Help Me Build A Jedi Academy

[Jcent]

I use my creativity to elevate human consciousness. This is my purpose in life. 

I am in the midst of outlining and designing what I would call, for lack of a better term, a Jedi Academy. It's basically a school where you send your kids to master the ways of the force. Imagine a brick and mortar version of Actualized.org that you attend for the first 18 years of your life. 

Rather than just listing a bunch of my ideas, I want to hear yours. 

Engineering the community is obviously very difficult, a task which I'm not yet evolved enough to handle. But this is my dream project, I'm 20 years away from making real.

The hardest problem I've stumbled across so far is this: how does one scale something that's unscalable? My vision is that each and every kid will have a fully customizable curriculum. This is easy enough to do for a few kids. But it becomes quite a difficult problem to solve at scale (say, a class of 100 kids). Because you're just bringing in so many specialists and teachers for each kid that it becomes financially untenable. The cost of the school is already expected to be quite high. But the plan is to do something similar to what Musk did with Tesla; start high end and then bring it to the masses. 

I've been looking into the fields of Mass Customization and studying how manufacturers produce customizable things at scale. I hope to take that framework and the insights gained there and apply it to this problem. But it's not meant to be a mechanistic factory. Quite the opposite. 

There's also so much more that goes into it. The colors of the walls, the campus, the food, the teachers, the curriculum itself.

What are your ideas? What was great about your own education? I plan to both transcend and include what's already working now. For instance, I don't think that sports teams should go anywhere. The question is only: are you going to be okay when your kid is psychologically, emotionally, and spiritually more developed than you when she's 12? 

I'm not playing around here. I'm not interested in political discussions or debates about the education system. This is something completely outside of all that. I don't have time to jump through legislative hoops.

I would appreciate any and all feedback, whacky ideas, good examples of what's being done right now, etc.. Thanks!

*Applications are open* 

[Arhattobe]

Master the ways of the force? What?

[Jcent]

It's a metaphor for self-actualization, consciousness, metaphysics, epistemology, psychedelics, Etc.. And a whole bunch of other stuff; like minor technical training in math, science, english, history, language, etc..  

It means: becoming a fully-whole and extraordinary human being. 

Edited January 8, 2019 by Jcent

[Consilience]

I think you would need to find multi-disciplinary teachers so that 1 teacher has the ability to teach multiple topics. Researching scalable customization is a great idea as well. 

Keep us posted on how this process goes! 

[Arhattobe]

Maybe dream of supplying something the public would demand or in a way they would. After making sure you have grown enough yourself. Just dreaming by itself doesn’t lead to anything. 

“I dream of world peace”

”how will you achieve it?”

”idk”

doesnt work 

[zambize]

This is not outside of debates around the education system.  It's illegal  to not go to school, that has to be considered

[Leo Gura]

@Jcent It's a good vision, but it will require a lot of work from you. Don't expect others to solve the hard problems for you. Your role is to create solutions to all of those sticky problems like financing, etc.

You can start by studying & researching education theory. There are many serious scholars, experts, and academics working on the problems of education. But you should also realize that the biggest obstacles will always be bureaucratic, political, marketing, and financing.

Education is a very touchy political issue. People are not just going to let you wake up their kids. They want their children properly indoctrinated.

It will be very challenging to pitch a stage Yellow school to stage Blue/Orange parents in a stage Blue/Orange community.

If you are serious about this vision, you should think of a way to gain 1st-hand experience with the actual issues of education. You can do this by getting a job within the education field and study it from the inside. Otherwise you will lack 1st-hand experience and your solutions will be utopian fantasies, not anything workable in the real world.

The trick with lofty visions is that they also must square with how the real world works and the level of development that people are at. Coming up with grand visions is relatively easy. The hard part is figuring out how to actualize them.

[kieranperez]

I like this vision. I like this vision A LOT.

[Aakash]

@kieranperez don't you have the answer to your question then? if you like this vision alot theres nothing stopping you from doing it aswell. 

[kieranperez]

@Aakash all because I like @Jcent  vision doesn’t mean the key is to just copy and paste his vision to my own. I like Leo’s purpose. I like Sadhguru’s purpose, I like Buddha’s and Christ’s. I also like Leonardo da Vinci’s purpose. There’s a lot of people whose purpose I admire because of the contributive potential they each have and for a variety of other reasons. All because you recognize the power of someone’s vision and purpose doesn’t mean you just copy and paste there’s to your own. Otherwise I would’ve just copy and pasted Leo’ life purpose to my life and there would be nothing to figure out but he is different from me. I mean, I like to talk, I’m very good at understanding concepts and getting across to people a very direct way that wakes people up and also “makes them fiesty” by provoking them but in a way where I mindfuck them and also sharing deep insights but copy and pasting someone’s else’s life to your own is a hands down mistake. My key strength is also not creativity and I’m not that good at larger group teaching and leadership. That’s never been my strength and in fact has always been my biggest weaknesses. I can’t stand groups. I check out every time I lead or participate in groups. I’ve quit teams I’ve lead and have been part of (college cross country was a good example of that) because I can’t stand large groups. 

Edited January 8, 2019 by kieranperez

[Aakash]

@kieranperez so if your breaking it down- You like the truth is what your saying by listing all those names, 

thats a great start 

you know your weaknesses 

thats even better, it's up to you whether you choose to face them or not but 

the final thing is just to choose the only thing you resonate with , even slightly and incorporate the framework of truth within it? 

Just because everythings an illusion, it doesn't mean that you can't like things so too say, the suffering only comes when you get attached! and the identity is embedded into your awareness. Up until then your just learning and teaching your self to master something that will add value in the future to the wider world. 

Do you have anything you resonate with? 

art, music, teaching, science, computing , gaming, fashion, sports, magic, card games, biology, chemistry, history? 

[Shin]

Someone didn't watch the last episode ?

[okulele]

That is almost exactly what I would love to create. Better education seems so important.

There are schools designed by Krishnamurti.

Check out Rudolf Steiner and his Waldorf education.

You might like to read The Abolition of Man by C.S.Lewis.

There is a little bit of info here on Integral Education as envisioned by Sri Aurobindo.

Oh! And Yogananda's schools!

Edited January 8, 2019 by okulele
yogananda

[Bluebird]

@Jcent I've also thought of this before. I'm just gonna ramble here, maybe spark some ideas in you.

Quote

This is easy enough to do for a few kids. But it becomes quite a difficult problem to solve at scale (say, a class of 100 kids). Because you're just bringing in so many specialists and teachers for each kid that it becomes financially untenable. The cost of the school is already expected to be quite high. But the plan is to do something similar to what Musk did with Tesla; start high end and then bring it to the masses. 

 

I think this is the wrong mentality to be in personally.

It's not that much harder to build the school to be cost effective from the start. It will be much harder to start high end and trickle down, unless that's a branding tactic.

Your best bet is likely to look into a mix of Algorithm and Machine Learning to produce a curriculum based on the collation of as much data as possible. This could almost be a small bet, can you find some way to recommend learning material based on a quick survey or some background data collation.  

This way you can have an algorithm continually modifying and updating or shifting the learning material based on the user's growth. 

Who knows what the best strategy is, but I would make the university digital to start with. Less infrastructure cost, less cost to the user, increased ability to pivot rapidly, increased ability to gather data.

Facebook and Google track your data in a way that they can advertise to you, if you can peek into their strategies for example and gather data on people (and be very open about it, and offer privacy options) to better target the learning they need that is of great use.

Some things that would be useful to know to tailor curriculum to be fun:

• Big Five Personality Traits
• Spiral Dynamics Stage (current paradigm and values)
• Life Purpose (or rough career path, which the AI would clarify)
• Hobbies, interests and passions
• IQ
• A catalogue of everything they've read and studied

The curriculum has to be more engaging than University is, and also better at getting results. To do this, data is required, whether that's intuitively done by a teacher -- or in my opinion the better option is concretely gathered by a ML algorithm.

You need a feedback loop system. Almost like an adversarial network.

Initial Survey > AI Tailors Curriculum > Student Learns > AI Learns how student learns (tailors) > Student learns better > AI learns better (tailors) > Student learns even better > AI Tailors > Student learns worse > AI really learns better.

But almost like the Youtube recommendation algorithm, you don't know it's happening. In that sense it would also be good to be heavily self guided, if you are having some emotional issues you may want to learn more about that than economics at the moment.

You could then have a distributed and remote team of trained facilitators who are quite developed themselves working on the social aspects. The AI could pull together recommended meetings with groups of like-minded and also not so like-minded people based on what it thinks is best. The beauty is that if you do it right, the algorithm only gets better.

Basically, humans suck, especially when it comes to scaling. So let AI rule the world (carefully) haha.

Anyway, this is all fantasy, getting a machine learning solution mixed with logic rules and data collation capable of achieving any of this is not gonna be easy. Not to mention you've already got an agenda and ideology that you will doubtlessly desire to push on people.

But you seemed to be more in the brick and mortar mindset so I figured I'd give a different perspective. This was more a brain dump than anything for me.

[ajasatya]

11 hours ago, Jcent said:

It means: becoming a fully-whole and extraordinary human being. 

have you become a fully-whole and extraordinary human being, whatever that means, yet?

[RichardY]

@Jcent

 

Look into Buddhism, Jedi  are basically Buddhists in the star wars universe. Don't reinvent the wheel. Buddhism from what I have read so far is flawed, however it may still provide some useful information, it's treatment of consciousness like a registry entry that can be deleted, like in a process to help free up processing power was interesting. Perhaps the darkside, Jainism also provides some useful information.

As for scale-ability the students should effectively teach themselves, as was done in the Victorian era, through some form of incentive(money). Or perhaps through love of the order, which might only happen in East Asian countries where orphans are adopted to orders, rather than parents.

I would say design a video game, but that has already been done. Would be useful perhaps if everyone on a forum patronised one historical intellectual to augment their knowledge for the collective.

[moon777light]

YES YES!! on board with this, but it will take lots of stress and gray hair to do complete it  

[sarapr]

One thing is for sure, you have to bring in the kids from the very first grade and only keep working with those who started out with your academy cause with a lot of schools I see around me it's like the kid is second grade but already so out of hand to be corrected because of their family's influence on them and if you're gonna build a high level consciousness school you better expect a lot of disagreement with the families so you better do a sort of family selection too cause if you don't the children and students will only be more confused to see conflicting ideas in school and in their families.

These sorts of changes are real tricky, take all the points into account. But if you start small and keep experimenting as you're expanding, you'll be fine doing it 

[Jcent]

@sarapr The original idea was that you could only join from the very inception. You could not join past a certain age, maybe even as young as 5. Although, I can see that becoming utterly ridiculous and unfair. 

@moon777light It will. But that's why it's a 20 year endeavor. Several projects and businesses must come before this. But the result would be so worth it. Imagine how amazing those kids' lives would be. And then they just rub off on the world by inspiring others. Network effect.

@RichardY I'm very interested in video games, especially with their application into this school. AR and VR will 100% be integrated. Think: Lumosity on steroids. So you're saying that you solve the scalability problem by just having everyone teach themselves? 

@ajasatya No. Most of my 20's will be dedicated towards that pursuit. First I will leave the world and then I will serve the world. I've just left university for this very reason. The next generation of education cannot be solved from within the system. Something radically new is needed. This is perhaps where I disagree with @Leo Gura. 

@Bluebird These are some juicy ideas. AI is not something I had thought to integrate. But it seems like the perfect storm for something like this. I know some people who work for Google in LA, I had dinner with them a year ago. I'll have to talk to them.

9 hours ago, Bluebird said:

Who knows what the best strategy is, but I would make the university digital to start with.

This is possible, but even as I think about Actualized.org, there's something missing about it. Imagine being able to talk about these things at lunch with your buddies. Imagine stressing about a metaphysics final with your crush at recess. That's epic. I appreciate all of your ideas, some of them are spot on but will be hard to implement. Do you have experience with AI?

@okulele Thank you, I will look into what you've shared. 

@Shin I did not... 

@zambize It would be a private school until the formula could be franchised and spread to every state.

[zambize]

Just now, Jcent said:

@sarapr The original idea was that you could only join from the very inception. You could not join past a certain age, maybe even as young as 5. Although, I can see that becoming utterly ridiculous and unfair. 

@moon777light It will. But that's why it's a 20 year endeavor. Several projects and businesses must come before this. But the result would be so worth it. Imagine how amazing those kids' lives would be. And then they just rub off on the world by inspiring others. Network effect.

@RichardY I'm very interested in video games, especially with their application into this school. AR and VR will 100% be integrated. Think: Lumosity on steroids. So you're saying that you solve the scalability problem by just having everyone teach themselves? 

@ajasatya No. Most of my 20's will be dedicated towards that pursuit. First I will leave the world and then I will serve the world. I've just left university for this very reason. The next generation of education cannot be solved from within the system. Something radically new is needed. This is perhaps where I disagree with @Leo Gura. 

@Bluebird These are some juicy ideas. AI is not something I had thought to integrate. But it seems like the perfect storm for something like this. I know some people who work for Google in LA, I had dinner with them a year ago. I'll have to talk to them.

This is possible, but even as I think about Actualized.org, there's something missing about it. Imagine being able to talk about these things at lunch with your buddies. Imagine stressing about a metaphysics final with your crush at recess. That's epic. I appreciate all of your ideas, some of them are spot on but will be hard to implement. Do you have experience with AI?

@okulele Thank you, I will look into what you've shared. 

@Shin I did not... 

@zambize It would be a private school until the formula could be franchised and spread to every state.

I don't know enough about education, and it seems like a really nice goal, but there may be regulations on what you can teach in a private school?  Maybe not though because of the "science" I've seen Evangelicals teach.  Surely if they teach that dinosaurs didn't exist, you can teach a kid how to love himself, but maybe not?  Was just something to think about, and if you've already thought about it, well you're probably on the right track to actualizing this