Help Me Build A Jedi Academy

[kieranperez]

Here’s my question: what about kids with legitimate ADD/ADHD, Dyslexia, and such? How will your school provide ample learning for each individual? 

Totally cool if that’s something you’ve yet to come up with an answer on but obviously something you’re going to need to really study and come up with ideas on. High level Stage Yellow systems thinking is needed for that. 1st tier has done a shameful and atrocious job at solving this issue to the point where I’m almost convinced where these kids in the modern out of date school system will not be able to truly thrive until the playing field is leveled. I digresss though...

[RichardY]

@Jcent

The Scaleability problem would effectively solve itself, being more of a psychological problem, lateral as opposed to top-down, Cult like....... There is always some kid who's good at Art or Maths or whatever, if they teach to 2 or 3 that helps distribute the load. The important thing being that they are willing to do so, which would depend on various factors.

Teachers in the UK and USA are probably the most unionised and vocal profession there is, you never ever see teacher layoffs, ever. Police and military can all be more easily made redundant despite being life and death. Or numbers dramatically reduced and outsourced.

The video game thing was more of a joke, in reference to a video game of the same name. Although there are online schools developing, especially in the USA where homeschooling is more accepted. The sheer weight of available reasoning and referencing has got to have some sort of impact, if not censored or drowned out.

Say this and that though. This is one big mammoth of an undertaking, whose ramifications are massive. Treat it with the respect it deserves. At the moment it's a very thin line between fantasy and vision and I would say the former, Jedi Academy.........

[Jcent]

@kieranperez Unresolved so far. Having overcome a massive concussion during high school, I'm very sensitive and understanding of people with learning disabilities. The way I was treated in school is one of the motivations for this project.

39 minutes ago, RichardY said:

At the moment it's a very thin line between fantasy and vision and I would say the former, Jedi Academy.........

@RichardY Anything for views, right? 

[sarapr]

2 hours ago, Jcent said:

 

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. 

One other thing for you to worry about is that anything that becomes exam oriented like the way you're putting it, it loses all of its corr values for the students. The way it has to be should either be totally exam free or exams in a very different way. And that's kinda the trouble with philosophy majors in university, you have to write down what others have discovered with no real room for your own thoughts and true philosophy. So don't be making the same mistakes 

[Jcent]

@sarapr No there wouldn't be traditional tests. I was just being cute. There might not even be grade levels. 

[Leo Gura]

@Jcent It is wise, before you go breaking down a system, to learn the system from the inside.

Only a fool hastily disassembles a complex piece of machinery without first studying its inner workings.

A common problem with young revolutionaries is that they end up creating a worse system than the one they rail against because they underestimate the practical realities such a system must contend with.

Success requires striking a delicate balance between the old and the new, the status quo and the cutting edge, between the practical and ideal.

Otherwise you easily end up with something like a cult, a communist revolution, or Bioshock: a dystopian abomination.

[Emerald]

On 1/7/2019 at 7:48 PM, Jcent said:

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* 

One thing to keep in mind is that you'll probably have to have an audition process for your school and the parents would probably have to pay a lot of money for their kid to attend in order to fund such a school. So, you're going to have to be in the market to attract the wealthiest and most gifted students. That's especially true if you want to keep the school size as low as 100 students.

There are also certain acts and statutes that must be adhered to, such as EAHCA which guarantees an education to all children regardless of disability. So, private schools also have to adhere to this to get federal and state funding. So, if you have an audition-based school for high performers, then you'd likely not qualify for that funding (or at least not as much) and would rely on high tuition rates and funding from wealthy donors.

Also, you'd want to consult a lot of literature about child psychology. It sounds like a nice idea to have an actualization-based curriculum taught from kindergarten onward, but you have to be really clear about what actualization looks like at each age. Actualization at age 4 just looks like interactive playtime. Chances are that the elementary schoolers would need an education similar to what they're getting now, as this is highly tailored to their unique needs.

I think the self-actualization stuff would be nice to begin weaving in a little bit in middle school, and focused more heavily on once a student reaches about 10th grade. Kids have to crawl before they can walk and walk before they can run.

---

Also, you want to consider the intelligence factor. What I've learned from being a teacher is that my needs as a high functioning and ambitious student are not the needs of everyone. There is a huge range of aptitudes and levels of intelligence relative to academic pursuits. It's just like athletic ability. You can develop it quite a bit. But there are naturally gifted athletes, and there are people (like me) who will never be gifted athletes no matter how hard they work at it.

In school, I always viewed education as a path toward self-betterment and learning. And I was often upset by the degree everything was watered down. I had assumed everyone was able to function like me... if they would just put in the effort. So, I had a very libertarian-esque view of education in general. Like, "If they work hard, they'll get good grades. If they have bad grades, then they deserve them." So, to me, education was a competition and a means toward self-actualization... to which I thought public education did a piss-poor job. 

But being on the other side of the desk made it very clear that I was seeing education through the distorted lens of privilege that me and maybe the top 10% of learners think that the education was for people like us (which we assumed was everyone) and that it served us poorly. And that everyone who wasn't able to compete were just slackers who weren't competing well in the game I had assumed we all were playing. 

But as a teacher, I was able to see that students who get Fs often get them because they just don't get the work, no matter how hard they try. And there are kids with borderline IQs of 75-80 who are also taking this classes and having similar expectations put upon them because they don't quite qualify as mentally challenged. And you'd never guess that about these students because they just seem like another kid in class. There are kids in the 12th grade with 1st grade reading levels, who try their hardest.

And then a bunch of politicians who haven't been in a classroom since they were a student 30 years ago and try to hold teachers more accountable to fix that problem. This is probably because they were likely high functioning students and still have the same naive ideas that I had as a high functioning student since they never had reality check them on those ideas. Sometimes there are kids that just aren't good at understanding high concepts, just like some kids will never be able to slam dunk a basketball. It's just that cerebral academic performance is an expectation and playing basketball is not an expectation. 

And if I think about the idea of putting a rigorous actualization-based curriculum out to general public, for this very reason, I know this just won't work when the rubber meets the road. The concepts that Leo goes over aren't going to be grasped by over 50% of the student population, AT ALL. And then, only the top 10% will get a really good understanding of it. 

So, this is why you'd have to make it a school that the brightest students can audition for. And this also leads to needing to have high tuition rates as well as money from wealthy donors, since you probably won't be able to get any kind of federal funding. 

So, if your goal is to influence a handful of students who are already likely to thrive, then your school will be a great enrichment for them before they go off to some Ivy League college.

But if your goal is to really make huge changes on the societal level, you'll have to tweak your vision so that it can have a greater impact on the masses. And you would have to interject self-actualization concepts at the correct developmental times and be sure that it's put in a way that's simple and understandable to most people.

Not everyone can be a Jedi.

And if you don't know this, you'll screw over 80% of the student body and their needs if you invite the general populace in.

 

[Leo Gura]

51 minutes ago, Emerald said:

Not everyone can be a Jedi.

That's why you test 'em for midichlorians

[Outer]

Elon Musk actually created his own school for his kids and others. 

 

[now is forever]

haha the elon musk school sounds like a hybrid of my industrial design university with a montessori approach.

if you would mix that with a steiner/spiral mix approach you would certainly get the ultimative turquoise super hybrid.

it will be either a super elite or a private school that’s for sure - i would have a look on how in steiner schools the parents have to pay proportional to their income - as long as it’s not state supported that seems to be the most balanced financing  model.

[Emerald]

13 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

That's why you test 'em for midichlorians

Well, at least we already know what the audition process will be...  

[Leo Gura]

3 hours ago, Emerald said:

Well, at least we already know what the audition process will be...  

And the end result

[now is forever]

but that shouldn’t be a hindrance - i mean if you account blood as the effort parents put into bringing their children into a school like that. it’s still important to at least have schools like that - alternatives to what’s already available. we have to start somewhere! 

if going into the details, it’s interesting how montessori schools support the natural thrive and steiner schools don’t have grades. there are also much less obvious things like they don’t have tables in the lower grades in steiner schools and the children only sit on cushions and have drawing boards or small tables what’s really good for adhd or adhs children. a lot of these concepts are about integration of the bodymind into the learning process. the big question for today seems to be how to make that available not only for elites but for everyone. that’s what would bring us really on a higher level of development. the concepts are there it’s only a matter of integration.

theoretically.

Edited January 10, 2019 by now is forever