Truth and Dare

Steve,

Thank you so much for your thoughtful, expansive, nonTwitter response to my little Tweet! I love the vision you’ve detailed: open space, collaborative, personalized, unbounded, public and private, flexible, agile, reflective, technological—it’s truly everything the 21st century calls for in learners, doers, makers.

I would add that I would want the school to be diverse in every way, a bubbling, burbling cauldron of American democracy in action. I would want a variety of wraparound services, so that students could grow their social-emotional selves, as well as their maker-doer-collaborator selves. I would want students to be free to leave the school for internships, and I would want members of the creative economy to be able to cowork within the school for rotating periods. I would want whiteboard and chalkboard walls where people could brainstorm, sketch, prototype, doodle. I’d want—all opening onto each other— a graffiti wall, a game space, an atelier with a variety of making materials, a shop with a variety of tools, and at least one room of disassemblable and reassemblable stuff: the detritus of our electronic lives.

The ultimate high school program would also take advantage of the growing array of MOOCs available through Coursera and EdX and Instructure. Rather than cram students into a traffic jam of AP classes whose content they forget almost instantaneously after the exam—and for which a growing number of colleges no longer give credit—MOOCs could allow students to experience the wide world of college in the cocoon of high school.