This is a great attempt. But I think that the social service model, which is one of the best things about public schools, is also one of the worst things. It creates a fake environment that students find stifling, especially as they get older. See especially Paul Graham on this (link, link, link), excerpt:
If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I’d tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn’t really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just school, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.
Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.
And as for the schools, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.
What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren’t told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they’re called misfits.
I also think instead of designing from the inside out, you should design from the outside in. It’s hard to design something as complicated and entrenched as a school from first principles. Instead it would be great to find examples of schools from other times or cultures that seem to work better and figure out what we want to import from them! :)
I agree that the social services model is simultaneously good and bad. The issue stems from schools having to contend with two very different problems:
How do they deal with children from poor backgrounds who don’t want to learn? How do they deal with idiots, special needs students, assholes, troublemakers, etc.?
How do schools deal with gifted children? How do they deal with students who are smarter or learn faster than their peers?
These kinds of students need very different kinds of environments to thrive.
Paul Graham is representative of 2., and so the social services model is pretty useless to him. But there are plenty of children who can benefit enormously from it.
Future posts go into the school-as-education model, which is more suited for students from group 2.
As for designing from the outside in, it’s a cool idea, and I’d love to read someone’s attempt. I decided to try it from the inside out because I’d never seen it done before in the modern age.
This is a great attempt. But I think that the social service model, which is one of the best things about public schools, is also one of the worst things. It creates a fake environment that students find stifling, especially as they get older. See especially Paul Graham on this (link, link, link), excerpt:
I also think instead of designing from the inside out, you should design from the outside in. It’s hard to design something as complicated and entrenched as a school from first principles. Instead it would be great to find examples of schools from other times or cultures that seem to work better and figure out what we want to import from them! :)
Thanks for the response!
I agree that the social services model is simultaneously good and bad. The issue stems from schools having to contend with two very different problems:
How do they deal with children from poor backgrounds who don’t want to learn? How do they deal with idiots, special needs students, assholes, troublemakers, etc.?
How do schools deal with gifted children? How do they deal with students who are smarter or learn faster than their peers?
These kinds of students need very different kinds of environments to thrive.
Paul Graham is representative of 2., and so the social services model is pretty useless to him. But there are plenty of children who can benefit enormously from it.
Future posts go into the school-as-education model, which is more suited for students from group 2.
As for designing from the outside in, it’s a cool idea, and I’d love to read someone’s attempt. I decided to try it from the inside out because I’d never seen it done before in the modern age.