# grow: thoughts about mentoring and schools.

i feel that there's still a lot of undereducation, even illiteracy in places where things should really be much better. it seems to me that there are people who are not that interested in education and the more civilized way of life which in turn leads to another generation of theirs with the same qualities. often these people have completely different culture and lifestyle compared to the traditional western people. the traditional education experience simply doesn't work for them which is a loss for both them and everyone else in the society.

by "traditional education" i mean something where kids go to school, passively learn a fixed curriculum for about 6 hours a day (they sit at their little desks and listen to the teacher all day long), and then get examined and so on. people then keep repeating classes until they get a passing grade, or get bored of the school and simply don't go anymore. usually such classes contain a lot of people which causes problems around managing the classroom and around the boredom and the pacing of the material.

every person develops at a different pace, has different interests, needs different environment for effective learning, needs different psychological support to make sense of the world. i think the traditional one size for all system doesn't really scale well to diverse groups.

we also need to acknowledge that not everyone wants to be a doctor, engineer, professor, or something other that needs high education. some people just want to stay at home (e.g. to raise kids) or just have some simple non-demanding job that allows them a comfortable life. given the technological prowess the world has, it should probably be fine to not work at all.

i think the only things that everyone should know are the following:

i think that's about it what we should universally expect from all the people. anything on top of that should be at the person's own discretion. most of the above cannot be tested with standardized tests. (standardized tests are dumb on many levels but i don't want to get into that.) in fact there's no standardized way to teach all of the above, each person would need unique attention over many years to ensure achieving all of the above.

in order to achieve that, i think each kid needs a mentor who will appropriately challenge the kid and ensure their growth. we usually expect that the teachers do this for us but that doesn't really scale for most schools.

i'd make "mentor" an officially acknowledged title that people can wear. and i'd allow anyone to become a mentor after some short training. so if you are a bored stay at home mom, then you could sign up to mentor a few kids around the block (you could mentor your own kids but if the kids have a problem with you then you are robbing them from a truly 3rd party, neutral help.)

the mentor's task would be to ensure regular reflection in people. one can even formalize this. i'd expect that the mentor and the mentee would create a document together on a regular timeframe (no more than 5 months) that has a short answer to these prompts:

even a sentence's worth of answer is enough. the point here is to ask the question so that it triggers the reflection. this can prevent people going on autopilot all the time.

the last prompt about other people is for the mentor to solicit feedback about the mentee from other people at their own leisure time. this is to ensure that the various bubble and bias effects are somewhat smaller.

the answers to these questions would be relatively private. however to ensure accountability, the mentors would need to occasionally report to some mentor managers. these managers would be well experienced mentors that know what to look for and how to improve mentoring so they would review these answers for their reports. this means the mentor's manager would also have access to the answers.

i'd mandate everyone to have a mentor and to have such reflection documents written regularly. the nice thing about anybody easily becoming a mentor is that each mentee can then easily find a culturally similar mentor who has then a much higher chance to really connect with the mentee. (one of the ongoing expectations of the mentors would be to find a better mentor for the mentee if possible. mentor managers could help a lot with this.)

the mentor and mentees would regularly meet (e.g. weekly even). it doesn't have to be a formal meeting. they might go for a walk, coffee, gym, videogame arcade, whatever that really makes it easy to talk for the people. mentee would then tell about their ongoing struggles and the mentor would then challenge the mentee to overcome them and perhaps intervene or help out if the mentee has too large problems. the mentor can also suggest new things to try if the mentee is not sure what to do.

such mentorship shouldn't necessarily end at 18 years old. in fact this should be a lifelong thing. each citizen should have access to a neutral mentor (so ideally somebody with whom you have no conflict of interest with any topic). i'm not saying this should be mandatory, just a civil right. i mean government (or something) should ensure an active network of freely available mentors for consultation. stuff like this might already exists (e.g. in the form of self organized groups) but it can be quite hard to find and consider such things if you had never been exposed to such things before (and this is why i'd make it mandatory for teenagers at least).

now back to education. thanks to all the technological advancements a lot of new options have opened up when it comes to education. for instance we no longer need traditional lectures. people wanting lectures can just watch videos on the internet instead. and some of those videos (e.g. khan academy stuff) is much better quality than your average teacher could ever do whilst trying to maintain order in a classroom. learners can pause, rewind, alter the speed of such videos which makes it much easier to follow the content.

this doesn't eliminate the classrooms though. i think classrooms are still good for practicing together, asking questions, clearing up uncertainties about a certain topic. sometimes you don't even need a teacher, a group of similarly interested students can just get together and help each other understand some study materials.

so this means that schools would continue to exist and students can go there to learn all sorts of things. but what you learn there is mostly up to you. it is your mentor who nudges you to pick up interesting stuff and some stuff outside from your comfort zone too. it should be fine to not study anything and just play table tennis or to wrestle with others all day long too. the important point here is to ensure everyone can find something here that can occupy them rather than leaving people unsupervised and then having them go on some antisocial rampage.

i'd imagine that such schools could start when the kids become teenagers and until that time a somewhat less organized kindergarten like environment would be enough. however smarter kids could easily go earlier to a school like that if they feel like ready. i wouldn't put an upper age limit how long can people stay there. it should be possible even for adults to go back and learn with kids if they wish so. not sure how weird that would be.

i wouldn't give mandatory tests to the kids here. however it should be possible for the kids to have 1:1s with the teachers where the teacher tries to figure out the weaknesses of the kid. this wouldn't be graded and it would be solely for the kid's own development.

i think all sorts of kids could thrive here. the smart kid who simply soaks everything could just take all the modules. the one kid who has interest in one topic only and zones out on everything else can just learn that single topic and perhaps occasionally read about or listen to other topics on a mentor's prompt. the student who has no interest in learning or is antisocial: such kids usually don't thrive in traditional schools. at least in a place like this they might slowly learn to control their impulses if nothing else rather than let them develop uncontrollably.

in the old days teachers could simply use physical force to intimidate people into compliance. this might have given the illusion that schools worked better in the past. students these days know their rights very much so teachers need more subtle ways to make the school a nice place. i think people just need real good, personal guidance and that's why i talked so much about mentoring above.

i think schools like this already exist even with some mentoring (e.g. budapest school, i believe) but they aren't very mainstream. but i think all schools will slowly evolve in this direction over time. kids these days can already take lectures from internet. lectures can become the "homework" and classrooms can become more interactive practice or discussions groups if they haven't already. thanks to all instantaneous communication, calendar and scheduling software a school can decide for more flexible classroom schedules so kids can have more freedom to rearrange their week as they see fit. there's no need to centrally plan it all. this also opens up possibilties for the schools to provide more optional courses and kids can then focus more on their areas of interest.

in general i'm quite optimistic about the education in the future. but i expect the above changes will come only after a generation or two: the world is different than what it was when i grew up. to fully embrace it, i think you need people who were grown up in it. that's why i expect that all we need to do is to wait until the today's younglings start leading schools in the future.

published on 2021-01-15

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