult lessons, boring topics, racism,...).
Some random notes:
I like this. If the goal of school is to have knowledge, keeping the list of knowledge you actually have is better than assigning grades. (Grades are only tools, sometimes they become a lost purpose.) It would be difficult to maintain such lists on paper, but we can do it with computers. Not necessarily literally a list; other data structure, such as directed acyclic graph could be even better.
This is just an assumption. It is not something a school can achieve—it depends on the student (and their parents). I have seen students who had great conditions and lot of freedom in school… some of them used it to work hard at great projects, but most of them didn’t. I don’t see anything inherently bad in that—different people have different hobbies—I just object denotationally against the idea that if students don’t work hard on their own projects, then the school is doing something horribly wrong.
Where do you find enough experts, volunteering to do school discussions? You will get a lot of applause lights by suggesting that only the best experts in the world are worthy teaching our children, but face it… there are many children and only a few experts; and those experts don’t necessarily have time or desire to talk with your kids.
If the students are rated based on their group productivity, and you encourage high-scoring students to make teams with low-scoring students so that they have average team score… I don’t understand how is this supposed to be motivating. If the student does not care about high score, why should they care about how their classmates rate them? If the student cares about high score, then “rewarding” them by team members who will drag their score down is demotivating. I think this is confused, because it supposes that student is trying to get as high score as possible regardless of their experience that getting high score means getting worse teammates, which means getting lower score.
Summary: Good part is the emphasis on tools. And I imagine that “Personal Development” could include rationality lessons. Bad part is the expectation that if we make the school system good, miracles will happen. (And if the miracles won’t happen, it is all the teachers’ fault, right?) While I would love to see a school that uses individual interactive teaching, discussions with experts, team projects etc., I expect that it would lead to 10-20% children having spectacular results, 30-40% having pretty good results, and a lot of children just ignoring most of their beautiful opportunities and blaming it on someone else (stupid teachers, stupid classmates, too difficult lessons, boring topics, racism,...).