Through the construct of ‘schooling’, we have designed an environment for conditioning people to see knowledge acquisition as being directly associated with structure (through classes) and success (through grades), when in reality, most of what we learn and adopt as practices is from interacting with the world and through discovering results from... See more

The ability and desire for all people to have access to basic education is one of the most outstanding evolutions of human society, allowing us to progress over the last few thousand years to expand the potential of our entire species and support more equitable access to opportunities around the world.

Educators are there to help guide the curious mind through the moral, ethical, and socially valuable aspects of our time, not to provide a rigid and reductive framework that reinforces obedience.

The more knowledge students have about the way their brain works, how society operates, and the magic of the natural world in which they live, the more creativity they will be able to exert throughout their lives, helping to evolve society into a place that works better than today.

Teachers should be guides of the learning journey, not authoritative instructors ready to dish out abuse or punishment when the child expresses non-conforming behaviors.

Thus, this all begs the question, do modern schools actually build knowledge and capacity for all, or do they just reinforce old ideas of how industrial needs are met with a workforce? If schools are, at their fundamental level, designed to create the workers of the future, why are we still teaching siloed skills of the industrial age, when we have... See more

In general, schools today have become places where we actively discourage thinking that is not predefined, approved, and stamped by the larger social system of the day; as such, schools reinforce a reward system based on consumption, acquisition, and status increases

In the 1600s, John Amos Comenius, who is often referred to as “the grandfather of modern education” called schools “the slaughterhouse of the mind,” where he saw them devoted primarily to the boring and sometimes brutally-enforced study of Latin by “stuffing and flogging”. He went on to argue for education to follow “the lead of nature. A rational... See more

Fundamentally then, school and all educative experiences must empower the learner to think freely about the complex world around them, and thus should be a liberator of oppression, not the reinforcer of it.