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1/ I’ve spent the last several years deeply studying primary #education, it’s history, it’s philosophies, it’s practice. It has huge problems, as we all know intuitively and objectively. The single deepest problem which underlies all the rest is this: SCALE.
2/ It is Scaled on the level of overarching narratives related to personal growth and civic expectations. It’s Scaled at a level which doesn’t actually allow those expectations, at their best, to be fulfilled.
3/ Even the many great progressive ideas that have arisen over the last century—Montessori, Waldorf, Reggio Emilia, and more—are rendered meaningless when attempted to be applied at scale beyond a very small local context.
4/ Progressive edu ideas, when forced into scaled pedagogy and curriculum as has happened in Australia, parts of the US and the UK, become drivel. You can’t mass produce “individuality,” and the attempt to do so means waters down curriculum for no learning traction.
5/ (One stark exception is Sudbury freeschool, whose stark principle forces extreme localism and inherently cannot scale.)
6/ C-19 has exposed the fragility of school at scale, but to be honest, many of us already knew it was that fragile because we knew that there’s better ways to raise a human than through the filter of an institution and it’s government relationship.
7/ The answer is to force your Scale downward, locally. Your values, ideas, cultural, discrete actions and practiced democracy, all best happen ONLY at the local level.
8/ The emergent need for the type of education, pedagogy, curriculum, becomes emergent and exists in context such that it can NEVER be written into scalable doctrine. Two schools with seemingly vastly different philosophies may in the ground have similar embodied practices.
9/ These are concepts I’ve worked on for a long time; the word that clicked it together Scale, I caught from @normonics @nntaleb
