Alpha School: A New Approach To Education - MacKenzie Price

What's fundamentally broken about the current school model?

Oh, boy. I don't know how long your podcast is, but let me tell you the fundamental issue. Uh, the teacher in front of the classroom model of, uh, one person trying to educate many kids who are at wildly different levels of understanding, uh, just fundamentally doesn't work. And, uh, that would be the summary. Uh, there's a lot of sub-points in there. Uh, I think the other thing that we really wanna fundamentally change in our culture is the attitude about school. I think people think school is like spinach. It's good for you, but you kind of just gotta, gotta, you know, get it through and, and do that. And, uh, what I truly believe is that kids should love school, because when kids love school, it opens up the possibility to... Uh, it opens up the possibility to do so many incredible things. Uh, and that's what we're doing at our schools.

Dig deeper. What's wrong with the one person lecturing to 20, 30, 40?

Yeah. Well, you know, if you wanna go back in history, think 1,000 years ago when Socrates was tutoring Plato, who tutored Aristotle, who tutored Alexander the Great, who went on to go, uh, take over the known world at the age of 22. That tutoring system, uh, was phenomenal. But it was reserved for the very, very elite. And, uh, and, you know, education was not given to the masses. You know, fast-forward, uh, many years, uh, to the 1800s with the Industrial Revolution. Uh, we had to figure out a way to educate the masses. How could you get education to as many people as possible? But there was also another goal in mind at that point. How could you raise up compliant citizens who would listen to instruction and do as they're told so that they could go to work in the factories and, and make industry work? Um, and, you know, so that system of education, a teacher leading a group of students in a classroom, you know, came out in the 1800s. And you think about all of the industry changes across the board, except in the area of education. And if you went and visited a rural school in India or you went to the most posh boarding school in the East Coast, you would really see the same thing. You would see a teacher leading a group of students, uh, in a time-based classroom. You know, the building's nicer in one versus the other. But otherwise, you know, our education system has not changed. Uh, and we're seeing all of the kind of bad fruit that is coming from that, especially in recent years where our world is changing so quickly. And we fundamentally need to create a different type of citizen, uh, that's able to have critical s- thinking skills, is able to develop life skills. And, you know, we're not even in the traditional system developing great academic skills at this point.