“We get around 70 requests a week from all over the world from people wanting to come and see what we do here” says Rob Houben, manager of the Agora school in Roermond, Netherlands, and the closest thing school has to a principal or headteacher. “And I turn most of them down, I just don’t have the time to do all that!” It’s clear such interest is a testament to Agora’s unconventional approach, which is why I’m glad to be here. I first met Rob at Bett 2019, when he wandered onto pi-top’s stand, and we quickly struck up a rapport. If pi-top designed a school, it would be this. It’s amazing not because it’s awash with cash and has state of the art facilities, but because their entire approach is centred around projects. This is a school focused on learning, not teaching. “We give children the opportunity to play, because when children are playing with something they get interested. And then you don’t have to teach, and you don’t have to police them either” says Rob. No year groups Students at Agora range from 12 to 18 (though there are no year groups) and each of them is given control over their own educational journey. They are able to explore and learn about topics and things which interest them. I met students exploring subjects as diverse as German mountain guides, Mongolian horses, blacksmithing, Harry Potter patronuses, tables and skateboards. It is the job of the teacher – who here is called a coach – to challenge and guide that exploration process. INTRUDER! Using code, pi-top [4] and LEGO in your club or classroom pi-top [4] was specifically designed to use with construction products people are familiar with such as LEGO medium.com The staff, who are responsible for around 17 students each, also have to ensure there are tangible results and genuine development, as well as work with each student on ways to continue developing the learning journey. Though brilliant for kids you can see why one of the biggest issues facing Rob has been finding the right sort of teacher, at ease with a ‘guide on the side’ approach rather than barking at a class of 30 kids. Rob describes Agora as a blend of a university (where you have knowledge), a Buddhist monastery (where you can think), a theme park (where you can play) and a communal marketplace (where you can trade and swap things). And it’s this last one, Agora, and borrowed from Ancient Greek, that gives the school its name. Each day starts with dagstart, where students spend a few minutes outlining their challenges for the day, what they hope to achieve and what help they might need. It’s also a chance for other students to suggest things, offer advice or join in. You could describe the space where this happens as full of happy clutter. There’s objects, books, posters, figures, half-finished projects, bits and bobs. In short, lots and lots of detritus for playing with. Custom desks Each student has a desk, which they are encouraged to customise. One has the front of a car attached to it, which was built with the help of a local scrapyard. “The first one they made didn’t fit in the lift!” Says Rob, meaning the students then learned how to calculate the volume of a cuboid (the lift) and adjust their design so as to get it in. Another displays some amazing ivy like tendrils CNC’d out of wood. After dagstart, students move on to project time, which could be at their desks or in any of the facilities such as the wood workshop, metal workshop, textiles room, kitchen or computer room. There’s lunch, followed by quiet time, where students are encouraged to read or think. Then it’s more project or group work until the end of the day. As they get older, students can choose flexible start and end times, signing in and out to better suit their diaries and what they are doing. In speaking to Agora students time and time again they said what they enjoy most about the school is the freedom to explore and learn whatever they want. “People look strange at us. They think because of their school experience you have to have things like four mathematics lesson a week, but in the Netherlands, that isn’t the case. The Government only asks you to bring students to a certain level within a certain time period” says Rob. The magic in all this is in having coaches guide that apparent freedom so as to naturally include the things students need to know by law. So for example, all students must know Pythagoras’ theorem by a certain age, but that doesn’t have to happen in a mathematics lesson, it could be while exploring a geography problem, or building a table, that then leads the student to find out more. Ubiquitous mobile phone use Perhaps most shocking for UK secondary school teachers to hear is that at Agora, there is ubiquitous mobile phone and internet use. “All our children have Chromebooks for free, so they have access to the internet all day. We allow them to use their phones, all day, because you need to learn how not to use your phone in certain moments. And you don’t learn that when you put your phone in a locker or container because then you have to have a container your whole life” Consequently, the school uses WhatsApp to manage messaging students. Parents are encouraged to get involved too, with tear strip flyers advertising their skills. So if you need carpentry advice, you contact the student whose parent knows about woodwork and approach them. The school can afford free Chromebooks for each child because they don’t spend a lot on books. “Even when they are studying for an exam, it’s not like a normal school where we have to spend money on 50 maths books. If you want to study maths you have to tell me how you’re going to do that and which book or digital content you want to use. And if a student can do that and explain why they need that book we will buy it for them. But that doesn’t mean the person next to them gets one”. Agora started in 2014 with 30 students as an experiment within another more traditional school, to see if the whole idea of what education is could be designed differently. Crucially, the students, not the teaching staff, were the only ones consulted on what the school should contain, look like and do. The board gave the founding staff members a long leash and let them get on with it. They did. There are now 250 students in the school, with a long waiting list of others wanted to join. “When we opened the government came within a month and said ‘we’re going to close the school’, by the end of the day they said ‘ok we’re not’. How do you measure progress without tests? So if students aren’t being tested in specific subjects, but rather working on a huge range of different projects, how are they tracking their progress? It’s a good question, and like the design and layout for the building itself, the answer came not from the faculty, but from the students. Egodact is a piece of software designed by three Agora students, Rafael, Baruch and Ruben, to track not only a student’s challenges but also their progress. It’s light, simple and easy to use. Not only that, they have now set up a company to market and sell the software to other changemaker schools. They’ve written a business plan, designed a product road map, and opened a bank account. Pretty impressive for three 16 year olds who began this at 14. Of course Agora is still recognisably a school. It has an auditorium space and a canteen, and it’s full of children who are messy and noisy like kids everywhere. But it also has meeting rooms the children can book via their phones to work on things or meet people. And next to the home economics kitchens there’s a restaurant, with a bar and beer pump. Rob’s plan for the future is to have a restaurant business in here working with students and serving the local community. “Before you know it, the students will own the catering company” he tells me. He’s clearly dreaming big, and so he should, the school is an amazing achievement, but it hasn’t always been easy. “It’s been a lot of hard work getting to this stage. We had to grow fast because we had a lot of demand, and schooling teachers not to teach is very hard!” And it’s going to get harder as Rob develops and expands both the school and teaching faculty. Finding, training and supporting the right staff with this highly different approach to education takes time. “I tell my staff, ‘don’t ask me if this is a good idea. Do it for a week and ask the children if it’s a good idea. Because what I don’t do is manage people, they can do that themselves. Our teachers work five days, four days with kids, and on the fifth day I don’t allow them to work with kids, they have to observe other teachers and give them feedback. And if they do that enough I say ‘get out of the school’, go to a museum, go to a laboratory, go to a business and tell us what you found there. That’s what school is for, we have to get kids out there, because we think that the most knowledge is outside the school not inside.” So where does all this lead? Well if you look at the skills employers constantly cry out for: empathy, communication, teamwork, agility, flexibility, and the ability to design and make solutions to multidisciplinary problems, a traditional education barely offers students any of that. Instead, there are lots of dates, facts and formulas to remember. The children at Agora are different, like us adults they have the world’s information in their pocket, but crucially, they have the wherewithal to make sense of it, synthesise and use it as and when they need it. And chief among their soft skills is a sense of confidence in their abilities to tackle problems and communicate with adults and each other. That is what work will be in the future, the human things that machines can’t do. Agora and other changemaker schools are giving their students the best possible skills and experience to do that. “I’m not doing this for children in our school, I’m doing it for children everywhere. I want every child to do this. I hate having a waiting list, but to get the staff at the right level, that takes time” says Rob. “But everyone can learn this, anyone can do this.” Forget what you know about teaching If you’d like to hear more about Rob’s vision on what education and learning could be, he very kindly let me video him doing a presentation in his office. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Fds4aNkgUQ  www.pi-top.com

To understand schools, we must view them in historical perspective.

When we see that children everywhere are required by law to go to school, that almost all schools are structured in the same way, and that our society goes to a great deal of trouble and expense to provide such schools, we tend naturally to assume that there must be some good, logical reason for all this. Perhaps if we didn't force children to go to school, or if schools operated much differently, children would not grow up to be competent adults. Perhaps some really smart people have figured all this out and have proven it in some way, or perhaps alternative ways of thinking about child development and education have been tested and have failed.

Studies on Self Directed Education (SDE) schools and its graduates show that normal, average children become educated through their own play and exploration, without adult direction or prodding, and go on to be fulfilled, effective adults in the larger culture. Instead of providing direction and prodding, the SDE schools provide a rich setting within which to play, explore, and experience democracy first hand; and it does that at lower expense and with less trouble for all involved than is required to operate standard schools. So why aren't most schools like that?

If we want to understand why standard schools are what they are, we have to abandon the idea that they are products of logical necessity or scientific insight. They are, instead, products of history. Schooling, as it exists today, only makes sense if we view it from a historical perspective. And so, as a first step toward explaining why schools are what they are, I present here, in a nutshell, an outline of the history of education, from the beginning of humankind until now. Most scholars of educational history would use different terms than I use here, but I doubt that they would deny the overall accuracy of the sketch. In fact, I have used the writings of such scholars to help me develop the sketch.

In the beginning, for hundreds of thousands of years, children educated themselves through self-directed play and exploration.

In relation to the biological history of our species, schools are very recent institutions. For hundreds of thousands of years, before the advent of agriculture, we lived as hunter-gatherers. The evidence from anthropology is that children in hunter-gatherer cultures learned what they needed to know to become effective adults through their own play and exploration. The strong drives in children to play and explore presumably came about, during our evolution as hunter-gatherers, to serve the needs of education. Adults in hunter-gatherer cultures allowed children almost unlimited freedom to play and explore on their own because they recognized that those activities are children's natural ways of learning.

With the rise of agriculture, and later of industry, children became forced laborers. Play and exploration were suppressed. Wilfulness, which had been a virtue, became a vice that had to be beaten out of children.

The invention of agriculture, beginning 10,000 years ago in some parts of the world and later in other parts, set in motion a whirlwind of change in people's ways of living. The hunter-gatherer way of life had been skill-intensive and knowledge-intensive, but not labour-intensive. To be effective hunters and gatherers, people had to acquire a vast knowledge of the plants and animals on which they depended and of the landscapes within which they foraged. They also had to develop great skill in crafting and using the tools of hunting and gathering. They had to be able to take initiative and be creative in finding foods and tracking game. However, they did not have to work long hours; and the work they did was exciting, not dreary. Anthropologists have reported that the hunter-gatherer groups they studied did not distinguish between work and play--essentially all of life was understood as play.

Agriculture gradually changed all that. With agriculture, people could produce more food, which allowed them to have more children. Agriculture also allowed people (or forced people) to live in permanent dwellings, where their crops were planted, rather than live a nomadic life, and this in turn allowed people to accumulate property. But these changes occurred at a great cost in labour. While hunter-gatherers skilfully harvested what nature had grown, farmers had to plough, plant, cultivate, tend their flocks, and so on. Successful farming required long hours of relatively unskilled, repetitive labour, much of which could be done by children. With larger families, children had to work in the fields to help feed their younger siblings, or they had to work at home to help care for those siblings. Children's lives changed gradually from the free pursuit of their own interests to increasingly more time spent at work that was required to serve the rest of the family.

Agriculture and the associated ownership of land and accumulation of property also created, for the first time in history, clear status differences. People who did not own land became dependent on those who did. Also, landowners discovered that they could increase their own wealth by getting other people to work for them. Systems of slavery and other forms of servitude developed. Those with wealth could become even wealthier with the help of others who depended on them for survival. All this culminated with feudalism in the Middle Ages, when society became steeply hierarchical, with a few kings and lords at the top and masses of slaves and serfs at the bottom. Now the lot of most people, children included, was servitude. The principal lessons that children had to learn were obedience, suppression of their own will, and the show of reverence toward lords and masters. A rebellious spirit could well result in death.

In the Middle Ages, lords and masters had no qualms about physically beating children into submission. For example, in one document from the late 14th or early 15th century, a French count advised that nobles' huntsmen should "choose a boy servant as young as seven or eight" and that "...this boy should be beaten until he has a proper dread of failing to carry out his masters orders."[1] The document went on to list a prodigious number of chores that the boy would perform daily and noted that he would sleep in a loft above the hounds at night in order to attend to the dogs' needs.

With the rise of industry and of a new bourgeoisie class, feudalism gradually subsided, but this did not immediately improve the lives of most children. Business owners, like landowners, needed laborers and could profit by extracting as much work from them as possible with as little compensation as possible. Everyone knows of the exploitation that followed and still exists in many parts of the world. People, including young children, worked most of their waking hours, seven days a week, in beastly conditions, just to survive. The labour of children was moved from fields, where there had at least been sunshine, fresh air, and some opportunities to play, into dark, crowded, dirty factories. In England, overseers of the poor commonly farmed out paupers' children to factories, where they were treated as slaves. Many thousands of them died each year of diseases, starvation, and exhaustion. Not until the 19th century did England pass laws limiting child labour. In 1883, for example, new legislation forbade textile manufacturers from employing children under the age of 9 and limited the maximum weekly work hours to 48 for 10- to 12-year-olds and to 69 for 13- to 17-year-olds [2].

In sum, for several thousand years after the advent of agriculture, the education of children was, to a considerable degree, a matter squashing their wilfulness in order to make them good laborers. A good child was an obedient child, who suppressed his or her urge to play and explore and dutifully carried out the orders of adult masters. Such education, fortunately, was never fully successful. The human instincts to play and explore are so powerful that they can never be fully beaten out of a child. But certainly, the philosophy of education throughout that period, to the degree that it could be articulated, was the opposite of the philosophy that hunter-gatherers had held for hundreds of thousands of years earlier.

For various reasons, some religious and some secular, the idea of universal, compulsory education arose and gradually spread. Education was understood as inculcation.

As industry progressed and became somewhat more automated, the need for child labour declined in some parts of the world. The idea began to spread that childhood should be a time for learning, and schools for children were developed as places of learning. The idea and practice of universal, compulsory public education developed gradually in Europe, from the early 16th century on into the 19th. It was an idea that had many supporters, who all had their own agendas concerning the lessons that children should learn.

Much of the impetus for universal education came from the emerging Protestant religions. Martin Luther declared that salvation depends on each person's own reading of the Scriptures. A corollary, not lost on Luther, was that each person must learn to read and must also learn that the Scriptures represent absolute truths and that salvation depends on understanding those truths. Luther and other leaders of the Reformation promoted public education as Christian duty, to save souls from eternal damnation. By the end of the 17th century, Germany, which was the leader in the development of schooling, had laws in most of its states requiring that children attend school; but the Lutheran church, not the state, ran the schools [3].

In America, in the mid 17th century, Massachusetts became the first colony to mandate schooling, the clearly stated purpose of which was to turn children into good Puritans. Beginning in 1690, children in Massachusetts and adjacent colonies learned to read from the New England Primer, known colloquially as "The Little Bible of New England" [4]. It included a set of short rhymes to help children learn the alphabet, beginning with, "In Adam's Fall, We sinned all," and ending with, "Zacchaeus he, Did climb the tree, His Lord to see." The Primer also included the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, the Ten Commandments, and various lessons designed to instil in children a fear of God and a sense of duty to their elders.

Employers in industry saw schooling as a way to create better workers. To them, the most crucial lessons were punctuality, following directions, tolerance for long hours of tedious work, and a minimal ability to read and write. From their point of view (though they may not have put it this way), the duller the subjects taught in schools the better.

As nations gelled and became more centralized, national leaders saw schooling as means of creating good patriots and future soldiers. To them, the crucial lessons were about the glories of the fatherland, the wondrous achievements and moral virtues of the nation's founders and leaders, and the necessity to defend the nation from evil forces elsewhere.

Into this mix we must add reformers who truly cared about children, whose messages may ring sympathetically in our ears today. These are people who saw schools as places for protecting children from the damaging forces of the outside world and for providing children with the moral and intellectual grounding needed to develop into upstanding, competent adults. But they too had their agenda for what children should learn. Children should learn moral lessons and disciplines, such as Latin and mathematics, that would exercise their minds and turn them into scholars.

So, everyone involved in the founding and support of schools had a clear view about what lessons children should learn in school. Quite correctly, nobody believed that children left to their own devices, even in a rich setting for learning, would all learn just exactly the lessons that they (the adults) deemed to be so important. All of them saw schooling as inculcation, the implanting of certain truths and ways of thinking into children's minds. The only known method of inculcation, then as well as now, is forced repetition and testing for memory of what was repeated.

With the rise of schooling, people began to think of learning as children's work. The same power-assertive methods that had been used to make children work in fields and factories were quite naturally transferred to the classroom.

Repetition and memorization of lessons is tedious work for children, whose instincts urge them constantly to play freely and explore the world on their own. Just as children did not adapt readily to labouring in fields and factories, they did not adapt readily to schooling. This was no surprise to the adults involved. By this point in history, the idea that children's own wilfulness had any value was pretty well forgotten. Everyone assumed that to make children learn in school the children's wilfulness would have to be beaten out of them. Punishments of all sorts were understood as intrinsic to the educational process. In some schools, children were permitted certain periods of play (recess), to allow them to let off steam; but play was not considered to be a vehicle of learning. In the classroom, play was the enemy of learning.

A prominent attitude of eighteenth century school authorities toward play is reflected in John Wesley's rules for Wesleyan schools, which included the statement: "As we have no play days, so neither do we allow any time for play on any day; for he that plays as a child will play as a man."[5]

The brute force methods long used to keep children on task on the farm or in the factory were transported into schools to make children learn. Some of the underpaid, ill-prepared schoolmasters were clearly sadistic. One master in Germany kept records of the punishments he meted out in 51 years of teaching, a partial list of which included: "911,527 blows with a rod, 124,010 blows with a cane, 20,989 taps with a ruler, 136,715 blows with the hand, 10,235 blows to the mouth, 7,905 boxes on the ear, and 1,118,800 blows on the head"[6]. Clearly, that master was proud of all the educating he had done.

In his autobiography, John Bernard, a prominent eighteenth-century Massachusetts minister, described approvingly how he himself, as a child, was beaten regularly by his schoolmaster [7]. He was beaten because of his irresistible drive to play; he was beaten when he failed to learn; he was even beaten when his classmates failed to learn. Because he was a bright boy, he was put in charge of helping the others learn, and when they failed to recite a lesson properly he was beaten for that. His only complaint was that one classmate deliberately flubbed his lessons in order to see him beaten. He solved that problem, finally, by giving the classmate "a good drubbing" when the school day was over and threatening more drubbings in the future. Those were the good old days.

In recent times, the methods of schooling have become less harsh, but basic assumptions have not changed. Learning continues to be defined as children's work, and power assertive means are used to make children do that work.

In the 19th and 20th centuries, public schooling gradually evolved toward what we all recognize today as conventional schooling. The methods of discipline became more humane, or at least less corporal; the lessons became more secular; the curriculum expanded, as knowledge expanded, to include an ever-growing list of subjects; and the number of hours, days, and years of compulsory schooling increased continuously. School gradually replaced fieldwork, factory work, and domestic chores as the child's primary job. Just as adults put in their 8-hour day at their place of employment, children today put in their 6-hour day at school, plus another hour or more of homework, and often more hours of lessons outside of school. Over time, children's lives have become increasingly defined and structured by the school curriculum. Children now are almost universally identified by their grade in school, much as adults are identified by their job or career.

Schools today are much less harsh than they were, but certain premises about the nature of learning remain unchanged: Learning is hard work; it is something that children must be forced to do, not something that will happen naturally through children's self-chosen activities. The specific lessons that children must learn are determined by professional educators, not by children, so education today is still, as much as ever, a matter of inculcation (though educators tend to avoid that term and use, falsely, terms like "discovery").

Clever educators today might use "play" as a tool to get children to enjoy some of their lessons, and children might be allowed some free playtime at recess (though even this is decreasing in very recent times), but children's own play is certainly understood as inadequate as a foundation for education. Children whose drive to play is so strong that they can't sit still for lessons are no longer beaten; instead, they are medicated.

School today is the place where all children learn the distinction that hunter-gatherers never knew--the distinction between work and play. The teacher says, "you must do your work and then you can play." Clearly, according to this message, work, which encompasses all of school learning, is something that one does not want to do but must; and play, which is everything that one wants to do, has relatively little value. That, perhaps, is the leading lesson of our method of schooling. If children learn nothing else in school, they learn the difference between work and play and that learning is work, not play.

In this posting I have tried to explain how the history of humanity has led to the development of schools as we know them today. In my next posting I will discuss some reasons why modern attempts to reform schools in basic ways have been so ineffective.

By Peter Gray , Ph.D., research professor at Boston College and author of the book Free to Learn (Basic Books) and Psychology .

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Notes

1. Quoted by Orme, N. (2001), Medieval children, p 315.
2. Mulhern, J. (1959), A history of education: A social interpretation, 2nd edition.
3. Again, Mulhern (1959).
4. Gutek, G. L. (1991), An historical introduction to American education, 2nd edition.
5. Quoted by Mullhern (1959, p 383).
6. Again, in Mullhern (1959, p 383).
7. From “Autobiography of the Rev. John Bernard,” Collections of the Massachusetts Historical Society, 3rd Ser., 5 [1836]: 178-182. Extracted in J. Martin (Ed.) (2007), Children in Colonial America.

As a kindergartener, I went to school because I didn’t know how to do anything but what the adults in my life commanded. As an elementary and middle schooler, I went to school because I’d never been presented with another option. As a high schooler, I go to school because I’m afraid that if I don’t, I’ll be a failure.

Never have I gone to school with the intent of being educated; anything learned at school is merely a byproduct, and any real passion is crushed into something that can fit in the bubbles of a Scantron test. The goal of the school system is not to produce innovative individuals. It is to churn out efficient, but not empowered, employees. John D. Rockefeller, creator of the General Education Board, once said, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.” ¹ Although this was stated well over a century ago, it may as well serve as the moral and intellectual compass of modern American schooling.

Students are discouraged from expressing any distaste for their schooling at a young age. Kids who berate the fact that they are forced into spending seven hours locked in a room with twenty other children, being taught how and what to think, are labelled trouble makers and treated as problems to be dealt with similarly to a rodent skirting across a clean kitchen floor.

Kids who go to school lose their passion for learning at a young age, and by the time they reach middle school, their curiosity and creativity has been graded into submission. There is no evidence supporting the claim that students need grades to learn efficiently; most children have learned to speak and walk before entering kindergarten, and they have done so without each minor accomplishment being given a letter grade. Many begin reading and writing by three, and four-year-olds can count, recognize different shapes, and add and subtract some numbers, yet they don’t begin kindergarten, and by extension, formal grading, until age five. However, 68 percent of students surveyed believed that grading was a necessary part of education.

What is the benefit of being graded? It doesn’t improve students’ ability to learn, and it certainly doesn’t impassion them, rather its purpose is to judge them: to weed out those who it deems subpar through failing them or through shoving them into under-funded special education programmes, to elevate those who conform by rewarding them with gold star stickers and A grades, and to streamline the youth into a hive mind so as to simplify it all.

If students went to class only when they wanted to, went to the restroom without asking, openly conversed without permission, and exercised their right to express themselves freely, most schools would ascend into unmanageability. Administrators would no longer be able to control the students; kids who sit quietly and do what they are told are more easily regulated than intelligent individuals who elect to govern themselves. Alexander Khost, a youth rights advocate and founder of Voice of the Children, highlights the primary issue with conventional schooling, saying, “It boils down to one issue that a man named Alexander Sutherland Neill stated about a hundred years ago. That is, that the school should fit the child rather than the child fit the school.” School isn’t built to accommodate the needs of the student; it is built to accommodate the needs of itself at the expense of the student.

When asked about the efficiency of the school system anonymously, one hundred students I surveyed at a public high school said:

• It sucks. (written five times)
• Probably rigged, doesn’t benefit the students, just the people in charge.
• It’s f*cked.
• It doesn’t evolve and it teaches us to be robots.
• It also makes us feel dumb in some ways, like a fish being told to climb a tree.
• It mostly just teaches us to memorize things.
• There’s too much pressure on tests and not enough time to learn things.
• Honestly it’s crap.
• We focus so much on the grades and not on the outcome.
• They want their children to be straight A students.
• They shove everything about our future up our butts and never talk about how to get to that future.
• There’s way too much useless stuff that we just learn for the standardized test, instead of stuff that would be helpful in life.
• It is more about passing than learning.
• It’s very backwards and overwhelming.
• The school system has everyone stressed and getting mental disorders.
• Garbage.
• It blows.
• Sucks balls.
• 
  

Students know they’re being cheated out of an education by the politicians who designed this system and by the administrators who enforce it. Their opinions are just as valid as those of an adult, yet they are brushed aside as the edgy complaints of a typical teen. Students are not taught that they have an unalienable right to speak their truth and to control their own bodies and actions. Why does a bell have more of a right to control your time than you do? Why does a teacher have the right to take your personal possessions if they deem them distracting? Why are kids who commandeer themselves slapped with labels like “problem child” and “trouble maker” and told that they’ll end up flipping burgers?

There is no answer that can justify indoctrinating children into believing that they lack the right to control their own lives, yet this system is ingrained in our society as the only true way to be educated and prepared for adult life.

In the past 125 years since this system was founded, humans have developed computers, smartphones, internet, solar panels, air conditioning, and hundreds of other things that we wouldn’t think of living without in 2018. And with these inventions, we’ve thrown out things like showering only twice a year, measles and mumps, and washing laundry by hand. It’s time to add this school system to that pile.

John Taylor Gatto, former schoolteacher and author of Weapons of Mass Instruction , notes that schooling is becoming useless in today’s world, saying, “I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my 25 years of teaching — that schools and schooling are becoming increasingly irrelevant in the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders.” ²

The world has changed a lot in the past century.

A century ago, John D. Rockefeller, founder of the General Education Board, said, “I don’t want a nation of thinkers. I want a nation of workers.” His words are echoed by almost every school in the United States. And in 2018, they’re dead wrong. Manufacturing jobs are obsolete, as are coal jobs. Retail jobs are following, and none of them are coming back. The wealth of all human knowledge is at our fingertips.

The youth of today will not succeed through obedience and conformity, or with an education suited to a factory worker in 1890, rather through innovation, ingenuity, and creativity. Khost says, “Standardized tests produce standardized minds. And the world doesn’t need standardized minds; it needs people who come alive.” I asked Khost what advice he would give to students who hate school, and to that, he said:

If every day of your life is being dictated by someone else, there is something wrong there. This is true whether you’re twelve or forty-two. And so, if you do not like school, you should start considering no longer going. Remember that life is a balance and doing so will definitely have consequences that also might suck. But I would much rather be fighting for my rights and struggling than complying with someone else’s oppression of me and struggling.

Rebellion sounds exciting, but in the end, rebellion means taking responsibility for your own life and your own decisions, which is actually quite burdensome. That responsibility starts with a really really hard question: what do you want to actually do with your time? And then it gets even harder because you actually have to go do it. And a lot of the time, what you thought you wanted isn’t really what you even wanted. And then you’re not only back to square one but you have a lot of people (especially adults) sitting around telling you, “I told you so!” This is what is called failure. And failure is absolutely fantastic! No, really. An expert is any one person who has made all of the mistakes in one concentrated field and now knows how to not make them any more. Fall flat on your face. Then pick yourself up and do it over and over and over again. Follow passion. Passion is real. And all of the nine to fiver career oriented folks out there who say otherwise are just jaded and forgot how to joyously fall flat on their faces with failure.

Have a dream so worthy that you would die for it. That is passion, that is worth pursuing. And if you’re not doing that and people are holding you back from doing that, something is wrong, go fix it. Now!

And contrary to the sea of blank faces you’ll see if you walk into an average high school classroom, students are passionate.

I asked students what they were truly passionate about learning.

Their responses ranged from “how the world works” to “music, history and science.” Some said, “not sure,” while others said “anything I can.” Students are passionate about languages, programming, maths, psychology, law, writing, computers, and so much more. They want to learn about money, economics, space, finance. One student says, “I’m not really sure because we’re only taught four main things.”

Another states, “I’m just getting through it so I can get a job and start my life. Anything STEM-related.” They are curious and intelligent, and they are being held back by a system that does not value them. One says, “I’m passionate about learning so many different things, I’m not even sure if I know everything I’m passionate about. With the school system now, they don’t allow those passions to develop because right after an interesting unit, you just move on and never talk about the topic again.”

If you walk into a classroom of kindergarteners, they are eager to learn. They ask hundreds of odd questions. Why is the sky blue? Why does it get dark at night? Why do cats have tails? What happens if I eat food I found on the floor? If you walk into a classroom of high schoolers, chances are they won’t even notice you’ve entered.

Over 20 percent of the students I surveyed said they learned nothing at all or very little during the average school day, and 52 percent said they learned only some things. One student said, “I learn how to juul in bathrooms.” When asked about how frequently they are bored during school, over half said they were bored over 70 percent of the time, with only 36 percent being bored under half the time.

What happens between kindergarten and high school that results in all the zeal for learning being sucked from the classroom? They learn that their passions are just hobbies, that the things they love doing are useless compared to their homework, and that the only way they can succeed is to stifle themselves into mediocrity.

Students want to learn. They just don’t want to be schooled.

[by Jane Arisi ]

[1] One Nation Under Siege. Directed by William Lewis, BridgeStone Media Group and William Lewis Films 2006.
[2] John Taylor Gatto. Weapons of Mass Instruction. New Society Publishers, 2010.

Jane Arisi is a writer, artist, and high school student.

On the 25th of June 2018, along with the newly elected Members of Parliament, I had the privilege to be part of the historic moment when Asgardia’s first Head of Nation, Dr Igor Ashurbeyli, stated at his inauguration ceremony at the Hofburg Palace in Vienna that "Access to outer space should be a human right, beyond the control of any Earthly nation!"

Until today, the Outer Space Treaty that underpins international space law stated that responsibility and liability for objects sent into space lies with the nation that launched them. But the geopolitical landscape of space activity has changed since the Outer Space Treaty was drawn up in the 1960s and as from today, Asgardia is ready to set a new precedent, shifting responsibility to the “space nation” itself.

As Dr Ashurbeyli said, “the existing state agencies represent interests of their own countries and there are not so many countries in the world that have those space agencies." Therefore, it is essential for that to change. And this is where Asgardia comes to revolutionise the way people around the globe are doing politics by setting an example and bringing to life the vision of its Head of Nation, Dr Igor Ashurbeyli, who states: “The ultimate aim is to create a legal platform to ensure protection of planet Earth and to provide access to space technologies for those who do not have that access at the moment.”

I truly believe that world peace starts within us as individuals!

I believe each and every one of us can and should make a difference in the world and that starts by being the best version of ourselves because when an individual is happy and confident and has an inner peace it ripples out to the people around them.

Politics is about power over others, I want people to believe they have power over themselves, over their own lives and that starts with educating children to think differently.

For the world to be a better place we all need to learn about how we can have inner peace... how to be happy and confident; we need to learn about gratitude and forgiveness and kindness, how to harness the power of their mind; we need to acknowledge that we have the ability to change the world simply by being our best Self, by being who we authentically are rather than trying to fit into who society thinks we should be; we need to accept that we are one world and we can make it a better place for everyone to live in.

Asgardia brings to the world a new way of doing politics, a new vision about doing research, a new philosophy promoting the most elevated values to the humankind. Under the circumstances, it is only natural for Asgardia to also encourage a new way of educating children, in order to prepare the new generations to continue and take further the wonderful work we are doing today . I see Asgardia as a unique opportunity for people from all over the world to understand and adhere to the idea that the human race is not meant to fight and compete against itself, but to grow and develop in peace, together, as part of a Universe/Multiverse, with immutable rules of life.

As Asgardian Educators, I believe we have a duty of honour to prepare the new generations for the revolutionary model of our new space nation , involving children (including early ages) into self-directed forms of learning. Children engaged in self-directed learning are marvellous. Their drives to explore, understand, play with, and master those things, and their joy when they succeed, are palpable. Such a child is fully alive to the world and to learning. This is what education already looks like for children who have not yet reached “school age.” It can look like this for ALL children. And Asgardia should set an example!

Because Asgardians will be in the beginning bonded to a terrestrial state and will have dual citizenship with Asgardia and their terrestrial state, Asgardian Education Hubs (AEH) will be built throughout terrestrial communities.  In those AEHs, children—and adults—could come to play, explore, make new friends, and learn. It might provide computers, art supplies, books, and athletic and science equipment; there might also be a gymnasium, as well as fields and trees for outdoor play. Perhaps it would be an extension of the local public library and park systems. The people using the AEHs could form mixed-age groups to pursue special interests and learn from each other. Classes might also be offered in music, art, athletics, math, business management, wood-working, or anything else people want to study or practice in a structured way. But there would be no requirements or stress-inducing comparisons among people.

Any child or adult with an Internet connection has acc ess to a world of information. So , self-directed education has never been easier. But it has also never been more essential to success. The rapidly changing economy of Asgardia will put a premium on self-motivation, innovation, and the ability to acquire new skills and evaluate new ideas. People develop these traits when they are empowered to seek out and think about information that is similar to their own real questions. Fortunately, this empowerment is natural to all human beings; it exists in every child fro m birth.

As Asgardians, citizens of the first space nation in history of humankind, we have a moral duty to lead by example. An important thing to keep in mind is that a mass-scale transformation that puts people in charge of their own learning is not only possible but inevitable. Scientists have found that a tipping point occurs when some 3 percent of people adopt a new belief; after that, it spreads like wildfire. At that point, standard public and private schools that have resisted change will either have to reinvent themselves or become irrelevant. We should not forget that our Head of Nation, Dr Igor Ashurbeyli has stated in his Solemn Speech of Inauguration, that Asgardia will aim to reach a population of 150 million, precisely for this reason!

The journey to the tipping point has already begun and is gaining momentum. The only question is how quickly we can get there, for the sake of our children and for the future of our space nation, Asgardia!