# Introduction Welcome to Blankslate Education. Blankslate Education consists of a combination of ideas to change the way education works. The main premise is to re-develop education from scratch. Blankslate Education targets the following concepts: * A core focus on soft skills first instead of hard skills first. * Leveraging technology for efficiency and cost effectiveness. * Personalization and the demolishing of the factory education model. * Removing the bubble and connecting education to the real world. * Equitable design to build stronger communities. The ideas from this book are from Stanton Wong and if you have any feedback, thoughts, or interest in collaboration, you can reach out to him at ******. Enjoy the content! # 1. Premise Imagine if you could toss out all of the traditional thinking and methodologies of education and schools. Then, from scratch, develop a new education system that is designed from the ground up to be relevant to the needs of the world today and in the future. There are a myriad of things that are wrong with the current school system today. We teach with a focus on textbooks and memorization, which lacks a connection with the real world. We teach content that is traditionally measurable, ones that can be graded or compared against some average, while reducing the amount of time to play and explore. Schools should help its students become the best version of themselves. Although the intention is there, many schools of today are not succeeding. Instead, many schools and education systems follow a century old factory system that was initially designed to create capable automatons. These schools are used to filter kids into different buckets for higher education and future jobs, where although they are provided knowledge, they are also told what they are not good at because of an expectation to succeed in the content assigned to them, regardless of their curiosity and interest. One way the filtering is being done is through grades. Grades are assigned for tasks that students perform and if the tasks are done well, then a higher grade is given. The grades do not necessarily reflect ability or potential. It’s really all about following directions. Students who can test out with A’s are ones that will be capable of following orders very, very well. The ones that test out with B’s are one’s that are slightly less likely to follow orders all the way, but still follow the general path that is required. Student’s with C’s and below tend to be the trouble makers who are more disruptive and will need to be kept on a tighter leash. This schooling system made sense in the past few centuries when the world was expanding rapidly and the industrial revolution was happening. We needed a lot of people to have the same skills and essentially be human robots to the industries that we’re being developed. Accounting, administrative work, and basic arithmetic were all absolutely necessary in a functioning society before computers. But that is changing. The future does not look like it did in the 20th century. Automation will make repetitive jobs less repetitive. Machine learning will make automation smarter. We will gradually move closer to robots and computer systems that can replicate different tasks that used to require a human to do. And it will be happen fast. So what are humans good for in the future ahead? Humans will need to play the role of what we call the ‘human touch’, or in other words, communication. Humans will be solely in charge of getting ideas across to others. Sharing ideas, collaborating to create new ideas, passing on ideas, all of this will be done by humans. Schools for the future should be focused on how to do this better rather than the memorization of textbooks and formulas. Schools for the future is all about communication and how to connect with the world around us. I believe one of the keys to the future of humanity is in education and the direction that education is taking around the world is, to say the least, disappointing. I think we can do better, and to do that, we need better ideas, and thens someone to test and implement those ideas. ### Four Sections There are a four central ideas I want to present in this book. The **first section** describes the importance of a new core curriculum that focuses on soft skills rather than hard skills, centering schooling on human skills rather than computer skills. The **second section** dives into technologies and methodologies that we can leverage to enhance education in the 21st century. The **third section** explores general curriculum design and how to connect the academia and the real world. The **four section** digs into developing the school as a holistic community center of learning. A successful education does not end when students leave the school and it is known that the community is one of the most important indicators of an individual’s success during education. It is absolution critical that schools become not only a place for children, but also a place for adults to grow. # 2. Blankslate Education Blankslate Education is a series of ideas for what a school of the future will look like. The starting point for the concept is: If we throw away all of traditional education and start from scratch, what will we come up with? First, let’s get the boring stuff over with and do a simple who, what, when, where, why. The school is designed for the ages of 0 - 17 with a focus on general education. Many elements of the school will additionally be tailored for adults and parents because to really provide the best environment, affecting out of school time will be important as well. Blankslate Education is designed with the potential to be implemented anywhere in the world and the target is to have schools using Blankslate Education before 2030. The reason that I came up with this is because the future is coming fast and we’re not ready for it. Education will play a big role in how we transition to that future. Note that many, if not most, of the ideas in Blankslate Education is not new. Many have been discussed and implemented in different forms. The difference will be implementing all of the ideas in one school. That will be absolutely radical and if it works, will revolutionize the way we see education. The approach for this concept is unlike any of the current education improvements that build off of what is already there. Blankslate Education throws away all the baggage and looks at the fundamental issues that education needs to solve. This does two things: 1. The educational ideas and concepts will actually be designed specifically to deal with the fundamental issue. 2. It streamlines the path from where we stand today in education to an education that will solve the fundamental issues. The fundamental issue that traditional education tried to solve was to factory produce knowledge and capability in humans. This mean training every person to learn the same set of skills as a basis so that a person who went through the system can become useful to society. This was extremely effective during the British Empire’s expansion. Administrative work was absolutely required and the skills that were taught were designed to solve that. That means that going through the education system allowed people to become useful to society. The system worked very well and allowed civilization to expand. When there were no computers. That is why it is now a fundamental issue of the past. With the computer age, we have gained access to automation. With the internet age, we have gained access to unlimited information at our finger tips. And with the Artificial Intelligence (big data and big computation) age potentially coming soon, everything will change even more. The question we need to ask is, what is the role for humans to play in society in the future when almost all the traditional jobs can be done by computers or robots? Manufacturing? Automated by computers and robots. Transportation? Automated by computers and robots. Construction? Automated by computers and robots. Accounting, law, and medicine will all see computers and robots take over a significant portion of current human contributions in the market. Why? Because much of the work is repetitive and will be able to be replicated with upcoming technology. Pretty much any job or role you can think of will have the capability of becoming automated. To calm down the readers who are jumping up and saying that there will be many things that cannot be automated, yes, I agree. This is not to say that everything will be automated, but you can bet that if it can be automated, it will be at some point. There will obviously still be many bespoke services offered that are not automated since automation, at the end of the day, is often an economic decision. If it’s cheaper with automation, then that is what will happen. So where does that leave us humans? There are a few obvious roles that will be available. Research into new technologies. Management and maintenance of the automated systems. Roles that provide better results when there is human interaction, like nursing and coaching. In a way, the human interaction is there to help ease others into a future that potentially won’t even need the human interface middle man. And most importantly, communication between different parties, entities, and corporations to figure out how to collaborate. Previous labor is freed up to do more meaningful things. But the key will be in how to solve the problem of money and jobs. Society will have to rethink these two concepts to be able to transition to this future peacefully. If the changes in the system are handled properly though, it is a very exciting future. Imagine a future where everyone gets to choose how they contribute to society? Instead of laboring away in something that feels completely meaningless, to be able to explore new things and dive deeper into the things that they love? We could use a lot more historians, geologists, biologists (studying the rain forests, biomimicry), archaeologists, anthropologists (communicating and recording tribes), historians (recording are currently history), journalism, etc. Actual infinite possibilities. Therefore, the fundamental issues that education will need to solve are concepts that will allow someone to thrive in such a future. Intellectual curiosity and communication skills will be at the core of these issues. And to maintain peace, another fundamental issue will be how we teach our students to become citizens of the Earth. Blankslate Education assumes the following fundamental issues as the core to what education needs to solve: 1. The ability to understand and connect with yourself 2. The ability to understand and connect with others 3. The ability to understand and connect with the greater community, society, and environment. I have termed this as the 3 Connections and it will be the central philosophy of Blankslate Education. # 3. Three Connections A Central Philosophy The 3 Connections is the Central Philosophy to the Blankslate Education Concept. General education should revolve around fundamental ideas that are taught to every student. The Central Philosophy is core to instilling a philosophy that we believe will make every student become the best version of themselves, to find their happiness and success, and while at the same time, making the world a better place for future generations. Many schools of today lack a strong central philosophy. Schools are developed to follow some kind of external grading system that determines the success of students. We have tests. We have grades. We have college acceptance rates. But do these external grading systems really help instill the right kind of insights we want in our students? The Central Philosophy in Blankslate Education is based around the 3 Connections: * Connection 1: Connect with Yourself * Connection 2: Connect with Others * Connection 3: Connect with the greater community, society, and environment. ## Connection 1: Connect with Yourself Connecting with yourself revolves around the idea that one needs to understand and be able to control one’s self. Most of us live our lives never having really connected with ourselves to understand what we actually want. We meander through life without a clear focus and thus find ourselves constantly swept up by external forces rather than being able to control our own paths. The first part of Connection 1 involves understanding yourself. What are your: * strengths and weaknesses * likes and dislikes * wants and desires * needs * feelings * fears Understanding and knowing who you are is important in helping define potential future paths. In school today, it is rare to find ourselves spending time to discover this. From a young age up till middle school, all our classes are defined for us. There is very little room to explore and much less room to actually have discussions on what students want. The negative side, the weaknesses, the dislikes, and the fears, are even less talked about. These are real and it is something everything experiences, yet, schools have never approached them as a core part of education. The goal of this in education is to help students develop a vocabulary to be able to express themselves. The stronger the vocabulary, the better they will be at communicating their thoughts. The second part of Connection 1 is the tool set that will help you figure out the first part. It involves developing skills and attributes that empower your being. Some of these key skills and attributes include: * open mindedness * self control * self respect * resilience * grit * discipline * toughness * mindfulness * gratitude These are all skills that will help develop your understanding of yourself and a control over your mind and body to build the best version of yourself. Again, these are skills that are not taught in school. Instead, the development of understanding one’s self has always been left to the student themselves and the time that we start really exploring this is when we become adults. The most sought after learning materials after adults finish general education is in the above topics. It is what we call self-development. Most of the vocabulary we get from the above come about when we start spending time looking into self development. Why isn’t self development topics built into education when it’s the most sought after learning material when we are adults? It should be obvious that we have neglected a very important section of knowledge in our general education. There will be a lot of interesting things to explore when actually developing a general education curriculum for understanding and connecting with yourself. For example, connecting students with the real world and teaching them what it means to fail and how it is not the end. With the current grading system in schools, schools tend to build up an aversion to failure in students, which is detrimental to a student’s development when they encounter the real world where experiencing failure is almost definite. When spirituality is discussed today, I believe a lot of it is about connecting with yourself. Finding time to understand who you are, your likes and dislikes, strengths and weaknesses, desires, feelings, and fears. And after finding out, how to build a strong support to help you get what you want or to alleviate the pain. Connecting with yourself is one of the keys to finding happiness. Or better yet, content-ness. ## Connection 2: Connect with Others The second Connection is Connect with Others. This Connection is focused around the ability to be able to communicate and relate so you can better understand and connect with others. The importance of this Connection applies to us because humans are typically social creatures and any success in today’s world requires collaboration and communication with others. With the way the world is shaping up, the content in Connection 2 will be an integral part of what we need as skills in the future. Connect with Others is broken down into two parts. The first is simply language. The second is interpersonal skills. Language is the core of communication. Understanding how to read, write, speak, and listen is critical to being successful in the world today because everything revolves around working together with other people. It is now very rare for anybody to find success when isolated to themselves. And it’s not only about learning one language. It’s about learning multiple languages. Schools should aspire to give their students two native languages. Multiple languages not only give them more opportunities for success in the future, it also teaches them to have a more flexible mind because there is always more than one answer and not everything is directly translatable 1-to-1. This teaches students that the world is not black and white, but rather many shades of grey. After the basic requirement in communication, there are interpersonal skills that will allow for stronger communication between people. Interpersonal skills are a series of ideas that will allow people to better Connect with Others by involving empathy and understanding of the other party instead of just caring about yourself. These ideas involve: * the golden rule (treat people how you would like to be treated) * being right vs. being wrong * everyone’s truth * respecting others * mutual relationships * how to be likable * empathy * sympathy * manners * being polite * leadership These are all simple concepts that we talk about all the time, but they are often not taught in a systematic way where all of this is at least brought up formally in a general education setting. Another topic that needs to be broached is sex education. Sex is obviously a very important part of how people connect and it should be a core part of education, not only to understand how to connect with others, but to also connect with yourself by becoming comfortable with your body. Most of us do learn this at some point in our life, but again, the problem is that we learn it through trial and error through the relationships and friendships that we encounter throughout our life. If we know that these are ideas that most people need to know, why not teach it structurally and formally? Connection 2: Connect with Others is absolutely critical because success today and in the future as a human will often revolve around communicating and collaborating with others. This means that the skills for connecting with others will be crucial to a person’s future success. ## Connection 3: Connect with Community, Society, and Environment The last connection, Connection 3, is important in creating a world that is peaceful and considerate. Connection 3 is the one that is becoming extremely relevant as we move towards a world where people live in closer proximity to each other and the natural resources of the world are becoming more limited. Everybody is now integrated into a community or the society in some way or another and it is very hard to be completely disconnected from it. For Connection 3, I want to break it down into 3 parts: community, society, and environment. They all play into each other, but when separated, it will make it easier to describe. ### Community **Community** is about the local community of people. This would include the people that you interact with on a daily basis: your family, your neighbors, your school, the restaurants near you, the office, the stores near you, the people who clean the streets, etc. A good community is one that provides a sense of safety and comfort for its occupants. To do this, the community should promote openness and respect for each other and the general space. When connecting or being part of a community, there are things that everybody needs to mutually agree on and understand for it to work. There are basic rules of mutual respect that should be in place for every community and the goal of Connection 3’s Community is to build this into general education so that students have a strong basis for this concept and can influence the world around them to build stronger communities. ### Society **Society** is about the larger picture and includes all the people that you might not see. This is a more systems approach, where often times, the knowledge required here is based off of things that are not on a human-to-human level anymore, but something that is a product of something bigger. Examples would be economics, law, and anything related to money. Since most of us are part of society in one way or another, it is important to learn how society works and how we as individuals play a role in it. Learning about economics will help people understand markets and the flow of goods and services. Learning about law will help people understand rules and governments and how they play together to deal with issues such as the tragedy of the commons. Learning about money, or finance, will help people understand capital, banking, and investment strategies that will allow them to leverage and control money rather than to be controlled by money. Learning about government and politics will help people understand how decisions are made in a larger system and how individuals can play a role. Traditional general education does not include society as part of the core curriculum, which is unfortunate as this is the knowledge that everyone should get if they want to become citizens of our society called Earth. ### Environment **Environment** Last but not least, we have the environment. When humans were still a small part of the ecosystem, we didn’t have to think about this too much, but now that humans control much of the environment and human actions can have a large impact on the overall ecology, the environment has become a critical aspect of the world around us and will play a bigger role as we start to encounter more of the repercussions of what we have done. Learning about weather patterns, about ecological patterns, and technologies that can create renewable resources will be important to the peace and stability of the world moving forward. These messages are built into the curriculum starting at a young age to help students develop a sense of responsibility towards their community, society, and the environment. ## The Key Roles of Education One of the key roles and opportunities of general education is to provide a universal language and vocabulary that everybody can use to communicate and connect with each other. Traditional education has brought the world together by providing the same basic skills for everybody and has helped people connect when the focus of much of the world was still to make sure the lower needs of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, such as physiological and safety, were fulfilled. But as society develops, we are starting to find that there is a significant amount of vocabulary that is missing to help people connect in the higher needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy such as belongingness and love, esteem, and self-actualization. Traditional education is missing some of the most basic vocabulary necessary to help people communicate and connect on the higher needs in Maslow’s Hierarchy. We should be taught how to express our feelings. We should be taught about consent. We should be taught how to communicate and share our wants and needs without the need to pressure others or feel the need to use violence. We should be taught to love ourselves for who we are. We should be taught what it means to be friends and what it means to have a relationship. Everything that we had to learn by trial and error in the playground and in real life should be systematically taught in a way that everybody has the same language and vocabulary to be able to explore it for themselves. That is the core of the 3 Connections. # 4. Life Skills First A Complete Core Curriculum that teaches you how to live your life and navigate the world When considering the idea of a core curriculum based around soft skills, something kept bothering me. Soft skills encompassed the first two Connections of the central philosophy, but what about the 3rd Connection, which is equally equivalent in importance for the success of an individual? ## Core Curriculum A core curriculum is a set of common courses that all students need to take. The courses in the core curriculum include the skills and knowledge we want every single student to develop. This is the key for the core curriculum. These are courses that teach skills relevant to every single student and the future that awaits them. And most importantly, these are the courses that will define a common vocabulary for all the students at the school. The Core Curriculum builds off of the Core Philosophy and in this chapter, we will explore how the core curriculum classes can be designed. It is important that we keep the core curriculum as streamlined as possible. All other courses should be included into a Secondary Curriculum that includes optional courses and skills that can be learned. The Secondary Curriculum will be expanded more in the next chapter. These are the skills that should be systematically taught to every student because it is useful no matter where you are in life. Whether it be in a place of work, daily interactions with your family or significant other, instant messaging friends, or negotiating for a deal or opportunity, soft skills are absolutely critical to the success of these interactions. My K-12 alma mater, the International School of Beijing, embody the following values: • Global-Mindedness fosters diversity of thought among students who consider their role in an increasingly connected world. • Integrity is as highly valued as results, laying the platform by which we function. • Respect among our community is a fundamental attribute for learning together. • Balance in the lives of all our community members is promoted and supported. • Service prepares engaged global citizens committed to contributing to the world around them. • Creativity is a critical quality for future success, which along with innovation is valued and promoted. A Core Curriculum should prioritize the learning of these ideas rather than making them supplementary and as an after thought to the traditional curriculum. That’s why the true core curriculum is not actually soft skills first. Rather, it is life skills first. ## Life Skills First #### A Complete Core Curriculum Life skills encompass all of the soft skills, but it adds a few more skills that are not included in soft skills. Namely, skills involved with how the society and the environment around us works. This allows us to integrate the third connection in the 3 Connections into the Core Curriculum. The 3rd Connection is all about connecting with the community, society, and the environment. This means learning about news, politics, government systems, economics, trade, banking, climate change, ecological cycles, etc. This knowledge is highly relevant in today’s world where everything is integrated and interconnected. Not only is being part of a community integral to most of the population, it is very hard to in general to completely disconnect from the rest of society. One thing I really want to emphasize is the importance of understanding how the larger picture works, and in this case, I’m speaking about the environment. Spending time and effort to understand longer term repercussions in larger systems that are yet to be fully understood allows that generation of students to have a stronger moral compass for what needs to be prioritized, creating more potential for solutions to problems that will crop up in the following decades. ## Traditional vs. Life Skills First I want to quickly explore what a Life Skills First Curriculum would look like compared to a traditional curriculum. A Traditional Curriculum looks something like this: * **Math** (includes arithmetic, algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus) * **Sciences** Includes hard sciences such as biology, chemistry, physics, earth science, astronomy, etc. and soft sciences such as psychology, sociology, economics, etc. * **Physical Education** Includes general exercise and physical activity. * **Language (Native Language)** Includes reading, writing, and speaking. * **Foreign/second language** An opportunity to explore reading, writing, and speaking in another language. * **History** Can include local, national, and international history * **Computer Classes** This includes the learning of how to use computers including typing and commonly used software as well as computer science programming. * **Arts & Music** includes drawing, painting, theater, musical instruments, singing, etc. The above should be relatively familiar to most people. These are the classes that we took from elementary through to high school. All of these classes have a focus on knowledge accumulation with the goal of having a better understanding of the world around us. If we were to choose the most essential skill in the above list in today’s world, **Language** would be it because it is absolutely the most critical skill and it is necessary to facilitate general learning and it is the most basic skill needed to be able to communicate with others. This is the type of skill that should be in the core curriculum. Others including Math, Science, and History, should be moved towards a Secondary and Optional Curriculum because these subjects can be very broad and the proficiency of each of these subjects should vary depending on the student. Now, let’s look at an example of a Life Skills First curriculum, broken down into the 3 Connections Core Philosophy it would be based off of: ## Connection 1: Self The Self Curriculum can be broken down into 2 distinct parts:\ **Learning about Yourself** and **Developing Fundamental Skills**. The first one, **Learning about Yourself**, dive into basic questions related to the self that are explored systematically for each student. This includes doing research on each individual’s strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, wants and desires, needs, feelings, and fears. In traditional curriculums, we never explicitly explore this, thus, students are never able to explicitly share their thoughts. Spending time to explore these questions will provide a significant amount of insight into the student for themselves and for others, allowing for a better understanding of what paths the student can take when they decide on the developmental path they want to take in their education. And Learning about Yourself should be done multiple times throughout the year. As students learn and grow, their thoughts and feelings will quickly develop and change, making the entire process highly iterative. The second one, **Developing Fundamental Skills**, focuses on self development and is broken down into 4 parts:\ mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. ### Mental Development **Mental development** is what we usually attribute to schools. Aspects of mental development would include leadership, creativity, logic and problem solving. Although traditional curriculums do tackle these, the difference would be on the approach. Traditional curriculums tend to integrate these into the classroom as secondary, where the goal of a specific project is to research and complete the project and if it so happens that the project requires some leadership or problem solving, all the better. With a Life Skills first curriculum, the initial goal that is being set is the skill that needs to be developed. If the skill being developed is creativity, then the prompt for the project becomes: “Design and develop a project that requires creativity”. Students will define the project based on this requirement, whereby it is guaranteed the project will demonstrate creative thinking if the project is approved. This also puts students in the driver’s seat. Instead of being assigned the same project that is done by everyone, students now create their own project which allows for more options and out of the box thinking. ### Physical Development With **Physical Development**, we are looking at basic physical education in addition to better understanding of the human body and all aspects that relate to the human body, including how to take care of it. In physical education, there needs to be a focus on understanding the human body and the basics of movement. Traditional physical education programs have been about getting students moving and active, but it was never taught to us how we should move. For example, how many people run with heel strike first motions? That’s because we were never taught how to run. How many people have posture issues? That’s because we were never taught how to properly use our core. How many people actually know how to do a push up or plank properly? Surprisingly, we are not taught how to actually do these simple moves properly, even though they are commonly done in physical education programs. Heck, how many people walking properly? On top of that, basic balance and spatial awareness should be developed to help students better understand how to use their body. With the goal of better understanding the human body, that obviously includes looking at the human anatomy, human biology (explored in a way that can be directly related to what students can touch and feel instead of memorizing that mitochondria is the work horse of the cell), health, and medicine. Upon mentioning health, a very important aspect of health is food. A strong understanding of food and nutrients will also be an important aspect of physical education. Lastly, physical education should include learning about how to take care of yourself. This can be simplified down to the term, self maintenance, and should include knowledge development in basics such as cooking, how to clean yourself, laundry, and maybe even how to create shelter. ### Emotional Development The third piece of Developing Fundamental Skills is **Emotional Development**. These are the skills that build a strong foundation that will empower your well-being and control over your emotions. This includes developing self-control, self-respect, resilience, grit, discipline, toughness, and open mindedness. The goal of developing emotional strength is to help students be able to manage themselves and build the strongest version of themselves so they are able to handle anything that can be thrown at them. With emotional strength, they can maintain calm in more scenarios and it will help students fight off anxiety and also build a school environment that will have fewer conflicts. Much of the conflicts that we see in school, especially bullying, is derived from a lack of emotional balance, causing students to need to appease their emotional instability by putting down others to build up a sense of superiority to combat the emotional trauma in other parts of their life. Developing the emotional fundamental skills will give students the soft skills that that will allow them to succeed by being much more comfortable with who they are. ### Spiritual Development The fourth fundamental skill is **Spiritual Development**. The term spiritual, is used in many ways, but the focus here will be slightly more concrete and will not include religious definitions. Spiritual, in many ways, is an extension of emotional. Emotional is about your relationship with yourself, while spiritual is about your relationship with your surroundings. The spiritual skills involve developing an appreciation for the world around us, giving thanks and providing forgiveness. Spiritual development is how we help students find their inner calmness to the world around them. Much of this stems around understanding how the world works, specifically what can and cannot be controlled. In addition, it’s important to understand how to control your reactions to your surroundings, which leads to exercises like meditation and maybe even yoga where the goal is to slow down and parse through the large amounts of information without new distractions. In today’s world where there is so much distraction and outside stimuli, developing a strong spirit and spiritual well-being will be very important for finding a sense of happiness and fulfillment. ## Connection 2: Others The second part of the core curriculum centers around skills that are necessary for communication and empathy. With communication, at the very basic level, we have language. Reading and writing are a must and becoming multi-lingual is important as well as it will allow for students to become more capable in communication. An additional benefit of multilingualism is each language tend to generate different biases in the language’s ways of thinking, which can help individuals think outside the box more often. For example, the English language has a tendency to mentally box time into past, present, and future thanks to it’s relatively distinct future and past tense vocabulary, allowing for easier acceptance and abuse of the concepts of loans, mortgages, and credit, while the Chinese language would tend to create more conservative individuals in regards to the same topic due to there being less separation between the present self and the future self. Additional learnings for language can target penmanship and typing, where they are not absolutely critical to the language itself, but are very important for utilizing the language efficiently. Language then extends into the different mediums for how one can share their ideas. Essays, white papers, blog posts, reports, are all different ways to organize and express an idea. In addition to text based content, communication will encompass other mediums such as audio, video, and other art forms such as paintings, music, and theater, all forms of expression and communication. Once we get into these different mediums, we begin to encounter communication with empathy. The reason why alternative mediums of communication are so powerful is because they can elicit emotions within others and this is done through empathy. Whether it be non-fiction or fiction, science fiction or fantasy, the communication of ideas where the content is trying to empathetically reach the audience is the most powerful type of communication because it can be relatable. When something is relatable, that’s when others can begin to accept it. Therefore, the study of empathy breaks down into a series of psychology and sociology concepts. Understanding the idea of respect, inter-human relationships, right vs. wrong, selfishness, attraction, agreeableness, and consent are all part of topics that would be studied to increase empathy. A specific type of communication focused around empathy has already been developed by the late Marshall Rosenberg called “Non-violent Communication” and it focuses on understanding each other’s needs and fears through communication to better negotiate and determine a solution that can make everyone happy. This is the final goal of communication and our role is to increase the chances of success by giving everyone the knowledge and practice that will increase these chances. ## Connection 3: Community, Society, and Environment Connection 3 is the outlier for why the core curriculum should be about Life Skills rather than Soft Skills. It’s because the material in Connection 3 aren’t traditionally labeled as soft skills. They are more based around knowledge. But the knowledge in Connection 3 is an absolute requirement for anybody who expects to live within the confines of society, which is almost everybody. Connection 3’s curriculum can be broken down into 3 parts: Community, Society, and Environment. Community focuses around understanding and experiencing how a community works. The knowledge aspect involves understanding the importance of local businesses and local services such as schools, hospitals, municipal systems, etc. The experience part will involve different types of community service, including volunteering with the police department, fire fighting department, the local town hall, waste management, etc. with the goal of allowing students to see all the different aspects of making a local municipality run correctly. Of course, that’s not all there is to community. There will also need to be a more theoretical approach where the content focuses on defining what a community is and why it is important to the well-being of the people in the area. This would include ideas around the benefits of a community, how to build a community, and how to maintain a community. The second part is Society. Society focuses on studying how we interact with it and also how the system works. Basic understanding of money, economics, politics, and law are important in the everyday interactions with have with society, especially money. Banking, credit and debit, investing, and financial independence are all part of everybody’s life, and thus should be a core part of our general education. The system part includes understanding macro economics, especially behavioral economics, where the learning touches on how humans behave in larger numbers. This is to help more people understand concepts like “tragedy of the commons” and “prisoner’s dilemmas” so as a society, better decisions can be made for the greater good. Additional understanding of sociology and history will greatly benefit the understanding of how society became what it is today. The last part is the environment. The environment is important because it is the space we live in. For the time being, this world is still the only home we have, so we should develop a strong understanding of it so we can protect and hopefully, someday, be able to control it. The environment includes basic sciences such as earth science and geology, but traditional sciences such as chemistry, physics, and biology will all be fundamental part of learning about our Earth and our environment. The goal is understand that all parts of the ecology is interconnected and humans already have the ability to heavily impact the environment and the world. The greater understanding that our young ones have of how the environment works, the more likely that they will care and want to protect it. ## Conclusion The Core Curriculum in Blankslate Education actually overlaps a lot with the traditional curriculum. The difference is that the focus is on achieving the goals listed in the 3 Connections rather than just acquiring the knowledge for each subject. The Core Curriculum is not a grade based curriculum. It’s about exposure and repetition of the content as the student grows to get an understanding of each student’s growth and development. Exposure is based around how these soft skills apply in different situations and repetition involves constantly reminding students about it so that it gets ingrained in the students. It would make sense to include different aptitude tests as well to better understand each student as they develop. The goal of the Core Curriculum is to create a program that actually encompasses all the most important knowledge that every single person should know when entering society. Preparation for the real world is what core curriculums should be trying to achieve. # 5. Soft Skills A Missing Component in our Core Curriculum There is a large component missing in our traditional education today and it is soft skills. Soft skills are becoming ever more important in society today, whether it be in the work place, every day interactions with others, or communication between friends and loved ones. But soft skills aren’t taught in school. There’s no class in elementary, middle, or high school that teaches students about self confidence. There’s no class that teaches about failure. There’s no class that is designed for the sole purpose of teaching influencing via leadership or empathetic communication methods such as non-violent communication. Why are we not teaching in school these skills that can be used by everybody? All of this should be introduced at a young age as tools to navigate life. It is already important to consider in elementary school, or even earlier, when students start having unguided conversations and communications with others. Soft skills is now a large part of self development and is a significant part of the learning curriculum once we become adults. It’s the one thing that every adult should look into if it was missing from their education because a large amount of soft skills will be useful to every single person in the world. The goal of this chapter is to describe what a curriculum might include if soft skills are integrated into the core of it and why soft skills is a more important part of the curriculum than traditional skills that are taught. ## What is Soft Skills? The opening paragraph for Soft Skills on Wikipedia does a great job of defining Soft Skills: Soft skills are a combination of people skills, social skills, communication skills, character or personality traits, attitudes, career attributes,1 social intelligence and emotional intelligence quotients, among others, that enable people to navigate their environment, work well with others, perform well, and achieve their goals with complementing hard skills.2 The Collins English Dictionary defines the term "soft skills" as "desirable qualities for certain forms of employment that do not depend on acquired knowledge: they include common sense, the ability to deal with people, and a positive flexible attitude."3 When we look at a lot of newer education frameworks today, we see many that prioritize these soft skills rather than what we traditionally learn in school because these are the skills that people are looking for when they hire. It is rarely ever true that a student graduating from school will have all the skills they need to do for their work or their job, thus it is often more important to have a good attitude and the ability to learn on the job. One of my favorite education frameworks comes from Tony Wagner. Wagner compiled the 7 Survival Skills that are required to find success in today’s workplace. The below is taken directly from Wagner’s website \[]: * **critical thinking and problem solving** * “The idea that a company’s senior leaders have all the answers and can solve problems by themselves has gone completely by the wayside…The person who’s close to the work has to have strong analytic skills. You have to be rigorous: test your assumptions, don’t take things at face value, don’t go in with preconceived ideas that you’re trying to prove.” —Ellen Kumata, consultant to Fortune 200 companies * **collaboration across networks and leading by influence** * “The biggest problem we have in the company as a whole is finding people capable of exerting leadership across the board…Our mantra is that you lead by influence, rather than authority.” —Mark Chandler, Senior Vice President and General Counsel at Cisco * **agility and adaptability** * “I’ve been here four years, and we’ve done fundamental reorganization every year because of changes in the business…I can guarantee the job I hire someone to do will change or may not exist in the future, so this is why adaptability and learning skills are more important than technical skills.” —Clay Parker, President of Chemical Management Division of BOC Edwards * **initiative and entrepreneurship** * “For our production and crafts staff, the hourly workers, we need self-directed people…who can find creative solutions to some very tough, challenging problems.” —Mark Maddox, Human Resources Manager at Unilever Foods North America * **effective oral and written communication** * “The biggest skill people are missing is the ability to communicate: both written and oral presentations. It’s a huge problem for us.” —Annmarie Neal, Vice President for Talent Management at Cisco Systems * **accessing and analyzing information** * “There is so much information available that it is almost too much, and if people aren’t prepared to process the information effectively, it almost freezes them in their steps.” —Mike Summers, Vice President for Global Talent Management at Dell * **curiosity and imagination** * “Our old idea is that work is defined by employers and that employees have to do whatever the employer wants…but actually, you would like him to come up with an interpretation that you like—he’s adding something personal—a creative element.” —Michael Jung, Senior Consultant at McKinsey and Company This list is comprised entirely of soft skills because these are the skills that are required in an age where knowledge is available at your fingertips. These are also the skills that are necessary as when enter an era where automation will take over a lot of the repetitive tasks that humans do today. Thus, the skills listed by Wagner can be encompassed by the Central Philosophy of the 3 Connections and the ability to learn. Learning is a life time endeavor and schools should be providing students with the tools to learn, not just the content. The important skills involve learning how to leverage that knowledge and then how you use that knowledge in different situations rather than the knowledge itself. It follows the old adage of “Give a man a fish, they eat for a day. Teach the man how to fish, they eat for a lifetime.” Let’s start teaching our students how to skillset that will allow them to continue to grow even after school. ## Current Issues in schools due to lack of a formalized soft skills curriculum The most interesting thing to consider is how much of an impact a formalized education in soft skills can affect the current school environment. Issues that can be found in schools including bullying, discipline issues, and ADHD/focus issues can all be addressed with classes around soft skills. Bullying is often times caused by a lack of confidence from the bully, not the bullied. That lack of confidence that is generated due to either expectations directed at them can create a hole that they have resolved to fill by displaying worth via putting down others. Bullying can be addressed through courses in self confidence in self worth and helping students better understand how to deal with expectations and how to love themself for who they are. In schools today, instead of addressing and trying to solve the underlying issues around bullying, we take the easy route and issue out punishments, hoping that the negative incentive will magically help students understand where their faults lie. That’s just not how people work and it’s not the most effective way to help students change for the better. It is also very normal to see a lack of discipline in students, whether it’s being late to classes all the time, lack of responsibility towards the work assigned to them, or just pure laziness. Targeted classes focused around raising discipline would be very helpful. This can include classes teaching the concept of discipline, classes that practice discipline (i.e. physical training, mental training), teaching the concept of grit, teaching about habits and habit building, etc. For focussing issues, we often diagnose kids with ADHD and then leave it at that. Why are we not giving them programs that help them deal with these issues? Learning to calm their minds through meditation, building their resistance to instant gratification, guiding them away from the addictive natures of social media and technology, teaching them about how addictions form, and teaching them how technology uses gamification to entice them. With this knowledge available to them, students can make better choices on how solve their focussing issues. Targeting the actual skills involved in strong self development will solve a lot of the problems we encounter in school today. Building self confidence and self worth and helping students deal with emotional issues through knowledge is so important to their general growth. Systematically helping students understand themselves and those around them better, we might have been able to prevent tragedies similar to Columbine and all the school shootings that have happened in the past couple decades. ## Why isn’t Soft Skills part of our curriculum now? During the school years from day care, nursery, kindergarten, elementary, middle, high school, and finally college and university, we were never formally taught soft skills. Large amounts of the soft skills that we learned in school were through the unstructured parts of school: lunch, recess, friendships, bullying, etc. So why wasn’t it taught? There are three main reasons. One of them is that they are not measurable by traditional means. We do not have a way to define someone’s ability in self-confidence or resilience with a number. Without these measurements, there is no way to determine which students are excelling and which students are not. Without being able to filter students, there is no way to determine which students can go to elite schools and colleges and which students cannot. The second reason is that our current education curriculum was based on a time when education was used to create human robots. Language, arithmetic, and basic sciences were all skill that were necessary for basic white collar work. This can be highlighted during the expansion of the British Empire. People who successfully finished their K-12 education could become part of the cogs in any part of the empire because they had the basic skills to be successful in implementing the administrative needs of such a large empire before the existence of computers. The last reason is because no curriculum has been created for it before. Self development or personal development has seen significant growth in the past couple decades as finding success in the real world has increasingly become about soft skills. An arsenal of hard skills just isn’t going to cut it because our world is more interconnected than ever, thanks to computers and the internet. Communication and collaboration are absolutely required and soft skills help tremendously on that front. ## Examples of Soft Skill Courses Soft skill content build heavily off of the central philosophy of Connection 1 & Connection 2. Connecting with Yourself and Connecting with Others are both centered around soft skills and the idea is that every student should become well-versed in this content. ### **Connection 1: Connect with yourself** The first set of soft skills build off of Connection 1 from the Core Philosophy and is the most lacking in today’s education system. To reiterate, the fundamentals of connecting with yourself revolves around the idea that one needs to understand and be able to control one’s self. Understanding yourself includes understanding your: * strengths and weaknesses * likes and dislikes * wants and desires * needs * feelings * fears To be able to act upon one’s self requires the development of: * open mindedness * self control * self respect * resilience * grit * discipline * toughness * mindfulness * gratitude Making a conscious effort to teach this in school will provide students with a vocabulary for expressing themselves properly and effectively as well as help build core skills that will stick around with the for the rest of their life. **Course on Self** Taught much like a history class, the goal of it is to explore the different ideas around the self. Who are you, what do you like, what do you dis-like, what do you want, what do you need, what do you fear, how do you feel, etc. This is a class focused on asking the questions to explore and understand who you are. **Course on Self-Control and Self-Discipline** What is Self-Control? What is self-discipline, and what is self-respect? The course should introduce these terms and then put them into practice through various activities to help students understand what it means to consciously make the decisions to be in control of their own decisions. **Course on Self-Respect and Self-Love** A rampant problem regardless of age, a course on self-respect and self-love, teaching the ideas around how to appreciate one’s self, can be very effective in developing emotional independence and grounded-ness. The content of the course should start with basic definitions and then move into experiential experiments and reflections from the students. **Course on Resilience** Resilience and grit are very fascinating soft skills that can provide a strong baseline on whether or not someone has the ability to succeed. To simplify the idea of resilience, it can be described as the ability to not be afraid to fail. The course would be focused around developing the mental and emotional stability in the face of failure. This course will help students learn to be not afraid of taking risks, which in turn provides them with more opportunities to succeed. The resilience class is taught by making students fail and try again. After failing, it’s up to the students to figure out how to stand up and try again with a different approach or a different project. The amazing thing about this is that anything can be chosen as the project. There are opportunities to teach music, arithmetic, logic, and anything that might be potentially hard to do for a student. ### **Connection 2: Connecting with Others** In addition to examples listed from Connection 1, I want to briefly bring up Connection 2 as well. Connection 2 courses will focus around communication and how to connect with others. As a reminder, these ideas involve: * the golden rule (treat people how you would like to be treated) * being right vs. being wrong * everyone’s truth * respecting others * mutual relationships * how to be likable * empathy * sympathy * manners * being polite * leadership **Course on Non-Violent Communication** A very obvious course to teach is non-violent communication by Marshall Rosenberg. It is way of communicating that teaches empathy, sympathy, respect, and leadership, on top of being a very effective way to communicate. Non-violent communication allows people to respectfully share their needs and desires while taking into consideration the other person’s needs, wants, desires, and fears; therefore allowing for a grounded conversation that takes into consideration the points of views of both sides. This is an absolutely valuable skill that a majority of the population is lacking in and systematic teaching of this content will greatly improve interpersonal communication and relationships. ## What are the dangers of not caring about soft skills. Assuming we don’t do anything about instituting formal soft skills development, we will see a more and more disconnected world. That’s because there are now many options of staying disconnected. Before, people were forced to interact with each other, whether it be at the grocery store, restaurants, coffee shop, work place, etc. But in the coming decades, you won’t need to meet anybody when you buy something. You won’t need a human waiter when you go to a restaurant. There won’t be a human barista at the coffee shop, and you won’t need to work in an office full of people. This means there will be fewer and fewer necessary interactions with humans. It will all be designed around convenience and ease of use, which means fewer human interactions. This means less communication practice. We can already see it in the youth of China today. Live streaming is a phenomenon created by people who are uncomfortable with face to face interactions. Whether it’s fear or rejection or fear of revealing who they are due to a lack of self confidence, it’s common for people to hide behind the computer screen to feel safe during interactions. This population will become largely useless in our society of the future unless we can help them be able to communicate and develop the soft skills that they are lacking. ## Soft Skills are not a replacement for hard skills I think it’s important to state that I am not advocating for replacing hard skills with soft skills, but rather that there should be a shift in prioritization. Our interest is in making hard skills become optional to allow for students to be able to pick and choose what they are actually interested in while centering the core curriculum around soft skills that will be useful to every student in the future. To play devil’s advocate, many might think that centering a curriculum around soft skills will make it so that students have a lot of difficulty with hard skills because there is less time spent on hard skills. This is, without a doubt, true. At the same time, we need to understand that a large amount of the hard skills being taught are a complete waste of time either due to the student’s lack of interest or the fact that technology is moving faster than the pace at which academia can keep up with the content that is being taught. By decreasing the amount of wasted time in school and more deliberate learning because the students are actually interested in what they are studying, we massively increase learning speed and ability. A simple question to ask is how many classes have you taken during your school years that you weren’t interested in? How much of the content do you really remember? Traditional education was more about memorization of knowledge. The issue is that much of the knowledge that was taught in school were not relevant in the real world. How often do I use Calculus. How often do I need to know about the Gettysburg Address or the Battle of Gettysburg? How often do I need to know about rocks in nature or understanding the chemical reaction of Magnesium and Water? All of that knowledge is useful, but does everyone really need to know the same thing? Wouldn’t it make more sense for this to be the Extra Curricular courses? Different students can choose to focus on different extra curricular courses based on their interests and passion. This allows them to build a more in depth understanding of the subject and it will allow students to be able to spend time on subjects to fully learn it. This includes giving students the time and space to work on individual and team projects, leaning towards individual learning and project based learning. \[4]: # 6. 21st Century Education We are almost two decades into the 21st century and education in the world is still largely lecture based, a form of education that started in the 1800s when knowledge was passed down from individual to individual without the help of written text. The factory model education was very efficient during the 20th century, but now that we are in the 21st century, we should begin exploring better options. The factory model education is a term that is used to describe an education structure where students are filed into a factory like school. Every student will go through the same production line and learn the same content. Without a strong regard for how well a student performs, they have a limited amount of time at each part of the production line and once their time is done, they are graded and moved along. This process happens every school year from kindergarten through to college, systematically moving students through the system with the goals of getting good grades, getting in college, and then getting a job. In addition to the factory model education, we also implemented the classroom structure, which allowed the education system to be able to take on more students. The bigger the gap between the student-teacher ratio, the higher the capacity of the factory. The classroom structure made a lot of sense when it was initially implemented because its main goal was to raise the minimum education level of every student. And even until recently, it was the best way to provide quality education en masse because there was limited access to resources that could help you learn. Elite schools try to keep the student-teacher ratio as low as possible, but this is impossible to do for all schools because teachers are expensive (if we want to pay them well), and we haven’t even talked about good teachers yet. The scariest part about schools today is their ability to kill curiosity and creativity. With all the limitations and restrictions designed into a school system based off of the factory model and classrooms, teachers don’t have the flexibility and space to give to students. Important questions are dismissed due to a lack of time to explore it because the curriculum demanded that the time is spent according to the schedule. Exploration of topics beyond what is scoped is extremely limited, again due to the demands of curriculum and schedules. The saddest part about this is we never give students the time and space to think problem solve and critically think through their problems and fail their way to success, one of the most important experiences to an individual’s growth and development. In addition, the schedule limitations and restrictions create an environment where there is no real reinforcement of the knowledge learned. When the goal is to rush through content, it is hard to help students understand the content in a way that it will be absorbed into long term memory because they aren’t given the opportunity to actively learn and ask and explore the questions that really pique their interests. Without the time to explore and play, it will be hard for the knowledge to be absorbed into long term memory, making the entire learning process of the knowledge less than ideal because the knowledge will be lost in the long term. When considering better options, we should first take a look at the pain points in today’s education. As mentioned, the factory model is one of the issues in that it tries to put every single student through the same curriculum. The issues with this is that every student is different. How they learn and how fast they understand content is different from each individual student. Thus, personalized learning is already a hot topic and can transform the way we approach education because it becomes tailored for optimal performance based on the student. Another pain point we see is the grading system. Grades are used to determine the success of students, but is it really measuring the right things? Students who are successful in schools and achieve good grades are not necessarily successful in the real world because schools have a certain structure and use standardization to weed out the incompatible. All other students who are not considered “good” in terms of the structure that a school has set out will have a hard time succeeding. That’s why it’s important to reconsider how we grade. Do we want to schools to find the best student according to a certain criteria or do we want schools to polish every stone that goes through the system? Lastly, a huge pain point is the number of good teachers. Schools seem to be heavily influenced by teacher competency. And good teachers cost money. Fair. Unfortunately, if we allow that limitation to persist, there will always be a distinction between education for the rich and education for the poor. The education must be designed so that it leverages its resources to the maximum and provides quality education through the use of automation or system design. Schools should be designed to be able to generate education that is replicable so that it can be scaled with the goal of higher efficiency and lower costs. This way, schools can be accessible by all, creating a balancing force for the population. In the first section, we explored the Core Curriculum. In this section, we explore interesting methodologies that can greatly enhance the way education can be done. Many of the approaches are already greatly talked about. My goal is to further explore these ideas as an extension to Blankslate Education. # 7. Better Measuring Sticks via a Digital Portfolio Getting rid of Grades and College and purposefully Failing our Students In today’s world, we measure success in school with numbers that we gather from grades, tests, and college acceptance rates. But do these external grading systems really help instill the right kind of insights we want in our students? Regardless of interest or background or ability, we require every student to go through the same curriculum and tests, even though every student has their own strengths and weaknesses. We filter them through a system that is designed to discover the students that are good at getting a high score in tests. We use this information to determine whether or not students are excelling and with that, guide students along a path where the better students, with higher grades, get to go to better schools and the worst students, the ones with lower grades, go to less prestigious schools. At the end of the day, what we have are a handful of students who excelled in taking tests based on a curriculum that was defined decade ago. Schools are a filter that find students who are capable of following directions and punish everyone else who is different. What we are very clearly not doing is developing our students, polishing them into the best version of themselves. That’s why there needs to be a fundamental change to how we determine success in school. And to do that, we must re-consider how grading works. ## The Problem with Grades Not to be dramatic, but grades have destroyed the real goal of education. In China and Japan, there is the National Exam for getting into university. Throughout the entirety of high school, all you’re doing is preparing for this exam. If you do well on the exam, you have the opportunity to go to a good university. If you don’t do well, then you can go to a subpar university or try to re-take the exam next year. High school is now four years spent learning the content for a test to get into university. How many students use the content they memorize for this National Exam after they join society in the real world? In the US, we have something similar. High school is four years of academic preparation for university. All the classes are designed to help you get comfortable with the way college classes work. The success of high schools is measured by what kind of universities their students are able to enter. If that was the metric, it’s curious why there aren’t any mandatory SAT classes for all the students. Additionally, standardized testing is heavily used to measure a school’s success. Students are tested and schools use these results to measure the success of the school’s education system. Does any of this make any sense? The incentives are all wrong! Every student is dumbed down to one number and the incentive for all schools is to increase that number. How does this number help these students step into the real world? Is this the best use of their time? Is this the best way to help them become the best version of themselves and prepare them to enter society has autonomous individuals? The answer is no. ## Why we have grades Just to break this down a bit more, the reason that we have grades is because there is no way to administratively manage everything. The structure has naturally evolved into one that is elitist thanks to money. Since the beginning of time, there needed to be a way to filter out the best. The best would have opportunities to attend lectures with the best professors. This slowly became opportunities to attend elite schools and universities. As the number of applicants increased, a system needed to be in place that would allow these elite schools to find the right students in the shortest amount of time. While perviously, there might have been a direct connection between members of the elite schools and the applicants so there’s a general understanding of the individual applicants ability, the new format simplifies the applicant into a number (plus a few other metrics depending on where you are in the world). And this is all reasonable. With the limited resources and the technology available at the time, this really was the best that could be done. Information was scarce and it was only available at these elite schools. There was no internet and information was not easily accessible. There was no easy way to communicate with experts and there was no easy way to engage in conversation via publications. Grades really were the best solution to the problem at hand. But now, we are again at a point of evolution. ## Getting Rid of Grades In our school system right now, grades are numbers used to determine whether or not you succeeded in something. There are grades for assignments, grades for quizzes and tests, and grades for entire courses. These numbers are used to judge a student’s proficiency and is used to determine their future path. It makes sense to have grades for assignments, quizzes, and tests because they are a very isolated event and re-dos are potentially possible (another problem that will be discussed later). But does it really make sense to use grades for entire courses? What’s the point of failing a student if they don’t have options to re-do the work and learn from their mistake? What is the point of the education system today? The education system is currently a way to filter students and find the best applicants for the elite schools. All the ones who do not fit the criteria that is used to judge students get pushed to the way side and are labeled as failures. Is this really the best we can do? Now, what do we want the education system to actually be? A systematic way to create the best versions of each individual student and prepare them to integrate into society. To accomplish that, we need something better than grades. And the answer is actually quite simple. What we need is a digital portfolio. ## The Digital Portfolio The digital portfolio is a record of everything that happened during school. Essentially, it borrows from the measure of achievement that is used in society, the resume. After graduating from school, no one talks about what your grades were. The initial measurement for compatibility for any opportunity is your resume, a list of what you have achieved. Thus, the digital portfolio is a digital resume that follows you through the entirety of school, listing all your accomplishments and tracks all your progress. The digital portfolio will track everything. It will track the content in the Core Curriculum. For parts of the curriculum that are very focused around soft skills, it will track all the content that was studied. The content might be in the form of lectures or workshops, in which case, the digital portfolio will note that you had attended the event and if available, list that you took a test to verify that you understand the content. The intention is to track progress in the different soft skills that you’re learning and measuring how much understanding the student has of each soft skill. It will track the Secondary Curriculum, focusing on how the student performed in different parts of the skill tree and the level of understanding achieved. Even though much of the Secondary Curriculum is hard skill based, the tracking of it will involve a lot more than just numbers from quizzes and tests because the understanding of this content cannot be simply verified with just tests. The real key to understanding comes in the form of actually using the knowledge in new and unique ways where there his potentially no right answer. This might involve projects, real world problems that need research and solving, or business and marketing related thinking to convince others of your thinking. Anything is possible and the more out of the box, the better. Although we haven’t really brought it up yet, both the Core Curriculum and the Secondary Curriculum will have a heavy amount of project based learning. Project based learning is great for integrating different aspects of the curriculum into one larger, holistic piece of content in the curriculum. The value of using the digital portfolio is that the incentive is not about the grade anymore, but it’s a goal that can be defined by the team and it offers ultimate flexibility, giving the decision making power to the students. Lastly, it will be important to track the student themself. Their personal history on what they have done, read, watched, listened to, etc. Their growth as they journal and explore their strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes, their habits, and their successes and failures. These and potentially many more are all key metrics that can be used to better understand how the school can better help the student develop to becoming the best version of himself. ## Preparing for integration into society The importance of having a digital portfolio in schools cannot be overstated. Grades just cannot be what it needs to be to prepare students for the real world. Grades are relatively short sighted and they cannot be used to really tell a story. The digital portfolio creates a form of flexibility in education that is unheard of and it is the perfect foil to help us affect change to the curriculum. This is important because the future is coming and it’s coming faster than we expect because the changes are accelerating. We have entered an era where growth is exponential, not linear. That means although many things seem slow right now, a single spark can cause everything to change many tens of times faster immediately. Thus, an additional benefit to the digital portfolio is its ability to facilitate and support education and projects that heavily tie into the real world. Academics in elementary, middle, and high school are highly disconnected from the real world. Why not bring more of the real world into the classroom? ## Conclusion The goal of the digital portfolio is to create an opportunity to think outside the box of traditional education that is limited by grades. By making the replace of grades be a tracking of a student’s progress, it opens up doors and creates a lot of flexibility to how to measure success. Our current system rewards only one kind of student. The “good” student. The grading system basically is designed to only discover the one kind of “good” student and forsakes the rest. With the help of the app for personalized learning and the digital portfolio, we are in a position to really transform education into something that focuses on the development of the student rather than filtering students into buckets that don’t necessarily empower them to discover what they can really succeed at. # 8. Student Mentorship and Coaching Changing the role of the teacher With personalized learning solutions and a better methodology for measuring grades, we have all of a sudden encountered a very important problem. How will the content be taught? The model of schools has always been a teacher with a bunch of students. This model was developed during a time when there was no written word. The lecturer would share their knowledge to the rest of the audience. This model persisted through the era of the written word where much of the knowledge was available in books because much of the content couldn’t be understood through just words. It needed to be clarified and everybody understood different parts of it, so the only way to help someone else fully understand is for someone who does have full understanding to guide them through it. This model continues to persist today, even with the internet and having everything available at your finger tips. So why are we still using lectures? And is there a better way to learn? ## Replacing Teachers with Student Mentors Personalized learning and the digital portfolio is designed for a world where there is a lot more teaching resources available. The traditional methodology is using the teacher, which is someone who is more learned that a student and is able to help pass on the knowledge to the student. But an effective teacher has the time to spend with each student to help them learn and every student would need a different approach because everyone learns differently. The resources needed to actually achieve this is impossibly prohibitive. That’s why only the very elite of schools have such a low student-teacher ratio. If not traditional teachers, then what? It might very well come in the form of artificial intelligence, but we are still a couple years away from that. And AI does not help students develop inter-relational and communication skills that is part of the second Connect and critical to success in a world where artificial intelligence already plays a huge role. So what is the alternative to traditional teachers and artificial intelligence? The answer is student mentors. Mentors are role models and they help advise you in the direction that makes sense. Most mentor-mentee relationships are intimate and involve a close relationship of some kind. And they are the perfect teachers. Imagine this. In the skill tree mentioned described in the Personalized Learning chapter, there are different parts of the curriculum course that can be chosen by students to study. Once they complete the program and finish all the testing and project requirements, they officially get 50% of the possible completion of the course. To get the rest of the 50%, they must help help another student finish the same course. This is a win-win situation in every way possible. The student being mentored gets very personalized teaching because the student mentor won’t be teaching more than 2-3 students for each batch. The student mentor gets to really learn the content because they now have to help someone else understand it. It lowers the resource cost of the school, making education cheaper. And most incredibly, it gives students more opportunities to interact between each other, which become opportunities to develop problem solving skills, leadership abilities, and communication skills. All of this gets tracked in the digital portfolio and student mentors will have their successes and failures recorded, incentivizing student mentors to give it their all. This creates a system that leverages its own resources to further its growth, similar to a fire. The initial batch of wood that has started to burn will be able to help the next batch of wood burn. The key is have a successful initial ignition of the entire process! ## Removing Age Segregation With the inclusion of students as teachers, we open up the possibility of removing age segregation. Traditionally, students are paired with students their same age without much consideration for ability. If you were born in 1999, then your classmates that you will be studying in school with will most likely all be born in 1999. But the truth is, schooling should not be about age. It should be about ability. Just like how in the real world, we don’t care that much about someone’s age, why not allow for students to intermingle between ages a little more? The benefits of this is that classes and courses can be tailored for ability and students of any age can participate, assuming that they have all the pre-requisites completed. A series of simple tests and credit accumulation can be used for tracking pre-requisites, which can then be used to decide whether or not a student can move on to the next level. This provides an environment where students can learn at a more similar pace instead of restricting their pace or trying to teach them something new when they haven’t even understood the base knowledge necessary for them to understand the new content. If students are not required to only study with people their same age, a bigger pool of students can be chosen from to take a certain course together. Because everyone’s learning pace is different, let us let like minded people hang out and learn together, regardless of age. ## Teachers —> Coaches With the removal of the traditional teacher, do we still have a need for adults in the building? Why yes, we do. One significant role that’s been missing in the education system is the coach. The difference between a teacher and a coach is that the teacher’s goal is to teach you the content, while the coach tries to understand you first before figuring out what you need to learn. A very simple example will be the sport coach. Although their first task is often to build a winning team, the result of that task is to take their players and develop them. A coach needs to know how their players perform in different situations, their strengths and weaknesses, and what to prioritize in the limited amount of training time available. In the real world, we have something we call a life coach, who are hired to help figure out the issues in life and also help you develop into the best version of yourself. After they understand what it is that you want and who you are as a person, they use all the tools in their arsenal to help you become who you want to be. So why do we not have coaches in school? Why is there nobody assigned and incentivized to simply help students become the best version of themselves? Teachers should not be spending all their time lecturing from a textbook and grading papers. Teachers should be coaches, inspiring students, guiding them, helping them explore and experience the world around them. We also want teachers to be the adults in the school. They have more experience in life and their presence in school should be leverage to impart teachings that normally take time and experience to learn, especially in the form of emotional support. For example, as adults, we have learned that everyone is different, that everyone is unique in their own way. We understand this after spending a significant amount of time watching the people around us. The more we expand our horizons, either by traveling or meeting people from different places and backgrounds, the better we understand this concept. But kids don’t understand this. Their method of learning is copying. They copy the people around them and if they find out that they are in the minority in anything, they feel burdened to perform because that’s what everyone is telling them. In a TED Radio Hour podcast, titled: Teaching for Better Humans, the guest host, Manoush Zomorodi shares a personal story inspired by the writer, Jacqueline Woodson. Zomorodi’s daughter was a slow reader and felt pressure to read faster and it was stressing her out. One day, when Woodson came to present at Zomorodi’s daughter’s class, Woodson said that it is okay to read slowly. Reading slowly allows you to appreciate the content that you were reading. After hearing that, Zomorodi’s daughter would basically skip when walking because she was so happy that someone confirmed that it was okay for her to be herself. She had confidence to be herself because she received affirmation and understood that it was okay. How many times have we looked for acknowledgement growing up? That it was okay to be who we were? That it was okay to be weird or slower at something or not good at something? That we didn’t have to be perfect and be number 1 at everything? All we needed was for someone to tell us: “It is okay”. And I want adults in school to be looking for opportunities to tell kids that “it is okay” rather than being encumbered by textbooks or grading. Coaches will be there to help students grow emotional intelligence, something that is never specifically handled in school and something that actually requires older people to help younger students develop. In addition, having coaches will help students better understand themselves, thus decreasing the number of incidents of self-harm and bullying. Most importantly, coaches will have the time to look out for the well-being of their students without having the burden of preparing all the content that they would traditionally have to teach. ## Conclusion The traditional teacher is an outdated feature of the education system. The teaching of content can be replaced with technology and student mentors. Instead of spending all the resources on having adult teachers and not having the resources for other roles, there would be immensely more value for students and the adults if traditional teachers have the opportunity to become coaches, where they can be impactful to the growth of the students they are in charge of. The impact of student mentors will be immense. Homo sapiens are successful because there are the radicalists that explore new ideas. Often, schools call these radicalists students with learning disability, problem children, or delinquents. We need a way to support these students just as much as other students. Personalized learning + digital portfolio + student mentorship will give us that. In the next section, we explore teaching methodologies. The curriculum is important, but possibly even more important is the learning methodology because that’s how the knowledge will be transferred. As we have outlined in this section, a large proponent of the learning will be self-learning and the school will have systems in place to allow for more flexible options for schooling. This set up opens many new opportunities that will be explored in the next section. # 9. Personalized Learning Tailoring Learning to Individuals, the Secondary Curriculum, and getting rid of the Classroom The most commonly talked about improvement to education today is personalized learning. And rightly so because of its importance. Today’s education structure is designed to find the best according to the given requirements rather than developing each student. You can imagine it as a diamond mine that is only focused on the sorting of raw diamonds based on the size rather than polishing each one to find out what each diamond is actually worth. The bottom line is, the current education system is more suitable for filtering and weeding out the unconventional and mavericks than it is at developing talent. The reason for this is because schools have always been designed to share knowledge via a teacher. Having teachers mean that there is a resource limit since there will always be a lack of good teachers. Thus, we have the classroom where we can pair one teacher with multiple students. And with the classroom, it unfortunately means students will have to take similar courses and be measured with similar criteria, regardless of their talents, strengths, and weaknesses. To allow for personalized learning and create a better education environment for each student, it will be critical to lean on technology. And it’s obvious that this is coming. Education is one of the hottest things in the market and economy right now and everyone is looking at ways to improve it, especially technology companies. To achieve personalized learning, there will need to be a significant amount of support from technology, especially machine learning and artificial intelligence. Personalized learning can be defined as a tailored curriculum for each individual student based on their strengths and weaknesses. The goal of it is to allow students the flexibility to pick and choose what they want to learn based on their interests, strengths, and weaknesses. Personalized learning should facilitate a students exploration and growth. In this chapter, I will focus mainly on the methodology rather than the philosophy behind what the content should be. The most important requirements for success for personalized learning is actually not technology but the following 3 things: 1. An App 2. Skill Trees 3. Gamification Let me explain. ## The App and the Secondary Curriculum The app is the interface to personalized learning. It allows students to find and discover the content that they want to learn. To start things off, I want to introduce the idea of the Secondary Curriculum. With the Core Philosophy and Core Curriculum in place, it’s time to talk about the rest of the curriculum, which we will refer to as Secondary Curriculum. Unlike the Core Curriculum where the content must be learned by every student, the most distinguishing feature of the Secondary Curriculum is that it will consist of courses that are optional for students to learn in the form of a skills tree. The Secondary Curriculum is where all the traditional courses (i.e. math, sciences, and history) will exist. With the myriad of options, the app handles provides a way in which content in the Secondary Curriculum can be found and accessed. Making it digital means that there can be multiple options of the same material that is tailored for different types of learners, greatly increasing the possibility that we can help our students fully understand the content rather pass over it without fully understanding. With a Core Curriculum mainly comprising of content from the 3 Connections and a Secondary Curriculum comprising of content that will include both soft skills and hard skills, there will be many options for what to learn. Because there is no formally structured curriculum for these skills in the Secondary Curriculum, the app will need a way to create progression by introducing content that can be learned without it being too easy or too difficult. That is where skill trees comes in. ## Skill Trees Skill trees can be thought of as a tree with branches. At each section of the tree, starting at the trunk, there are skills that can be learned. As you go higher up the tree, each branch will have it’s own skill and they are all linked together based on the branches they are connected to. The skills lower down are typically the prerequisites to the higher up skills. Skill trees are often found in role playing games where new skills can be accessed when leveling up and it’s up to the player to assign where their skill points go. The skill trees approach tailors the learning for each individual student by providing flexibility and a marked path that students can embark on. Using skill trees, the Secondary Curriculum can be personalized. Students get to pick and choose their paths. Skill trees work best when the content can be cleanly broken into bite-sized pieces. An example would be developing content that takes 1-2 weeks to learn and understand. If it takes more than that amount of time, it should be questioned as to whether or not it can be broken down further. It could be a set of vocabulary, a math concept, or a piece of history that is being explored. The interesting thing about a skill trees format is that the skill tree will be forever evolving. We’re still stuck in the lecture model where teachers share knowledge with students, often times based on text books that haven’t changed in decades. Why are we still using textbooks that don’t change when the world is changing ever faster? Last year’s content might not even be relevant this year anymore. With skill trees, new content can be added at any time and connected to the skill tree without affecting old content. New content can include additional content based on new knowledge and research or it can be a new way to approach learning content that is already in the curriculum. The biggest argument against this is that online courses are terrible replacements for the classroom. And I completely agree. Online courses like MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) have been deemed a failure because most people who start the courses can not finish them. But the reason why that is happening is not because there is anything inherently wrong with the product. It’s wrong because it assumes that people can learn when they are not in a learning environment. Why schools and colleges and universities work is because everyone around you is targeting the same thing. People rub off on each other. The environment incentivizes and pushes each other forward via competition and osmosis. Surrounding everyone with people who care about education helps drive each other. The next question is how do you balance what is learned? With this much flexibility, students can choose what they want to learn and forget about everything else. This is where gamification comes in. ## Gamification, Recommendation, and AI To help control and nudge students in the direction we want them to go, we will be using gamification. Gamification not only can be used as an incentive to study the content that we want them to study to balance out their knowledge, it is also used as an incentive to study at all! The reason why a lot of roleplaying games are so much fun is because as a player, you can see the progress your character is making, which gives the player a sense of accomplishment. This is what needs to happen with our education. With the app and skill trees, we have provided students with a way to track their progress. Now, we just need a recommendation engine that leverages gamification to guide students towards what they should be learning. Educational organization that already does this really well are the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts. Scouts programs have the badge system already, which gives the scouts a reward once they accomplish a mission. Scouts are highly motivated and focused when trying to achieve a badge. It sucks them in the same way that a computer game can. This is the type of attitude we want from from students towards their education and gamification is a powerful way to achieve it naturally. The recommendation engine will probably be the highest tech piece of this entire puzzle. Initially, it will be designed according to what we believe is best for students, but we must allow it to start tailoring the recommendation based on a student’s interest, strengths, and weaknesses with a focus on helping them develop the potential skills they would need in the future, especially those outside of their comfort zone. The recommendation will need a significant amount of consideration and will leverage the technology we have in machine learning to create an artificial intelligence that can adapt to each individual student. ## Getting Rid of the Classroom An interesting by product of the app for personalized learning is that there is no more need for the traditional classroom structure anymore because it replaces the strict structure of a curriculum that all students must follow together into something that each student can study on their own or in groups. Traditional school systems teaches skills in a classroom where everyone either has to keep up or lag behind. This doesn’t make sense when every student learns every single subject at a different pace. This is a large problem in how we teach our students because each student isn’t getting the right amount of time to fully understand the content and instead, is either rushed through it, not fully understanding what they learned, or they get bored because it’s too easy. This new found flexibility will finally allow students to study and develop at their own pace. The app will leverage the skill tree and each path will include different courses that the student can take that includes video lectures and project based group work. ## Conclusion and Outstanding Issues and Questions In conclusion, the Stanton Education Concept’s personalized learning is implemented based on an app that uses skill trees and gamification to replace the stiff structure of learning in classrooms, giving students a better opportunity to explore what they want to explore and also to have the time to thoroughly understand what they want to learn. In the next two chapters, we tackle the questions that is created from this personalized learning system: * how do we track the growth of the students if they get to choose what they want to study? * who will teach the content in the app? * how will teachers organize the students without classrooms? # 10. Methodologies for Curriculum Design The goal of a good education is to prepare a student for their life. A traditional education focuses on the knowledge that students should learn during their years in school in preparation for the student’s life after schooling. The curriculum for this kind of education focuses on content, textbooks, and memorization. This made sense in an age without computers and connectivity, but with the internet and smart phones and powerful search engines, we need to reconsider what schools need to be teaching. Simply, the role of the human has changed. The skills we used to learn made us into computers and automatons. In today’s world, society does not need human computers nor human automatons. The world needs human connectors. People that can connect ideas to create new ones. People that can connect two conflicting groups of people and help them come to an understanding. People that can connect other people together to do something bigger than either could have by themselves. This is especially true in a world where most people are glued to their screens and are born with technology encompassing their entire world. Kids don’t spend time playing with other kids anymore. They spend time playing with a smart phone, with tablets, with computers. Gradually, as technology continues to take over, there will no need for anyone to speak to another human for basic human needs. That means nobody is being forced to interact with other humans for the practice of human engagement. That’s why schools need to be be providing the opportunities and environments needed to develop effective human connectors that can make things happen in the real world. Essentially, the skills we need to learn now are how to become more human. In the following chapters, I want to share three curriculum methodologies that I really like and believe should be more strongly integrated into schools around the world. # 11. Real World Learning Connecting Academia and the Real World Schools should be designed to prepare students for the real world. And what better way to do that than to connect the real world to the classroom? In traditional education, students spend the majority of their time in an academic bubble starting from the time they were born till college graduation. Schools focus on knowledge and skill training based on textbooks that easily get outdated and every single student repeats the same tasks with nothing real to show for all the hard work other than a grade. There is a bubble in academia, and the bubble is very extreme for much of K-12 education, to the extent that much of the real world doesn’t apply to the school world. Students are not taught about how to survive in society. Students are not taught the concepts of creating value for a community, society, or the environment. Students are not put into the crucible that tests their resilience when faced with rejection and failure when they try to pursue something. If schools are a bubble, how are we preparing students for the real world? Let me rephrase that question. Aren’t schools supposed to prepare students for the real world? ## The Importance of Real World Learning Real world learning cannot be understated because even during school, students spend more than half of their waking time outside of school in the real world. Learning content that exists exclusively inside the academic bubble means that the knowledge learned cannot be transitioned over to the real world in a smooth manner. How much of everything you learned in school do you still remember? Elementary, middle, high school, college, that was 16 years of schooling at 200+ days a year, 8 hours a day. That is at least 25,600 hours that we spent in school. Aside from languages and basic arithmetic, how much can we say we actually retained through all that schooling? One of the reasons that it is so hard to retain the knowledge is because there is no reinforcement of the knowledge. Once the book knowledge has been studied and the test has been taken, we are done with the content and move on to the next thing. As a decent student, I was extremely good at storing the content studied into my short term memory for the sake of tests and immediately forgetting the majority of it after because there was nothing applicable about it. And applicability is actually possible and very easy to do by centering the content around an actual real world experience. For example, learning about biology could be tied to farming. While students are growing a plant, the curriculum can be designed to prompt them to ask related questions. Why does the seed sprout? What is making the roots spread? Where is it getting its energy from? What is photosynthesis? Is there a way to grow plants without photosynthesis? The questions are infinite and getting the students to be able to ask these questions out of their own curiosity of the world around them is a critical part of learning and absolutely one of the keys to their future success. Real world learning is very broad and encompasses almost the entirety of the curriculum. The Core Philosophy and Core Curriculums should be tailored to really focus on its application in the real world. All of the hard skills in the Auxiliary Curriculum should be structured in a way that is easy to relate to the real world rather than focus on just the knowledge itself. ## Integrating Real World Learning and School Management Speaking of real world experiences, the environment for learning about it is right there in the school. Running a school requires a lot of manpower and organization. Administration, technology, security, cleaning, food, grounds keeping, budget, etc., and these are just the basics. Depending on the school, there might be additional roles and departments to manage the school. What better way to do that than to create roles as part of school management that allow students to experience this? Would it be possible to integrate school management into the curriculum and allow students to participate and be responsible for parts of it? My favorite example for this is Japan. Japanese schools require students to take part in janitorial work, including cleaning of the classrooms, hallway, and bathrooms. Lunch is often served by the students. This gives students an opportunity to take responsibility in something that is bigger than them and be able to directly see the results of their efforts. Imagine a school that is managed by students and supervised by adults for the following: * technology * school security * kitchen * janitorial / cleaning * school government There are probably a lot more administrative tasks that can also be given to students that will allow them to learn more about how the real world works and experience the responsibility of their actions having an impact on something other than their own test scores. ## Bringing College into K-12 In traditional education, the little bit of the real world that connects to academia comes in the form of volunteer work and internships where students learn how to work and create value in the real world. But why do we not do this starting at a younger age? Currently, K-12 education is focused on one thing. Getting you into the best next school. If you are a student in elementary school, you’re getting taught the content that will help you advance to the best middle school you can get into. When you are a student in middle school, you’re getting taught the content that will help you advance to the best high school. And if you are a student in high school, the worst one, you’re getting taught the content that will help you advance to the best college available. Repetitive, isn’t it? Why do we do this? Why are K-12 schools designed to be this way? It is because we have a fascination towards college. Society believes that college is a requirement to success in the real world. And to a certain extent, this is true. That is because college is the first time where you have a bit more option to choose what you want because a college’s incentive is not sending you to the best next school. Their job is to give you the best environment to explore and find out what you want to do. To be honest, I can only really speak for liberal arts schools. Traditional colleges or universities might have more limitations in place because students are often assigned to a specific faculty and have limited time to explore other areas of learning. But nevertheless, colleges and universities are there to prepare you for the real world. So why do we not bring the college and university style of learning to K-12 schooling? Why not bring more flexibility and responsibility into a student’s learning? Why not connect academia to the real world at a younger age? Let’s do a thought experiment. Imagine that colleges and universities do not exist. What would we need to change with traditional K-12 education to give students a higher chance of success in the real world assuming that there is no college to go to afterwards? ## No College Design Currently, across the entire world, colleges have become ubiquitous and high schools are now designed for one purpose: college preparation. A “No College Design” concept is one where colleges do not exist in their current capacity. That means that high schools would be designed to replace the skills and knowledge that colleges try to impart onto their students. If colleges and other types of higher education did not exist, a massive change that will happen is high schools would not be about college preparation. It would be about life preparation, developed through early independence and working on real world problems. From a skills and knowledge perspective, high schools would become more flexible with more options for available courses and types of learning. There would be more room for exploring and discovery, ranging from classes, internships, mentorships, etc. There will be a stronger curriculum offered on important every day skills, particularly in the way of analysis, with a sprinkle of grander ways of philosophical thinking. Data analysis, statistical analysis, risk analysis, etc., are all much more useful today for the general person than trigonometry and calculus. Technological literacy will also become a component of the curriculum with the goal of helping students better understand all the tools that are available around them. There would be a significant amount of independence. There should be opportunities to live away from home, either through exchange programs or some form of camp where students can explore environments and communities that are vastly different from their own. There should be opportunities to learn how to take care of themselves, without the aid of parents who are doting after them. School should simulate the real world, which includes shopping for groceries, cooking, laundry, cleaning, and the skills need to live in society. And more importantly, there should be a myriad of opportunities where students get to make their own decisions and experience the consequences of the decisions they make, just like how it would be in the real world. To further connect students with the real world, internships and research projects that pertain to the real world will be made available. Internship and research projects give students the opportunity to utilize their skills and knowledge towards something that can have a real effect on the real world. Internships in companies within the community and research projects into different aspects of the community will strengthen and reinforce students’ understanding of how everything works and how everything is connected. The last, and possibly most important part, is the concept of money. To really submerse students in the real world, money must be introduced because money is the glue that holds much of society together, for better or worse. How to make money, how to spend money, how to invest money, how to donate money, how to gamble money, and just anything pertaining to money and its uses should be thoroughly explored. And real money should be used for this learning. Students should have access to monthly funds that each student gets and they are allowed to spend it in whichever way they want. Students should have the opportunity to donate to a club, invest in a business opportunity, buy the materials necessary for an art project, gamble on a risky proposition, or just save it for the future. Having a strong command over the use of money and general finance will make the transition from academia to the real world much smoother. ## Conclusion Very simply, much of why education is not effective is because it is not reinforced in the real world. We should connect academia with the real world to increase the amount of reinforcement of knowledge and also use that consideration to teach the knowledge that is most relevant for students to learn. # 12. Experiential Learning Curriculums that are not focused around the Textbook Similarly to connecting learning to the real world, one of the best ways to learn is to experience whatever you’re studying instead of only reading about it in a textbook or taking a test with multiple-choice questions. The real world cannot be explained by a textbook, and very situations in real life is black and white like multiple-choice answers. That’s why the most interesting lessons in science class involves actually playing with fire, building circuits, or developing ways to toss an egg off of a building without it breaking. An experiential learning focus incentivizes curriculum design that involves the following: * hands-on learning * project-based learning * exploration-based learning * failure-based learning ## Hands-on Learning Experiential learning focuses on experiences. What better way to experience something than to work with it with your hands? An example of hands on learning can be learning about food through cooking and farming. It’s one thing to see the pictures of the plants and read the descriptions through a textbook. It’s another to experience growing a vegetable from a seed, harvesting it, cutting it up to be cooked, cooking it, and eating it. Knowledge that can be learned can be so varied, including: * experimenting with how much water the vegetable needs, * optimal amounts of sunlight, learning about photosynthesis, * how the vegetable collects nutrients, * once harvested, how quickly does the vegetable lose it’s nutrients, * can freezing the vegetable help it stop losing nutrients, * how does the vegetable taste freshly picked vs. a week after being picked, * how long should you cook it, * what seasoning brings out the natural taste of the vegetable the best? To close the loop, you end the hands-on experience by collecting the seed to grow another one of the same vegetable. Other hands-on learning experiences can include cooking, wood-working, playing an instrument, film-making, robotics, acting, etc. Using these experiences as a vehicle for learning knowledge is much more engaging than a textbook. If the knowledge that was learned through a hands on experience, it is much more likely that students will have a stronger impression of it. It is also much more likely to be an efficient use of time because the knowledge will actually be part of their long term memory rather than short term memory. ## Project Based Learning Following hands-on learning, we have project-based learning. Project based learning is learning via doing projects rather than through classes involving lectures and pre-determined content. It uses the idea that students will learn better completing projects rather than completing rote tasks. Project based learning is nothing new and has been talked about a lot already. But I want to take this to the extreme. Project based learning should be completely flexible and only defined by a simple structure requiring that the project is defined properly. It should either be structured as a S.M.A.R.T. goal where there is a definitive end goal and time cap or it should be structured as a research project with hypothesis with the goal of coming to a conclusion. An example of a project-based learning curriculum is the food project described above in hands-on learning. Another example might be testing a new model of statistics for a certain sport and seeing if it generates any kind of correlation that did not exist previously. A further example might be participating in competitions and contests. A treasure trove of projects can be found in the research community. Most research projects are only performed by the authors of a paper. It would be amazing if there were others that can attempt to recreate the experiment to see if the conclusions of the initial experiment still holds in a different environment or population. If current K-12 schools can be in a position to re-run experiments in academic papers, the value-add to the academic and scientific academy would be tremendous. In general, the biggest benefits to a completely flexible project based learning methodology is that it encourages exploration and discovery rather than following a strict outline dictated by someone else. The learning is done in contained batches and allows students to really develop and choose the direction of their own education. To take project based learning one step further, it is absolutely critical that students are encouraged to work towards team project based learning. Team project based learning mimics better how work will be done in the real world, where most things are done in teams rather than by individuals. With team project based learning, it better integrates a lot of the soft skills required in the Core Philosophy. Most importantly, communication between team members become central to the project. ## Exploration-based learning Another essential part to learning is the exposure to new ideas and concepts. Schools should be offering ample opportunities to explore and experience new things and for students to explore out of their normal comfort zone. This can be achieved by workshops, field trips, speakers, events, etc. Exploration-based learning should be heavily integrated into the curriculum to develop exposure to all the knowledge and possibilities in the world. Traditional education has a lot of required courses, limiting the amount of benefit of exposure to new concepts and ideas. With hands-on and project-based learning as the core curriculum methodologies, it opens up the door for real exploration learning. For example, becoming a marine biologist that studies mussels. What is that like? Is there a career in astronomy? What are the specific disciplines?Becoming a YouTube Creator? What do I need to worry about to make it sustainable? Traveling the world? What are the benefits of residing within another culture for 2 weeks. What makes bread rise? What are the different types of bread around the world? What does it take to become a member of the circus? Will I be able to train my body to be flexible or strong enough for that? One important factor to exploration is in developing open-mindedness. The more different ideas and perspectives a student is exposed to, the more they can understand the nuances of the world and be willing to accept different concepts. Workshops and speakers can be arranged to be peppered through the week and students can choose whether or not they want to sign up and participate. A request system can be put in place to track interest, so if there is enough interest for a specific topic or specific person, there can be a group of students that make it their project to organize the session. This also opens up opportunities to interact more with the nearby community. It’s important for students to learn about what’s happening around them, so being exposed to what’s currently happening in government, the business models of the local businesses on Main Street, nature conservation efforts by volunteers, or even just some photography from a local trail. There are so many things to explore. Exploring the different hard sciences, exploring different cultures, exploring different foods, even exploring different histories where the same event is told in different ways depending on their culture and biases. Essentially, we want students to be able to explore anything and everything. ## Failure-based Learning Lastly, we have failure-based learning. An experience that is largely missing in traditional education is failure. Failure is a large part of life and fear of failure and rejection can really limit the possibilities of an individual’s path because they are too afraid to leave their comfort zone. Therefore, learning should include experiences focused around failure, which is another way of increasing academia’s connection with the real world. Failure helps students develop resilience and grit by showing how tough the real world is. Failure, in general, gives many opportunities to teach fundamental lessons that otherwise would not be available. How to deal with failure, how to deal with rejection, what to do if you fail, is it okay to fail, how to learn from failure, how to rebound from failure, and maybe most importantly, answering the questions of what is failure and is it bad to fail? In today’s schools, we try to protect students from experiencing failure because of an institutional problem. Schools need to perform by making sure students have good grades for the sake of either college or some form of national government assessment. Because of this incentive, schools don’t have the opportunity to allow students to experience failure because there is no time for them to learn from it. Once they fail, there’s no time for reflection. There’s no time to re-solve the problem and actually learn from the failure. There are no opportunities to fail because failure is not easily gradable and cannot contribute to a student’s metrics in the current system. With a more flexible curriculum, failure can be designed into the curriculum. It gives us opportunities to allow students to fail a test and spend an extra week learning the content that they failed to understand in order to take a re-test. It allows for situations where failure an expected part of the project and instead of it being a bad thing, the project instead incentivizes failure to allow students to experience it and the appropriate repercussions that go along with it. An example of this might be designing a chair and trying to sell it at a reasonable price. This will require the student to create prototypes and be rejected on issues surrounding aesthetics and comfort. This creates an opportunity for the student to receive feedback and make adjustments, iterating through a few designs before coming to something that is actually desirable by a client. Learning about sales is a great way to learn about failure because there is a high failure rate and it teaches students how to think about convincing others to listen to your idea. Another example might be developing a business plan and looking for actual funding. Fundraising is a great learning experience in rejection and iteration. Another part of failure-based learning are disasters that are outside of your control. Dealing with these disasters can help develop resilience and grit and help students get acclimated to these situations so they can remain calm and logical in the face of a calamity. Thus, I introduce the concept of calamity weeks. Calamity weeks are planned, week-long calamities that happen to individual students. These can be losing access to food on campus, losing access to the internet, or losing the progress made last week on your work. Calamities will be created by a special task force on campus, possibly by students. Students that are chosen to receive a calamity will be randomly selected. Of course, all calamities need to be designed in a way that is not dangerous in any way to the students. It is designed to be a setback or a state of discomfort. The goal is provide an opportunity for students to experience a negative event that is out of their control, which is actually a common occurrence in the real world. Calamity weeks have the potential of helping students experience and better understand optimism bias, a cognitive bias where one believes they are unlikely to experience a negative event. Most people who develop business or life plans forgo considerations for negative events, which is a recipe for disaster when negative events actually do happen because a contingency was never developed. Because you also see the calamities happening to other students around you, part of the hope is that students will be incentivized to help each other and build alliances and safety nets to help and protect each other when a calamity strikes. Failure-based learning is a way to reveal the harsher side of reality and the real world to students in a controlled fashion. Whether it is integrating failure into the curriculum or calamity weeks, these experiences will be incredibly valuable and memorable. It is always easier to remember the times that we have been under pressure. ## Potential Negatives of Experiential Learning With experiential learning, one of the biggest questions might be how it can help develop longer term skills. Real skill proficiency requires time to be spent on it. Traditional education curriculums and courses require students to sit through a term of that content to be able to master it. But with experiential learning where projects seem to jump all over the place and an indefinite schedule, isn’t it likely for students to not spend enough time actually acquiring knowledge? I would argue that most of the knowledge that students learn is not actually absorbed because it was spoon-fed to them. There was no incentive to keep that in long term memory either because it was not fascinating for the student or because the test was next week and after next week, this topic and knowledge will not be touched upon again until maybe 2 years from now. Are students actually effectively learning or are they only going through the motions of learning? Is learning effective without proper reinforcement? That is why project-based learning, especially with projects being selected by the students, provide a stronger environment for effective learning. Not only is the choice given to them, completing the project becomes part of their responsibility. If they feel passionate towards the topic, they will work harder and dig deeper into the subject. If not, they might develop a passion for it because they learn enough about it to be proficient and interested in the topic matter, a gateway drug to passion. Another question is how do you measure progress in experiential learning. One very clear thing is that experiential learning is not based on textbooks and multiple choice questions. This makes it harder to grade in the traditional sense. Instead, I would argue that we should be moving towards better measuring sticks by using a digital portfolio to track progress and feedback and a skills tree to track knowledge acquisition. A digital portfolio is more reflective of the real world, where we typically are using resumes instead of a grade to represent individuals. Honestly, even resumes are not enough because they are not able to showcase an individual properly to potential employers. At the end of the day, I want to move the target of education away from getting students into college. Instead, I want to target of education to be the individual development of the students. # 13. Systematic Continuous Curriculum Development One thing that I’ve always wondered is why do curriculums largely stay the same year after year? I remember textbooks that get passed on year after year, content that is decades old and largely irrelevant, but still taught due to tradition or lack of new content. Why is it that traditional school curriculums tend to stay the same and be so adverse to change? With the change around the world accelerating, curriculums should constantly be updating to stay relevant. In the last two chapters, we explored real world and experiential learning, which ties deeply to what is happening in the real world and removes the barriers that separate the academia bubble with the rest of the world. With real world and experiential learning, there will be a large amount of curriculum development that needs to be done. Not only does most of this curriculum not exist in a digestible or trackable format yet, the curriculum will need to evolve as things change. It will also need to get localized, whether it be language or context. Additionally, as more information becomes available, parts of the curriculum content will potentially need to be updated to reflect the latest discoveries and current affairs. Much like Wikipedia, the curriculum content should be kept up to date. There are currently schools that already have a flexible curriculum. Democratic Schools, or Sudbury Schools, are schools where the entire curriculum is defined by the students and teachers there. The curriculum is altered depending on the needs and wants of each student and students are allowed to play and explore during the majority of their time in school. This is essentially how we want to approach curriculum and course development, but with a more systematic and rule-based structure so that the effort spent on developing a module or piece of the curriculum does not get lost after the project is done. There will also need to be significantly more work done to make the piece of curriculum courses available to be used in the digital portfolio. To do this, course development needs to be treated like individual projects and uses the following steps: 1. The project starts off with a target or goal that the piece of curriculum wants to achieve for a student. 2. After that, students will take the course and give feedback on it with suggestions on how they might change parts of it. 3. The course is iterated upon and updated. For software developers, this reads like open source software, which is absolutely correct. It is open source curriculum and course development. Systems are put in place to track the feedback and recommendations. The feedback and recommendations is then, in turn, used to design for the changes and updates to the course. Courses will use version control to track changes so anybody can always review the historical changes. It also keeps the ability for students to take older versions of the course if the new one has changes that they don’t agree with. This also means that courses can be duplicated to design a similar course with a different methodology for learning the content, allowing for A/B testing of the courses and for certain versions better suited for different types of learners. To maintain a high quality of content and courses, a recommendation system is used to collect votes and reviews by students who have taken the course. Initially, there would be a central planning community that would seed the courses, but the goal is to make it so that courses start getting developed by the school community and the best versions get voted to the top. The best part about all this is that anybody can participate in the development of these courses. Teachers, students, professionals, or anybody that is part of the community can contribute, whether it be adding content, voting, or giving feedback. Here’s an example of how this might work. Let’s say a group comprised of teachers and students want to create a course to promote environmental sustainability. They brainstorm on different ideas that can be hands-on and project-based. They decide on making homemade soap by recycling oils. The initial course becomes a basic text-based tutorial on making soap. Someone then connects a section on why waste cooking oils can be dangerous to wildlife if not dealt with properly. Someone else connects a section on the chemistry of how cooking oil and lye, or sodium hydroxide, reacts to create soap. A group of students take the course and decide to film all the steps and adds the video to the tutorial so that videos are now available. Someone notices that the concept of soap is never official described, so they add a section that describes what soap and saponification is. Someone in the group decides to add a small quiz that includes questions on everything that was brought up before. Someone else decides to create a questionnaire that asks students to help brainstorm other ideas on improving environmental sustainability As bits and pieces get added to it, the course gets bigger and more complex. Students who take the course write reviews about what they liked about the course and what they learned. Likewise, students are expect to write what they didn’t like about the course and give constructive feedback and criticism so that others can review the course to see how it can be improved. And at some point, the course might get too big and complicated, so someone might decide to split it into multiple smaller courses that are connected instead. A curriculum with an ever evolving and growing number of courses and content created by the community is a way to better connect academia and the real world. It is very possible that there will be too many courses and the system becomes overrun with content. That is why it is important to have a system in place that allows for continuous development while maintaining quality through active participants in the school community to explore and recommend the best from the pile. ## A Self-Evolving, Real World, Experiential Learning With the last few chapters, we have explored the importance of real world connections to academia as well as the importance of focusing on experiential learning. We end this section with this chapter where we explore a systematic way in which the curriculum can be continuously developed. In summary, this is the basic premise behind a self-evolving, real world, experiential learning, where students are experiencing real world content that is able to keep up with the present that continuous to accelerate towards the future. # 14. More than just a School So far, we have explored a new type of core curriculum, the possibilities in education that today’s technology allows if leveraged properly, and new methods in developing curriculums that better prepare students for the 21st century. In this last section, I want to expand into concepts that do not directly relate to the curriculum. In this section, I want to explore the concepts of community, space, and access. This last section might be the most important section in the whole book because education is more than just a school. A student’s education is happening the whole time, whether they are home, traveling between their home and school, or just when they are out and about. Every second of every day is exposure for learning. And school is only a part of an entire day. Normal school hours are from 9am to 3pm. Including after school activities, it might open till 6pm. That’s 9 hours out of 24 hours, or 37.5% of the entire day. What about the rest of the day? There are plenty of studies that show how important the home environment and the community environment is to a child’s education. Starting from the time they are born, the amount of words that they hear, the stress levels that they have due to family or neighborhood circumstances, the love they experience from their parents, etc., all affect their development. Not only that, kids are very good and mimicking the actions of the people around them, so they will absorb these actions until they become habit. A community where everyone enjoys interacting in the park and being outdoors versus a community where everyone tends to be siloed at home playing on their computers and phones will provide a dramatically different educational environment. To help students become successful, we must remember that education does not only happen in school. Education is happening at all times and it will be happening everywhere. A family that cannot provide a strong environment at home for the student can and will negatively impact a student. If the space at home is always loud or distracting with everyone on their phones, playing games, or watching tv all day, that will negatively impact a student. The street that the family lives on can negatively impact a student if there is violence and crime. That’s why the school needs to build up the community around it as well to give students the best education possible. This is even more applicable the younger the student is. The education of a child snowballs and everything that is taught at a young age will impact the ability of a child as they grow up. Of course, we should not go overboard on memorization and cramming of knowledge. At the end of the day, schools need to look out for the well-being of the students and this includes the basics such as their health, food, and sleep. Therefore, in this section, we explore how schools can provide an environment that is more than just a school in the traditional sense and how that can help create an environment for learning that can be significantly more holistic and effective. # 15. Center of a Community Every community should have a school. Traditionally, schools have been a critical part of every community because it’s a place for kids to learn, focusing on K-12 education. But is that the best we can do? Is it possible to have the physical schools function as more than just a education center for K-12 students? Is it possible to make physical schools an education center for everyone, regardless of age? In this chapter, I want to explore a few ideas that might be slightly unconventional to traditional schools, but might create a significant amount of value to communities. I want to explore re-imagining schools as a place not just for students of younger ages, but for all students, young and old. I want to explore ideas of how schools could develop a stronger community and make it safer as well. Therefore, this chapter explores 3 ideas: 1. Schools should also be a place of education for adults. 2. Schools can make a community stronger. 3. Schools can make a community safer. ## 1. Schools should also be a place of education for adults After high school, the only place you would see a large amount of adults gathering to study are either in colleges or universities. Maybe a couple libraries, but they are probably studying at a college or university and just looking for a change of environment. Why do we not see more education targeted towards adults? There are gradually more self development courses in the market, quick workshops where everyone sits in an audience and listens to a lecturer. There are online classes where everyone sits alone at home or wherever, staring and interacting with their computer. But what about education for adults where they come together and just share and interact with each other? The problem is actually quite simple. There is no place for it. I used to run events and I stopped them after running them for a year. One of the main reasons was because it was hard to find a consistent location that was not expensive. Because of the costs, events either require sponsors or they include a business aspect to it, typically in the form of tickets. In general, this creates an overhead to gatherings because the organizer, who just wants to share ideas and concepts, is met with the challenge of balancing out costs. Is there any type of space that can be used to teach and share without having to think about costs? I would argue that schools are a perfect space. Physical schools are currently not being fully utilized. School days typically start around 8-9am and end around 5-6pm. That is approximately 9 hours. What about the rest of the hours? Sure, there might be special events once in awhile, like a sports game or a play, but most classrooms are probably off limits by then. There are maintenance and electricity costs to deal with, especially in the winter, and that would take some administrative effort to straighten out. The fees could be generally collected through sponsorship, donations, or it leverages an app that calculates and splits the costs to the participants, which will generally be significantly lower than renting a space elsewhere. Schools are a staple in every community. It’s a critical building in every modern society that we know of today and it’s typically a larger area with lots of different types of spaces available. It’s also typically central to the community in terms of travel distance and convenience. Schools are the obvious choice for gathering and for learning for all ages. Not only will it be a great place for people in the community to come together to share ideas and skills, it is also an amazing place to develop the different attributes of the Core Philosophy for everybody. One category of education for adults that might be very important is parenthood education. Most families are having kids for the first time and most parenthood knowledge is passed down instead of systematically studied. To provide the best environment for children, we need to have adults who are knowledgable about how children learn and continue to learn themselves so they can be the best role models they can be. ## 2. Schools can make a community stronger. In big cities, we suffer from loneliness because often times, we cannot build a connection with anybody. We don’t recognize the people we walk past on the streets everyday, we don’t hang out with the people we work with, and we don’t really know the people who open stores around our block. Heck, we barely know the neighbor who lives directly across the hall, 2 meters away. What most of us realize once we go into the real world is that real friends are hard to make. The reason is because we don’t spend enough time with these new friends. Our friends from school and college were all people we met every day for over 1000 days of our lives. That’s a lot of time that we spend together! And most importantly, it is consistent. Imagine trying to do that once we are in the real world. Where do we go everyday? What do we do? Why isn’t there a space where people can just congregate? There actually is one. Church. Why are church communities so strong? It’s because there is a consistent group of people that show up and if you see each other consistently, you build trust. I believe that is why my grandparents are stuck devout Christians. Not only did they grow up in a christian community, the community that they are a part of is everything to them. If they ever find themselves disagreeing with christian teachings or christian values that the larger christian community believes in, they could be potentially ostracized from the most important people they know outside of their family. The weekly consistency of meeting up is what makes church and religion so powerful. It is a means of connecting with others and developing a real sense of community. In a world where religion is not the uniting force it once was and with atheism on the rise, the school can become the new community glue. No one will argue against education or assert that education is bad. Idealogically, it is the perfect space for allowing people in the community to consistently congregate. Imagine a school that serves as a place of gathering for the community. It’s the local college, the YMCA, the park, the church, all put in one! During the day, the space is mostly allocated for the children enrolled in the school, but during after school hours, the space can be re-purposed for other community focused events to bring people together. There can be community classes that includes volunteer teachers from the community. There can be community games where you get to play with others. As more trust is built, the community becomes stronger because now, the people in your community are real people. They are no longer just a name or a statistic. They are actual faces, people that you have personally met. Real connections create a safety net where the community is more willing to help each other out in cases of emergencies and to support each other in the good and the bad times. It’s an extended family. It’s a stronger community. ## 3. Schools can make a community safer. Not only can schools help develop a stronger community, it can make it safer too. When building a stronger community, community members are required to build connections and relationships with others in the community. The more you get to know the people around you, the safer the community gets in general. This is because these connections in the community builds trust and most importantly, facial recognition. A safe community is one where people largely recognize who is part of the community. Smaller towns with community organizations have both a strong and a safe community because the members of the community recognize each other and each other’s children. They speak up and protect each other when something bad happens. They recognize when there is an outsider causing trouble. They know that it’s okay to stick their nose into the situations because they know it is their business, removing the chances of the bystander effect, where people watch a situation unfold from afar without helping because they are afraid of being pulled into a mess, or even worst, a scam, and creating extra problems and headaches in the future. Speaking of safety, there can be concerns on the safety of the school once adults are allowed in. One concern would be security. What if random people come in? What if they are dangerous? Although there is a lot of value with allowing adults into schools, it is safe to say that a very strong security program will need to be in place 24/7. Simple procedures like registering to be part of a member of the school community is a basic requirement. Anyone entering the campus will need to swipe in via a facial recognition system. Cameras will be everywhere around school to record everything that happens. Many western countries will then have an issue with privacy. In this case, schools are a place where security and safety can be prioritized over privacy. Therefore, there should be very obvious rules about what can and cannot be done within the bounds of the school. In the end, learning never stops, regardless of whether you are young or old. Schools provides a space that helps build relationships and connections with others so that members of the community trusts each other, creating a safer environment for all. The resulting stronger and safer community creates a better environment for children’s education, where they can be more independent within the community, and with better role models. # 16. A New Space How the School Space should be designed One thing we haven’t talked about is how the school space is designed. The way the space is designed can have a huge impact on learning. Here is a quick chapter on a few architecture and design ideas for the new school. With a lot of changes to how education should be done, a re-imagining of what a school space should look like should be included. ## Collaborative and Flexible With less of a focus on traditional classes, we want to open up the space so that it is more collaborative and engaging. This can be done with the removal of generic classrooms and instead, use more open spaces with boxed off areas for meetings and quiet spaces, similar in design to a lot of co-working spaces today. This means a lot more collaborative spaces for project based work. The open space design will also allow for more flexibility. The idea that the school can be used for more than just education for students, but also a place of gathering, means that the more options for how a space can be used, the more value it has. Flexibility will be key, including certain spaces that have movable tables and chairs. ## Activity One of the inspirations for re-evaluating education was the TED talk on a kindergarten designed by Takaharu Tezuka (\[]). The school was essentially a two-story donut shaped building where the entire second floor was a track for kids to run around and be kids. A space designed for activity and exploration is important, including areas for climbing and moving. Not only does it help children get a better understanding of their physical body, it allows them to exercise naturally in the name of fun. The other consideration is the opposite of activity. There should be just as much space designed for inactivity, for example, quiet spaces for independent thinking or meditation. Traditional schools have never given much thought to quiet rooms or the concept of meditation, where we train our self-discipline and focus. ## Experiential Spaces In the third section of the book, we explored some methodologies for curriculum design, focusing on real world learning and experiential learning. The school should include spaces where real trade workshops are established. For example, workshops or hacker spaces, preferably ones that have a professional who actually operates a business out of the space. Some of these hands on working places might be: * shoe makers, tailors, etc. * metal workers * electronic fixing up labs where we allow people to bring things in to fix * hardware store + hardware tools * farm Having these at arms length for the students allows them to learn from actually doing rather than only seeing these in textbooks or videos. The curiosity that it can develop in children becomes a very powerful driver for learning in the future. ## Immersive Language Zones One of the core criteria of the Stanton School Concept is communication, and preferably, the learning of multiple languages. Each school must teach at least two or more languages. But as we all know, languages do not stick unless used often and repetitively. Therefore, we have the Languages Zones, where in a specific language zone, you are only allowed to use that language. All workshops, all projects, and all activity that happens in that language zone will prioritize the using of that language. For example, if a school had English and Chinese, then the school would be separated into two halves with a thick line separating the two. All the posters, signage, text on the English side will be in English and Chinese on the Chinese side. The goal is to create a total immersive environment so that once you’re in that space, it’s almost as if you’ve traveled to another country.This kind of immersion will need to be gamified to incentivize students to spend time in both zones, but the immersion should help them learn faster. ## A healthy and sustainable space Lastly, I just want to mention that there needs to be a priority on health and sustainability. For health, a place of learning that includes sunlight, good air, plants, and good food. The space should help students develop concepts around protecting and taking care of their body. A sustainable space, where there is renewable energy, considerations for how to limit wasted resources, and general consideration for the environment, will help students develop a better understanding of the third connection, Connecting with the Community, Society, and the Environment. Being exposed to sustainability concepts at a young age will make students much stronger advocates and creators of sustainable practices. \[1]: # 17. Learning is for Everyone We have finally arrived to the last chapter. To me, this chapter is very important because it lists some of the challenges I wanted to tackle when conceptualizing the Stanton Education concept. Having lived in both areas surrounded by wealth and areas surrounded in poverty, I want education to be the equalizing force and be there to provide the opportunity for anybody to climb upwards. The challenge is to design a school that is for everyone, one that is not a school only for elites, but a school for everyone that can provide an education that is better than that of elite schools of today. ## Minimizing Costs A school needs to be self sufficient. The reason why most elite schools are so expensive is because they have some of the best resources. The best teachers, best administrators, and some strong endowments thanks to some of the best alumni. But what if we want to create elite level schools for everybody? We need to severely minimize costs. This was impetus for the ideas in the second section of the book where we explored what 21st Century Education looks like. I wanted to explore ideas where great schools were not reliant on great teachers because great teachers don’t go to rural places in the middle of nowhere. I wanted a system that would grant children the opportunity to learn the best content at the lowest cost possible, and is there a more cost effective way than digital content? I believe its effectiveness has been called into question only because it still has not found the perfect packaging yet. A really powerful podcast with Scott Gallaway, on the James Altucher Show, described my thoughts perfectly: "College is now a luxury service Value is starched out. Academics have become drunk on exclusivity. Rather than viewing ourselves as academics, we now view our selves as luxury brands. Colleges brag that they turned away 90+% of students. We are public servants, not fucking Hermes. **We should be in the business of making unremarkable kids remarkable. Instead, we are in the business of making remarkable kids billionaires.**” * Scott Gallaway (on the James Altucher Show #474) I want to be in the business of making everyone remarkable. ## Diversity Exposure To educate a quality human being, you need to instill in them a sense of empathy, specifically, the ability to put themselves in someone else’s shoes. That is why diversity exposure is so important. Diversity exposure is where we purposefully bring in people of different economic, racial, and cultural backgrounds to create opportunities to become familiar with each other. There are two large benefits to this. The first one is that it allows children to learn that it is okay to be different and it normalizes that difference. Once it’s been normalized and humanized due to exposure, it is less likely for different types of -isms to happen. Additionally, it opens up the opportunity to create scholarships for underprivileged children to attend the same school. If I started a school, I would be targeting a ratio of 75/25 for privileged vs. underprivileged students. In other words, an approximate 25% scholarship rate. The goal of diversity exposure is to remove as many of the current traditional limitations as possible. The school should allow for education for all ages, including adults, especially ones that might not have had the opportunity to complete general education. The school should remove grade limitations and allow students of different ages to co-mingle, making it normal for students to hang out with other students that are not of the same grade or age. And most importantly, we want to make sure there are students with all kind of backgrounds so that we can normalize it and create opportunities for more empathy in the world. ## A Connected Network Expanding on diversity, there are limits to racial and cultural diversity in a region, so what if we were able to build a connected network of schools that use the Stanton Education Concept and allow for easy transfers? Schools that use the Stanton Education Concept in full already are flexible and don’t follow a strict curriculum, meaning that a student should be able to enter or leave an existing school without too much difficulty of picking up where they left off. Let’s start with the possibilities. One thing easy transfers could do is to empower rural development. There can be boarding schools in rural areas where the learning is focused in one scholastic area or topic. For example, skills based learning and experienced based learning where you actually do the work (farming, rehabilitation, environment protection, ocean protection, etc.). Rural area schools also allow for disconnecting from the speed of the world, allowing students to slow down and find opportunities to be more present. ## Full Year Schooling An additional benefit of the lack of a scheduled curriculum is that schools can be designed to be active all year round and holidays become flexible. I think having tourism focused around the summer and winter holidays creates an unnecessary stress for tourism and the environment and ends up with wasted resources due to the extreme demand fluctuation depending on the time of the year. Full year schooling and flexible holidays means that both supply and demand can be better controlled. # 18. Next Steps The goal of writing this book was to organize my thoughts so I can start a school based on it one day. I want to be one of the people who will test and implement these new ideas. I want to start an experimental school using the concepts written in this book. The experimental school will be focused on providing the best environment for students to grow and develop core competencies for a role in the society of the future, regardless of their background and competencies. The goal is to educate each student and help them find the best path forward. Here is the thought process for how to achieve the goal: 1. Put all the ideas down on paper in one coherent package 2. Get feedback and criticisms in regards to the idea 3. Connect with others who are leading the education revolution 4. Raise awareness of the project 5. Fundraising to build said experimental school The next step will probably be to spread the word and at the same time, learn about starting a school. Wish me luck! # 19. Inspirations **Finland Schools. No Homework** Spend time doing other things for exploration. No standardized testing to measure school success. Learning to Learn. **Tony Wagner - seven survival skills** **9 valuable lessons I learned in the real world. (And not in school)** **The surprising thing google learned about it’s employees and what it means for today’s students - The Washington Post** **Google Soft Skills** **The Skills needed to surive the Robot Invasion of the Workplace** **Pricing Design Work & Creativity (what lectures should look like)**\ **TED Radio Hour: Teaching for Better Humans** More than test scores or good grades - what do kids need to prepare them for the future? This hour, guest host Manoush Zomorodi and TED Speakers explore how to help children grow into better humans, in and out of the classroom. Guests include educators Olympia Della Flora and Liz Kleinrock, psychologist Thomas Curran, and writer Jacqueline Woodson. **Sudbury Schools** **Montessori Schools** Book: The Montessori Method, by Maria Montessori **Waldorf/Steiner** **Finnish school documentary by Michael Moore** **Circle School in Tokyo** **Meet 13-year-old CEO Hillary Yip**\ **Five dangerous things** 1. Let Children be Co-Authors in their Education 2. Trust Children more 3. The Default answer is “Yes” 4. Focus on Character and Habits (instead of grades) 5. Let’s agree that everything is interesting **Benjamen Zander - Leadership on Display** **Anand Giridharadas: A tale of two Americas. And the mini-mart where they collided** **Financial Success video** **Simon Sinek on Education - Big Change** Find solutions to their own challenges Dintersmith organized the fundamentals behind PEAK learning, a way to design learning to help students develop the fundamental skills needed to succeed in general. **Ted Dintersmith’s PEAK Learning** * Purpose. If students are going to stay engaged, schoolwork has to be meaningful and connect to real-world initiatives. At Lab Atlanta, a community makerspace in Atlanta run by a private school, high schoolers can take a semester long course to invent projects that promote sustainability for their city, such as addressing air and water quality and improving public transportation. * Essentials. The most important strengths students must develop are those they cannot learn by taking a test: creative problem-solving, communication, critical analysis, collaboration, citizenship, and character. I saw this firsthand at Waipahu High School in Honolulu, where students are developing these skills and mindsets by blending career-and-applied learning with academic theory. * Agency. Students should have room in the classroom to grow into self-directed young adults. This starts when teachers let students own their learning, evaluate their academic progress, and explore specific interests. At Acton Academy in Austin, Texas, for example, students set their own agenda, learn to access online resources, and manage their own progress. The school has no formal teaching, just adult "guides" who aren't expected to be subject-matter experts or allowed to answer questions. * Knowledge. Students master what they study by applying their learning to real-life situations and teaching other students—the ultimate forms of accountability. Their knowledge should be deep and retained, not crammed into short-term memory. Currently, students across New Hampshire are evaluated not on pop quizzes, but on demonstrated competency tied to teacher-driven, performance-based assessments.