Better educational philosophies; how do we run our schools & educate our kids better?

Note: in the past, I've released two articles Why don't kids like school? Plus the problems with public education, how to fix it, the origins of public schools, & links to additional resources & Problems & solutions with school & education; how do we improve public schools & education?, both of which are the same in content but presents content in different orders. I recommend reading both before reading this article.
This article is a slightly edited excerpt from the aforementioned articles.
The only reason for me creating this article is to shorten the aforementioned articles so they wouldn't be so large & bring issues that come with large web pages.


I would encourage (but not require) that schools base their operating philosophy be based on the Montessori educational model, in order to facilitate the learning of individual students, embrace creativity & allow for individualism. In my opinion, if the education system truly cares for kids (which the institution of government schooling doesn't), then their enthusiasm for learning should be embraced, & be allowed to learn based on whatever their passions are in the way & environment best for them.

The Peninsula school philosophy would also be great. Here's some writings from Quora user Charles Tips (more of his writings will be linked below): 


Why is it that with so much evidence to the contrary, the media continue to report that public schools are failing?

"I've seen the future of education, and it works brilliantly and is cheap and fun.

We sent our sons to Peninsula School. It had been founded in 1925 on Quaker and communitarian principles. The founders wrote to John Dewey to send a top disciple to run the school. Within weeks, she had her way paid back to Chicago, and the consensus became that they couldn't go far wrong if they did pretty much the opposite of the Dewey approach in every respect. They consciously instead modeled the approach after the Little Red Schoolhouse, still an extant curriculum back then.

Half of every day was devoted to recess, to play. As my old author, Brian Sutton-Smith, would explain, you can't have genius without abundant play, nor creativity, nor spontaneity, nor superior socialization skills, nor a better cure for bullying.

There were bells to mark periods, just as in the public schools, but heeding them was always optional. Or, as my oldest explained when I asked him why he let his apprentices in the movie-making biz flounder at first, "Education cannot even begin until you realize your time is your own."

What was studied in class was always up to the students, who spent the beginning and end of each day in dialogue about next steps. The students learned to speak from the heart and listen with respect. They also learned to chart their own courses (in both senses) in collaboration with each other.

There were no grades to teach that your work was for the subjective evaluation of your betters. Rather, with permission, student work was put on display, which prompted many an organic conversation. And rather than learn that your work should not be done in the expectation of material gain, student work was a huge part of the annual auction with weavings and vases selling for hundreds of dollars apiece.

There was risk. Parents were flatly told to expect broken bones. You'd see five-year-old girls walking on the limbs of the giant live oaks like they were sidewalks. Students often lunched atop Flat Top, the sixty-something foot sequoia that had been topped by lightning. Edging the Big Building was a rite of passage.

In the upper grades, there was homework but always optional. They did not presume to tread on personal time as the state does.

Unlike the tony prep private schools in the area, there was no screening of academic potential for admission. And yet two to six members of each class of 18 to 22 went on to become National Merit Scholarship Finalists each year. One year I read that six of the sixty Finalists in our area came from Peninsula, more than any other school including the hyper-academic prep schools. As a board member, I went into the office the next morning and announced that we needed to publicize that fact. I was greeted with five dropped jaws. And then my jaw dropped; I finally understood what education should be about."

How is play important for child development?:
""With respect to education, we often seek to make a straight-cut ditch out of what should be a meandering brook. --Ralph Waldo Emerson"

Drive into the U-shaped driveway of Peninsula School and you are struck by huge trees and the Gilded Age mansion. Then you notice five-year old girls walking the boughs of ancient oaks fifteen feet in the air as though on a sidewalk. You hear voices above you. You look up... and up... and further up... and there sixty feet up at the top of "Flattop," the old sequoia topped by a lightning strike are three boys and a girl blithely having lunch. You hear raucous commotion and see heads racing around in a gaily-painted enclosure--the Ga Ga Court--where numerous dodge-ball, hike-ball and kick-ball games have been invented. As you approach the "Big Building," two boys race out of the doors, across the porch and, with total abandon, leap the lengthy set of front steps, landing in a sprawl. In a flash they are off again.

Around back the "shore" of the "Mud Puddle," the twenty-yard-by-eight-yard, shin-deep pond that is a fixture during the rainy season, is lined with, well, whoever wants to be there to witness the Spanish Armada (reduced to paper boats) attack England. My oldest son introduced the English fire ships. Well, not correct. They'd been there each year, but he added actual fire to the enthusiastic enjoyment of the onlookers. At 32, eighteen years later, it's still a key piece of how he defines himself.

The students at this school don't study; they play. Academics are greatly deemphasized compared with what's going on in the much sought after public and private schools there around Stanford University. Yet, after 8th grade when they move on to the local high schools, they slingshot past the other kids.

Play! Curb the play, curb the child."

What best prepares you for future life, private schools or public schools?

What did that look like: Half of every day was play, free play (as my old friend and author Brian Sutton-Smith liked to point out, you can't have genius without lots of play). A hand bell would be rung to note the start of class, but students were free to ignore it. There was no academic screening and academics were well down the list. The one class that used a text used a god-awful one so that students would learn to criticize what they read. 
 
Academics tended to proceed like this. Studying the Spanish Armada in 7th grade, students would assemble the Spanish and English fleets out of paper and proceed out to the mud puddle, a shin-deep pond about forty feet in diameter in the middle of the schoolyard most winters. They'd recreate the battle. My oldest is proud to this day two decades later of having added the historically-accurate embellishment of English fire ships, a tradition that has carried on ever since. Children from nursery on line the "shores" to watch the battle unfold. The presenting students weren't just learning history, they were learning to teach it in an entertaining way.
 
But academics were secondary to crafts--pottery, weaving, jewelry, woodshop, drama, animation--as learning with the hands and mastering process (something Fichte designed out of his school) is superior for brain development and leads to greater levels of creativity. In any case, what was to occupy the class's time was entirely up to the class, and each class held a discussion beginning and end of day where what they really learned was to speak from their hearts, listen courteously and get used to charting their own destinies... with others.
 
Once I noticed there was mysterious magic going on, I got myself elected to the board to figure out what. I finally had my Zen moment (every parent has one eventually) when I read a notice in the paper of the sixty National Merit Scholarship Finalists from the area there around Stanford, an area that features some of the most highly regarded public and private schools in the country. I saw five students who'd been in the Peninsula 8th-grade class (as far as the school went) of three years before. Well, Peninsula is tiny. Each grade is only twenty students give or take one or two. Five out of twenty is incredible given that Finalists represent the top one-half of one percent of SAT takers (I seem to recall). I had assumed we were sacrificing academics for a certain well-roundedness.
 
I marched into the school office the next morning and asked the director and assistant director and three others there if they were aware of five students of that class having been Finalists. "No, it was six" (turns out I had not recognized one name). Someone else added, "There were two from the class before that." "And four from the class before that and three from the class before that," someone else piped in.
 
That was incredible to me that a small student body could account for such disproportionate numbers of area Finalists--ten percent of the recent crop--and do so without academic screening or even much in the way of academics. I suggested simply, "We need to publicize this," and when I looked around the room and saw five jaws dropped, aghast, I had my Zen moment. And what makes for education and how we should go about it has never been the same for me since.

How can America build its education system to become one of the best in the world?

"Easy. Note every single abiding feature of our public schools and do precisely the opposite."

"In short, it was a design to make sure that agency and autonomy cannot form--to make sure that students cannot grow and self-actualize. Incredibly, the majority of us embrace this most anti-human of experiments and fail to see how it is at cross purposes with our American ideal of raising fully potent sovereign citizens. Even when our most rebellious parents choose to homeschool, they adopt the same dumb-making curriculum and employ many of the same methods.

What do we do instead?

Play—You cannot have genius, self-actualization, high social skills, spontaneity, freedom from bullying, and many other desirable qualities without ample play, free play. Parking kids' butts in desks, and then labeling them ADHD should be punishable by imprisonment.

Students Sovereign—Give the students their full panoply of rights as American citizens and let them learn to flex them. Let them choose what to do with their time including not attending class. Let them set their own curriculum and goals. Let them make their own decisions and live with the consequences.

Everything else is gravy. Implement those two measures and we'll be on the road to an exceptional American education. There are a small handful of schools in the US that approach education this way. We sent our sons to one, and it was worth every goddamn penny."

Why do many people default to saying that certain life skills (e.g. cooking, household budgeting) should be taught in school when children are ultimately the responsibility of their parents/guardians?

"PLAY! What is the most powerful force in all of society? The human imagination. And the crucible in which imagination forms? …play. This, by the way, is why our schools have continually limited play and kept it supervised, acting like there are better uses of students’ time. You want free play, not supervised play. And you want the full variety of play—climbing, for instance, teaches problem-solving in real time (great as a foundation for mathematics) and risk-assessment skills.

What Brian Sutton-Smith (another of my authors) called “galumphing” is the high hilarity of being totally immersed in a madcap moment. Strive to achieve it at least once a day as it floods the brain with endorphins and lays the foundation for outside-the-box thinking. Play is essential to a whole host of bodily coordination functions, some of which are critical to intellectual development.

Mastery—What turns your kids on? What do their own unique talents lead them to? As you detect them find your kids arenas to try them out. If your child heads off to college with 5000 or even 2000 hours toward mastery in whatever area, they already have an “unfair” advantage in life. Be more concerned about what your child is drawn to and wants to stick with than your adult evaluation of how lucrative or intellectual or esteemed the field is—there are lots of nuanced layers to sussing out mastery.

Mentors—The best arenas involve mentors who have those same skills. We’d send the boys off for six, eight, twelve weeks at a time to be mentored. We laid no ground rules or conditions; we wanted them to experience differing forms of adult authority. But mostly we wanted them getting deep experience from successful people in the area they seem to be headed to. “Micro” mentors and tutors for just an hour or three a week help too. This worked gangbusters for us.

Travel—By age twelve, we wanted the boys out in the world away from us for extended periods under the supervision of other adult mentors. By age 15, we wanted them in foreign countries. There’s no more real-world experience than having to adapt to new places, new household rules, new cultures, new languages.

Adventure—My business partner and I would take our sons, starting at age 12, deep into the Grand Canyon well beyond other hikers and with no contact with the outside world. The oldest got his skin-diving certification, the youngest sky-diving lessons. Such experiences build resourcefulness and are incredible confidence-builders.

And, in general, take every one of Fichte’s goals and shred it. Make their time their own. (Our oldest states with the young people he now mentors, “Education does not even start until you realize your time is your own.”) Never pass up a quality program or opportunity in sports, music, acting and improv, public speaking, intelligent conversation, caring for others, making things, doing things, letting hands and brain function together.

Do not micro-manage this process. Do not be a hover parent. Let them own it; that’s the only way it can work.

To answer the question, I have no idea why people default to saying the things they say. I do know it’s important to get your children real-world skills, and I do think the above ideas are part of the way to go about it. I also strongly suspect that keeping them out of schools these days is a great step in the right direction."

What subjects should schools teach? Are the subjects currently taught the best use of our children's time?

"My ideal high school would feature much more

• Play--According to my old friend Brian Sutton-Smith, it's difficult to foster genius without abundant play, which also promotes spontaneity, social-integration skills, confidence and more.
• Crafts--Students have been right all along, we don't teach useful subjects. Processes taught start-to-finish are essential to competence and to the kind of brain skills that lead to cross-over thinking (weaving is outstanding for teaching mathematics, etc.)
• Mastery--At present, schools actually interfere with students getting a head start on the proverbial 10,000 hours it takes to achieve mastery of a discipline.
• Real World Interaction--No more hermetically-sealed isolation from the real world.
• Listening and Speaking--No skills get people further ahead in life than being able to speak from the heart and being able to listen with respect and comprehension."

What would your ideal education system look like?

“Education does not even start until you realize your time is your own.” —My oldest son Travis relaying one of his realizations from his school

The school we sent our sons to, Peninsula School in Menlo Park, California, had an interesting history. Founded by Quaker labor organizers in 1925, their first thought was to write to John Dewey in Chicago offering to hire one of his top graduates. Only two weeks after her arrival, they paid her way back to Chicago and decided they could not go far wrong if they did the exact opposite of the Dewey method in every respect.

So impressed was I with the school’s impact on children, I took a seat on the board the better to figure out what was going on. The following flows from my experiences at Peninsula extended a bit to cover what my ideal education system would look like.

Purpose. Rather than pretend to prepare kids for the real world by keeping them hermetically sealed from it, provide abundant real-world experience including mentorships and apprenticeships outside of school. Use extended field trips.

Citizenship. Rather than school being a special environment in which children do not get to enjoy their robust American rights, make a major point of the school using and becoming familiar with their rights and respecting the rights of others.

Location. Rather than base schooling in the bureaucratic public sector with its “one size fits all” approach, put it back in the private (for-profit) and civil (not-for-profit) sectors where innovation and catering to specific markets and needs can occur.

Academics. Rather than devote the bulk of the time to memorization of idle facts, prefer the teaching of processes start to finish. Engaging the mind and hands together provides knowledge that lasts a lifetime, unlike fleeting memorization.

Time. Rather than using bells and schedules to teach students that their time is not their own, let students own their time and be free to pursue activities they prefer.

Grades. Rather than the insincerity of passing subjective judgment on student work, put student work on display leading to discussions of students’ ideas.

Pedagogy. Rather than “the sage on the stage,” teach students control of their own lives by letting class discussion determine curriculum. Teachers should be more “the guide by the side.”

Play. Rather than long days of structured activity with even play adult-directed, allow for abundant free play.

Skill-base. Rather than ignore all-important listening and speaking skills, use class discussion purposively to resolve issues, plan, come up with ideas and so on.

Private time. Rather than campuses designed so that there is no place to escape scrutiny, allow ample places for students to gather in private or alone.

Conflict resolution. Rather than discipline flowing top-down from authority figure to student(s), have students resolve all issues directly themselves.

Duration. Rather than school starting young and lasting until adulthood, have it be optional and voluntary at all times.

Curriculum. Rather than pre-digested study materials and canned “experiments,” have students engage in realistic projects with uncertain outcomes so that they learn to cope with ambiguity, uncertainty and failure.

Engagement. Rather than each class be an island unto itself, arrange activities for age mixing in meaningful ways. Have older students mentor younger ones.

Seating. Rather than ranks and files of desks, use tables around which smaller classes can easily see and engage their classmates.

Ambiance. Rather than sterile institutional appearance, have schools that students can add to themselves, paint murals, adapt to needs, carve their names and so on.

Peninsula produced graduates who were self-assured, self-actualized, skilled, with a good start toward mastery of a discipline and well-versed at employing their rights. To me, this is education."


Yet another philosophy would be Elon Musk's educational philosophy, which he claims is so good that his kids actually want to get back from vacation to the school that he was created.

While reading on Wikipedia, I've read some criticisms of unschooling/home education. While these are far from the only criticisms, & nor are they particularly deep or detailed, they are common in arguments against unschooling/home education. I'll have to adress others on a case-by-case basis.

"Socialization. Schools provide a ready-made group of peers, but unschooled children need other ways to make friends in their age group."

This is highly questionable. I've heard. Also, unschooling can involve group activities such as field trips. 

Forced socialization can also create problems. Maybe a reason why bullying occurs & why kids hate school is because they are outright forced to socialise, sometimes with bullies or people they otherwise would have avoided.

"Isolation. A child might not encounter people of other cultures, worldviews, and socioeconomic groups if they are not enrolled in a school. Of course, a school is not necessarily a place that is guaranteed to provide such a range of experiences, either."

This argument really shoots itself in the foot with the last sentence. How does being confined to a building & well within the surrounding area for several hours a day for most of the week & then being made to do busywork (homework) to eventually be allowed out not at least somewhat isolating?

"Qualifications. Some parents may not have the skills required to guide and advise their children in life skills or help them pursue their own interests."
"Development. Children won't learn what they need to know in their adult lives."

This is nonsense. Boyinaband has already done a video articulating being made to learn information in school that most people probably will not use again in their lives.

StormCloudsGathering's "Truth About School" & Ryan Dawson's videos about school has similarly gone into detail but from a more political perspective.

Most schools already teach little that is important or useful to students. And many students know it, but few articulate it well.

Some parents are better at teaching their kids than others. The exact same goes for teachers. The exact same goes for surgeons. And the exact same goes for every occupation.

At least parents have real skin in the game to properly educate their child. While I'm sure that most teachers are well-meaning, there is also a significant number who teach simply to have control over others (I know that type) &/or to get a stable (government) paycheck.

Qualifications? The East German Trabant was probably designed by qualified planners. And it goes down as one of the worst automobiles in history (especially for a German automobile).

And Elon Musk (& some other successful individuals) can care less rather or not you have a college degree.

"Standardization. A child may not learn the same things a regular-schooling peer does unless an educational professional controls what material is covered. In a 2006 study of five- to ten-year-olds, unschooling children scored below traditionally schooled children in 4 of 7 studied categories, and significantly below structured homeschoolers in all 7 studied categories."

Why do we need standardization? People are not inanimate objects like, say, cars (& there are many types of cars at that). We all have different interests & passions, different levels of motivation, different styles of learning, different ways of living, different dreams in life, different personalities, & so on & so forth. We are all different.

Why do we need to be standardized cookie-cutter style? Why should someone looking to get into business be forced to learn astronomy, or someone looking to get into astronomy be forced to learn about business (that was paraphrased from some video in my school & education playlist)?