One Room Schoolhouse, and Core Notions

Russell Ackoff makes the point that students learn best when they can learn at their own pace. In the traditional one room schoolhouse, students of different ages taught each other. Some learned to read when they were 4, some when they were 12. There are fewer reading disabilities among these kids.

What if the school was modeled as a one room schoolhouse, complete with wood stove but also stacked with state of the art computers and learning aids. We would chop our own firewood, feed the stove, work together in groups and alone. There would be a large garden outside, chickens or ducks, maybe a dairy cow. The room would be a microcosm of the world -- one can travel from Rome down any road and similarly from this room one would have access to the universe of knowledge.

One teacher, one co-instructor, twelve students ages 10-16.

Core Notions:

• We don't try to get it right the first time. We do a thing, make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and do it again. We build on experience constantly. Grit is the ability to build on one's repeated failures to achieve a goal. Sometimes we have a "do or die" project, like a performance or presentation or competition, which mirrors the real world.
• We are always striving to see the forest beyond the trees, and the world beyond the forest, and to make decisions based on long-term rather than short-term consequences.
• We seek knowledge and data in order to inform good judgment, while understanding that good judgment does not arise from knowledge or data, but from experience.
• We believe that the role of creativity or intuition is to integrate knowledge in the moment, forming from multiple pieces a coherent and meaningful whole. At times this process can result in something akin to magic.
• We treat separate disciplines as multiple perspectives for understanding and interacting with reality. Reality transcends disciplines, and integration allows us to see reality most clearly.
• We follow young people in their pursuits of whatever interests them, while encouraging rigor and focus. A student must weave everything they learn into coherent projects with real-world applications.
• We use play a lot. A lot. It's the tool nature gave us to make learning fun.
• We hope the students will come up with questions for which teachers do not have the answers. Learning together with an actively-engaged adult learner is the best way to model lifelong investigative and learning skills.

Creativity. Focus. Integration. Experience. Grit.

12 kids: first child $12,000, second child $10,000, third child $8,000. Average ~$10,500.

Gross (12*10.5k) = $126,000