Neighborhood schools
A neighborhood school has apprenticeships that let beginners learn by doing and let experts distribute their knowledge by doing. Both create something new together. So the skill and knowledge is robust against forgetfulness, disease, old age, and death, and also gets refreshed and acted out again and embodied. There is joy in its transmission and reception, like dancing.
A school is a piece of organizational and architectural art, there are living and non-living, animate and non-animate parts. You need grand arches and statues of dead people and overflowing bookshelves and humans to activate the whole machine. Teaching artists develop, practice, create, and learn their craft. The school provides guiding principles and infrastructure. Schools are jointly owned by their teachers, who provide their experience and confidence and skill, and students who provide their enthusiasm and belief and openness. Teachers pay attention to the learning of their students, students pay attention to the knowledge refracted through their teachers and reflected in their own minds. Both groups are there because they love learning.
There should be as many schools as possible in the world, expressive of different values, cultures, styles, creeds. There should be a neighborhood school every few blocks, like a library, park, church, post office, or power substation. It’s a utility and a civic and human need. Schools should be small. If they get to be too big, they should split off and form a sibling school. They’ll stay nimble, like the educational startups that they are.
When I hear about a new school, I devour information about it. The weirder the better. Is it an empty puzzle room escape? Does everyone wear bear costumes? What are their schedules like? How do the teachers govern themselves? What does it look like, smell, taste, feel? If an alien were to walk in and look at the faces and interactions of students and teachers, as an ethnography, what would they think?
Teachers are buccaneers. When they conceive of an idea for a class, or students pull one from their collective minds and demand it be taught, they cobble together an alliance. There is some revenue from students, some booty, and they elect a captain and a division of labor and treasure. When the class is over, the alliance dissolves. If it was a good class, a good venture, the same crew may voyage together again.
The Invisible College teaches confidence for building something independent. If you need a name, a tree to hang your school off of, and an umbrella to shade it from skepticism and doubt, use us. Tell us about the school you started. I used to think schools were created by a lone visionary with superhuman willpower and belief. Now I say “let’s start a school” to trick it into being.
