• Classroom democracy, obviously there’d be limits but charging students with increasing responsibility to guide their own curriculum I think will pass a great lesson on civic participation and responsibility.

• initial due dates for assignments and tests but with the ability to resubmit for an improved grade provided you actually give it your best effort on the initial and subsequent submissions.

• Full year rotating academic schedule

• At least two teachers to a classroom

• Hunt to the ends of the earth and exterminate any waste of oxygen who has so much as breathed of the concept of “parents rights” in any tone more positive than abject condemnation and disgust.

More hobbyist assistant teachers that go into schools and engage with the children about their various real-world jobs and interests.

More experiments that are followed through to completion, with the results used to improve outcomes across the board instead of being repeated in an endless series of trials.

I went to an experimental high school in the early 1970s. Among other things they tried were:

• Multi-grade classrooms for the transition years from arithmetic to introductory algebra to pre-calculus. Not the traditional 1 teacher for 2-3 grades, but 3 grades with 3 teachers taking turns. Some of us moved between grades depending on what we mastered and what we struggled with. My perception was that about 1/2 would get through 3 grades in 2 semesters, 1/4 would get through 3 grades in 1 semester, and 1/4 would require the full 3 semesters. But they cancelled the experiment after 1 semester.

• Contract assignments in a history class. We were given the list of papers to submit at the start of the semester. Despite class running normally, we could choose to do the necessary reading and research to fulfil the contract as we saw fit. About 1/3 of us completed our contracts by halfway through the semester, then they didn’t know what to do with us.

• Work at our own pace with the promise that if we finished early enough, they would transition us to the next grade without waiting for the next semester. A few of us put together an alternative study group and invited others to join. About 1/3 of the class took 6 weeks to finish all the homework assignments and write all the exams with the lowest mark being in the high 80s. They decided that this meant there was something wrong with the plan, cancelled the experiment, and forced us to sit through the rest of the semester. Nearly half of those hard workers opted out of further education after high school and two actually dropped out without a diploma.

More teachers per student.

Starting at about 4 student per teacher, and each year or developmental step gets a few more students. If still doing grades/years then another 2 or 3 students per. This let’s each teacher learn about each student and actually catch any development hurdles early and give the children direct attention. As children grow they get to learn to socialize more and more in bigger groups.

Gamification and goal adjustment

They shouldn’t have letter grades anymore, or if they do they aren’t locked at percentages. That means the grade can only go down as they make mistakes. Instead they start at the bottom and have to answer so many questions correctly to prove understanding. They also don’t run out of questions. When they get something wrong an explanation is given as to why and even steps on how to understand and work through it. When they understand a topic they move on and more questions on the things they struggle with are given. All of this is underpinned with game things like achievements, and unlocks, and rewards and so on.

Focus on practicality, strengths, and real world mentorship

After learning the fundamentals, more education should focus on their strengths, wants, and practical application. Actually doing the things is so important so getting out there and witnessing it, doing it in person is important. So there should be mentors like olden times. Students get to shadow people long term, actually do what they do, learn with them, earn with them. Multiple opportunities should be given that students find what they do enjoy, what they do excel at even if those things are different. This gives the student early indicators and choices. No longer needing to determine what they wanna be when they grow up without any real world experience.

No standardized testing, overhaul of how each subject is taught

Maths is amazing. Glorious puzzles to be solved. It’s currently taught in the worst way imaginable and sucks all the fun out of the subject. Now the majority of people hate maths. This is the same for quite a few subjects. A lot of that is due to standardized testing or how it’s taught. Those tests should disappear. Testing, just like grading above, would be catered to the student. Students still need to achieve reasonable real world goals, but timed stadardized testing in a high stress environment isn’t the way. Students would be afforded all the tools they would have access to in the real world. They would be taught how to use those tools effectively instead of told to memorize. They would be afforded a chance to enjoy they education and proof their worth in the way that works for everyone including themselves and not just to a random committee that made up an arbitrary system ages ago.

There is more but I’ll stop here.

@Marsupial@quokk.au You may also find !asksolarpunk@slrpnk.net to be a useful community if you’re not already aware of it. :)

ideally more immersion, whatever that means: perhaps by way of VR that’s tailored to each students experience, but i think you’re right on with less desk work

i’d say things like maths taught around a topic that the student enjoys: for me, for example, it would have been far more effective to teach me maths using space as a kinda framework to explore, and a universe you could play with… heck i might have finished a physics degree before i left high school if it hadve been presented the right way

Less “this is why this happens” more “figure out what reasons contribute to this happening”

Kids are curious, so I guess one could work with that. If they are permitted, they will ask a million questions to grown ups when nobody stops them, and can spend hours trying to figure something out.

I would like ‘school’ to be an environment where this can happen safely. Smaller kids might have a more traditional school where several adults supervise them, answer their questions and show them how to do stuff. The school grounds have a library and several different workshops or rooms for different activities. Of course older kids will go out (under supervision when they are younger, alone when they get older) and learn directly from professionals. Professionals might book regular teaching sessions (to avoid too many interruptions during work) as part of their job.

To expand on your thought of physical engagement… With all the dangers and pollutions of car traffic eliminated, outdoor classrooms. More walking, reading, play, reflection. Daily field trips to learn about local industry, some aspect of real world life, or simply to interact with other groups of people such as intergenerational engagement. A distinct and important role of elderly people in this.

Makarenko’s studies on self governing children’s communes are interesting.

These are all great suggestions and I concur. Education will be much more individualized. I prefer a competency (some folks here use ‘results based’ which is analogous, also sometimes called ‘strengths based’) focused education process.

Also, education will no longer be seen as a thing separate from life/work. Education isn’t something you finish then go to work, it’s a thing you incorporate into your whole life. Solarpunk society values simplicity but solarpunk society is more complex and demands a bit more from people. The solarpunk dream is that these demands are balanced by a healthy reward of a functional supporting social system.

So there’s a lot of good suggestions here I agree with - I think from personal experience I’d second the hands-on aspect, at least as an option.

I struggled with a lot of school but thrived in shop and tech classes, whether it was residential wiring, forging metal, using architectural software to design buildings to requirements, designing and assembling simple robots, and eventually one of those teachers let me set up a one-person self taught Python class (we didn’t have programming yet) which gave me a head start in college. There’s a lot of course content I can’t remember but almost two decades later I can apparently still strike an arc and cary a bead with an arc welder. Similarly, the Boy Scouts, though a sometimes problematic organization, did an awesome job teaching us about all kinds of stuff from basic skills to more academic knowledge about tree and animal identification, and it made great use of community knowledge by bringing in local adults to teach us their area of expertise.

By contrast, in the worst school class I remember the teacher would cover the whiteboard in notes, mostly dates, and we’d have to spend half the class session transcribing that to our notebooks before she’d begin the lecture and give us any context for it. History is just stories, and it’s full of crazy stuff, how do people find so many ways to make it boring? Kids love stories, just tell them what happened and they’ll have enough info on context and technology to know roughly when something happened if that’s really important.

Edit: I’m realizing now that I need the context around learning something - the metal shop stuff had here’s what we’re making, here’s how you use a milling machine so you can make it. Here’s other stuff you can make with it. You can hold the finished thing in your hand, or flip a switch you wired and see a lightbulb come on. Write a program, see it run, change it, see what changes. In history, you can tell a story, then use the dates to explain what other things happened and how they impacted or were impacted by whatever the story was about.

I’m so interested in this subject, but I have no societally-wide answers. I’m coming at this from the perspective of someone solarpunky who will have a child soon, and then as someone who will be educating that child eventually. I know what I WILL NOT do is send them to American public school, because of my own traumatising experience in that situation. Also because I live in the UK now. But I don’t want to send them to UK public school either, if I can help it. Still too much focus on rule following and “behaviours” as things to be changed, instead of behavior as communication.

In the years before kiddo goes to school, or if I choose to home educate, I’m gonna try pulling in some inspiration from montessori/waldorf/reggio emelia styles. (I’m realising now that I know those names but not exactly what they stand for anymore. Gotta redo my research, because I know they’re all a mixed bag)

But I think the ideal for school is time in nature, problem solving, finding answers over memorising them, etc. Big emphasis on time in nature, too-- I very much love tech and that should play a part in education too, but learning how the world in its most basic state works is so important. Especially with regards to where food and utilities come from.

I agree with you that it should move away from rote memorization and standardized testing, that method seems to just absolutely stamp out any curiosity that kids naturally have, which will lead them to having a much less fulfilling life.

As an example of how it could be improved, I like how this teacher is doing things, which looks like it’s a solid step in the right direction, at least within the limits on what they can reasonably do in our current system.

Open Source: The tools we reach for our children become the basis for a lot of their lives, we shouldnt be forcing them into life long expectations of subscriptions and surveillance)

More Democratic: Students, staff, parents, and the community all should have measurable and legally binding power over how the school functions

More immersion less memorization: More emphasis of people learning how to do and be less on passing tests. Ideally people should leave school with practical skill to do something, including academic research, scientific discovery, civic engagement, financial planning, wood working, etc

I really like the idea of more volunteer mentors for specialities and AI for shaping reusable content for children to learn from too. So rather that say a teacher assigning homework from a preselected workbook and reading assignments from a book, instead students are assessed and have reading, video, interactive content shapped for them to get prerequzite knowledge from to help prepare them for activities with mentors.