This seems like a very long list of complicated and in many cases new and untested changes to the way schools usually work... which is not in itself bad, but does make the plan very risky. How many students do you imagine attend this school? Have you spoken to people who have founded a similar-sized school?
The good news is that outcomes for exciting new opt-in educational things tend to be pretty good; the bad news is that this is usually for reasons other than "the new thing works" - e.g. the families are engaged and care about education, the teachers are passionate, the school is responsive to changing conditions, etc. If your goal is large-scale educational reform I would not hold out much hope; if you'd be happy running a small niche school with flourishing students (eg) for however long it lasts, that seems achievable with hard work.
Thank you for the comment!
I agree that there are many relatively untested changes. I do not expect all of them to make it through to the end product (assuming there is one). I have no idea if it'll work, so I don't know how it will grow. Maybe 300? Certainly not 1000. Possibly 30. Coming up on my to-do list is to speak with a bunch of people in my country who have founded schools. I plan to start this in a month or so, as the school year starts here next week, so they're all pretty busy.
I want the thing to work. If the marketing goes well and 100 families want to enrol and I get some strong evidence that it's no better or worse than public school, then I wouldn't start it. I don't know how I would know for sure that it's no good without trying it, and even then I don't know how I would know, given that I'd be so invested at that point that I certainly wouldn't be seeing straight. Though if I thought (based on external sources) that it was working for the kids that attended, I'd happily keep it going with 20 kids.
In late 2023 I read Brandon Hendrickson’s book review of Kieran Egan’s book The Educated Mind on ACX. I’m a teacher and it lit a fire in me. I spent 2024 cycling with my young family and while I kept reading some Egan-related things, I didn’t really “work on it”. At some point in that year I decided to dedicate a bunch of 2025 time (around 20 hours a week) to understanding Egan’s ideas and determine what I should do with them. The big dream is to be part of revolutionising education around the world. The next step is starting an Egan school.
Because this is my first post here, I’m going to stick to one purpose: to get feedback on what LWers (imo a certain type of smart person who cares about things) think about my school and my education ideas. To this end, I welcome any comments. Please be polite, but pull no punches. If I can’t interact with reality on LW, where can I? If you have any ideas of your own that you think should be included in any good school, let me know them too.
The problem: I think of it as soft edges, which I mean as “there are things that you’re literally allowed to change about education, but because people (teachers, students, parents) are set in their ways, these changes happen in a small way at best, so progress is slow/nonexistent”.
My solution: tell people “we’re doing a different thing over here so if you want to work/attend/send your spawn at/to this school, you’ll do it this way”. This will snap them out of their local inadequate equilibrium and we can explore the landscape of educational possibilities a bit. I also not-so-secretly want this to succeed then make a template for how other people can do it easily and export it to the rest of the country/the world. As in, here’s the menu, Egan is set, but you can pick from the other options depending on what you want your school to be like and what people near you want. Here’s how to do the financial bits, the legal bits, the marketing bits, the enrollment bits, all the other bits. At the end of the day I want more variety, ie. actual options for parents. Except Egan. Everyone must eat their Egan. (I don’t really mean that, if someone wants not-Egan they should be able to have it.)
Even though the first idea was purely “make an Egan school”, I’m departing from that because I think it's not marketable/distinct enough in small city like mine and I have a bunch of other ideas (that you're welcome to tell me are bad/incompatible) that I think are obviously good.
The differences to a “normal” school:
I can test Egan/Socratic teaching and LLM use this year as a regular high school teacher. My viewpoint is that this isn’t really a science experiment because I’m just one teacher trying out some stuff, so I’m not going to pretend that it is. I just want to get an idea of if I think these things work and I want that idea to be as accurate as possible. If someone thinks they know how I could actually measure things at the start and the end (beyond a test of what they know or how they think they think), and disentangle the difference from what would have happened with an alternative 40 weeks for the kids, I’d love to hear it. Possibly I’d be picking three or four behaviours I’d like to see (eg. when someone gets stuck on a problem do they start trying effective strategies to solve it, kids can answer questions on adjacent topics because they understand rather than know) and get someone to observe at the start and end of the year.
I live in the real world as much as possible. My estimate of the base rate of people who want to start schools actually doing it is low. But everyone who does start a school, has a plan and some belief that it might happen. I’m trying to do the things that a smart person who starts a great school would do. Can a medium INT player play a high INT character? With help from some high INT players on LW, maybe?