Announcing a new kind of Montessori program.

Short version: Montessori elementary, with 2 Hour Learning (viz. Alpha) platform on the shelf as a material.

Pilot this fall in Austin. Guide is the fantastic @annamorgsmiley. @drlauramazer and I leading development.

Long version: Montessori gave us the greatest educational philosophy ever created.

A deep knowledge curriculum pushed as young as possible. A maniacal focus on sustained concentration and joy in work. A radical pro-civilization and pro-human bent. And a fundamental goal of fostering agency.

Does Alpha school get results from selection effects? Is its thesis that of every other overhyped edtech personalization thing? Is it unserious and epistemically unhygienic? Is there any evidence that it works for the median student?

Or is there something there, hiding within?

https://twitter.com/andy_matuschak/status/1931944800934416610

Before earnestly getting to know the organization a few months ago, I had similar priors to Andy’s. When I joined, more than one educator whom I greatly admired (and still admire) reach out to express bafflement.

So this is a useful excuse to articulate my positive judgment.

<pitch to parents of K8-aged children in ~Austin>

A hard constraint on my willingness to take this @gtschool job was “would I enroll my children?”

I would and I am. My 5yo daughter starts this fall.

I’d love for her to have more classmates, so allow me to share my impressions: GT School is brand new. It started in September. I have opened many schools and classrooms. This school has perhaps the best student culture of any new program I’ve ever seen.

It’s a culture of friendly ambition. The students encourage and celebrate one another’s excellences.

A story about learning a masculine role in relationships, that may perhaps be useful to people similar enough to me.

In my early 20s or so I had no real conception of differentiated gender dynamics.

I was raised to believe that gender differences were ancien régime constructs. Not as explicit ideology, as one might imagine today, just as a low-key, backgrounded, occasionally mentioned matter of course. “lol, those things are outdated and we know better now.”

A review in 23 tweets.

The first three chapters of @astupple’s book argue, amongst other things, that children should be allowed to eat ice cream and oreos, as their staple foods, as often as and for as long as they desire, and have unlimited iPad time with no YouTube limits. I’m not exaggerating. I’m not even extrapolating; ice cream and oreos are his real life examples. (Oh, also, there’s a case against bedtime—coupled to a case against schooling/daycare, partly because these things require one to wake up at a certain time, which requires bedtime.)

I would encourage anyone who is worried about this to observe their baby the morning after sleep training and ask themselves whether or not his or her behavior is indicative of my-parents-are-dead levels of trauma or really any avoidant attachment at all

I think you won’t see it

https://twitter.com/singingbirth/status/1855373618253029735

In general if the only answer to the question “what would count as evidence for this being traumatic and awful?” is “behavior in the distant developmental future”, one should liberally deploy salt grains

I’ve always bought the “writing before reading” approach to literacy on the merits of general arguments and evidence, but seeing it play out with my child, it is even better than I thought it would be. Basically there is a long stretch where very young children can have basic alphabetism—knowledge of sounds and how they commonly correspond to letters—but where they don’t yet have phonemic blending, decoding a bunch of letter sounds *quickly* to make a single word.

We gave 4yo an iPad and set it up to offer her three affordances:

1. Take pictures

2. Type in notes

3. Text with a handful of people (family, a couple of family friends)

The last one is the big hit. And it is *amazing*. It is immensely developmentally valuable. Why? Well…
…they bring together two things:

* A software keyboard, which is tool that makes writing short messages much easier for children, akin to a Montessori movable alphabet

* A very real motivational context: communicating with someone she knows

You can see this as a policy failure, which it is. But you can also see it as something deeper than that.

High school has *always* been an awkward problem. Going back to the Ancient Greeks.

K8 (or, in my view, PK8) is suitable for general education. Middle adolescence is not.

https://twitter.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1818184804891832797

The problem, to which high school is a terrible solution, is “what do we do with these kids who are quite immature but who yearn for real purpose and real life in real society?”

When the problem is phrased clearly it is obvious why high school is a terrible solution.

Many in edtech are inspired by the AI education in The Diamond Age.

The fictional edtech is a nanotech pseudointelligent book, The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer. It bonds to a child at ~4 and educates them until ~16.

Features of interest of the Primer, then general thoughts… Features:

1. Moral education.

The Primer has a fundamentally moral aim.

Its goal is to impart neo-Victorian morals (virtues and etiquette) along with a “subversive” attitude towards them (substantiated in the book). There is a clear vision for what counts as a good adult life.

Arc of this children’s book:

1. Wolves build brick house; pig destroys it with sledgehammer

2. Wolves build concrete house; pig destroys it with jackhammer

3. Wolves build steel bunker; pig destroys it with TNT

4. Wolves build house of flowers; pig smells roses, reforms

So… …like… this story genuinely seems designed to make it maximally likely for the reader to wonder “why don’t the wolves just kill the pig?”

Was asked this recently, repeating my answer here:

> How do you best help someone who does not know what to do for their career?

First I would want to be sure that you’re thinking about “career” in the right way, as that is often the blocker. The right way is something like: “career” (n.):

a series of dents you make in your universe that earn you money, competence, self-esteem, and a sense of meaning, and, further, that will gradually open up additional opportunities to make different and/or bigger dents for possibly more money and meaning

I’ve been getting asked more and more (by parents) how to approach public school if that’s the only realistic option.

Here are three (possibly incompatible) strategies.

1. Embrace the daycare function, eschew the schooling function. That is, simply don’t think of it as solving for educational needs. You handle that elsewise.

Not a theoretically optimal allocation of time, but it’s feasible. Education, especially subject matter education, only takes a couple hours a day of instructional time *at most*.

.@raygirn told me this story about his 7yo son:

He came into school one morning determined to just churn through a massive amount of spelling work.

He did spelling practice all morning, for three hours.

He skipped recess for spelling. His hand was cramping and his teachers asked him if he wanted a break.

He did not; he continued to fill page after page with carefully written, cursive challenge words.

He continued to just work on spelling through the afternoon, until his parents picked him up.

Running teacher training about agency this week.

Nothing is more important than agency. But most people get agency wrong, especially educators who lean progressive.

Some haphazard calibrations: Traditional education kills agency by removing choice and interest.

Progressive education kills agency by removing excellence and competence.

This is your periodic reminder that “organisms enjoy using their faculties well” explains more about motivation than “brains are cued to release dopamine”. “Dopamine hit” stands in for a Hume + neurobabble model of pleasure and happiness. On this model you think about these things mechanically and hydrolically, in terms of hormetically optimal dosage, in a reductionistic and atomized way.

https://twitter.com/almostmedia/status/1682238181947895808

1. Problems of education are hard and routinely underestimated or misconceived.

“Education” is different from e.g. “learning”.

Education requires, amongst other things, instructional design (which startup folks often don’t get) and quality educators (which are hard to scale).

https://twitter.com/nabeelqu/status/1673833880002887682

2. It’s hard to make money in education.
Trillions of dollars slosh around but it’s mostly locked up behind school districts and universities.

The companies that make money figure out how to sell to these bureaucracies which most startup types frankly just don’t care much about.

Montessori is an alternative, agency-centric educational approach with

* unmatched staying power (100+ years) and reach (10000+ schools)
* a unique, refined curriculum and teaching method
* deep, extensible core principles

I’m often asked how to dig in and learn more, so… Montessori’s work¹:

Intro

* Discovery of the Child²—If you read just one thing, let it be this!
* 1946 London Lectures

Curriculum

* Montessori’s Own Handbook
* Psychoarithmetic/Psychogeometry

Philosophy

* Advanced Montessori Method³, vol 1
* Education and Peace

𝕿𝕙𝕖 𝕾𝕥𝕠𝕣𝕪 𝕠𝕗 𝕰𝕕𝕦𝕔𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟

CHAPTER 1: Primates to Primary Schools

—❊—

Once upon a time there lived some poorly endowed primates.

Their young were miracles of dysfunction. Immobile, helpless, loud. Bad even at sleep, digestion. Maturing slowly, over many years. But to compensate for a prolonged and especially useless juvenile period, and a general paucity of adaptive traits and overall lack of niche, these simians enjoyed unlimited potential.

Classic minmaxing, really.

Think of a good person. A healthy person. A normal, well-functioning person. This person is living her life. She has desires and dreams. She faces challenges. She thinks about her challenges and takes steps towards her dreams.

Feeling like a shitty parent today

3mo was especially unpredictable. Couldn’t figure out a “why” more specific than “baby”.

3yo is in a mode of not listening (even for very basic communication) and it’s unclear whether it’s manipulation or a skill deficit or both or neither. So much of parenting is cyclical. Your children go through phases of tempestuous change, and then reintegration and consolidation.

You do that as a parent too, ideally in a way that is synced but realistically often with some lag.

Multiple fractal sine waves trying to harmonize