Ivan Beeckmans's List: Alternative Schools

• Allowing this freedom would mean that we offer students three years of further education and so forcing them to stay in school till 19. The first year could be offered free from restrictive success criteria. Subjects wouldn't have to worry about students reaching a grade or even completing the course; finding a subject/s to love would be the only mark of success the students need worry about. Students would be free to spend their first year experimenting with subject choices and qualification types. This would give them their first real options instead of the pseudo options that they are given at 13.

  This still won't suit everyone; we will still be faced with young people who can't fit into the school model. As such, after the first year in the new model, these students can focus on employment or training but with the peace of mind that all options were explored.

• “The premium has moved from problem solving to problem finding as a skill,” Pink said. “Right now, especially in the commercial world, if I know exactly what my problem is, I can find the solution to my own problem. I don’t need someone to help me. Where I need help is when I don’t know what my problem is or when I’m wrong about what my problem is. Problem solving is an analytical, deductive kind of skill. The phrase ‘problem finding’ comes out of research on artists. It’s more of a conceptual kind of skill.”
• “Most of our education is heavily, heavily, heavily standardized,” Pink said. “So, 11-year-olds are all together in one room. No 10-year-olds, and certainly no 13-year-olds. And [assuming that] all of those 11-year-olds are the same, we’re going to put them all together in a 35-kid classroom. Every educator knows that doesn’t work well. Every educator knows about differentiated instruction. The idea that you treat everybody the same way is foolish, and yet the headwinds in education are very much toward routines, right answer, standardization.”
• “One of the things that I see as an outsider is that so much of education policy seems designed for the convenience of adults rather than the education of children,”
• Why do we have standardized testing? Because it’s unbelievably cheap. If you want to give real evaluations to kids, they have to be personalized, tailored to the kids, at the unit of one. Standardized testing: totally easy, totally cheap, and scales. Convenient for politicians and taxpayers.”
• Games have the potential to make math more relevant or engaging, Pink said, but if they lead to standardized thinking about getting to the one right answer, that can be problematic.
• The standardized model of education is in dire need of an upgrade, producing students with skills that won’t serve them well outside the boundaries of school. Students who are driven by external rewards (grades, trophies), will be fare worse than those who are self-directed, motivated by freedom, challenge, and purpose,

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