Aardvark Founder Max Ventilla Is Trying to Turn Education on Its Head With AltSchool
7th March 2014
“One of top five industries in the U.S. by expenditure is elementary education, and as opposed to other large industries, the median experience is bad from every angle,” he explains. The dysfunction and relative slow-to-change nature of the educational system is one of his biggest frustrations. The cost of education is increasing, he adds, but that isn’t translating into children excelling more effectively at skills like reading and math.
That’s one of the problems, because education is seen as being an ‘industry’ and it’s really not. As an industry, kids are pushed in one end, as raw materials, and are expected to come out the other end as finished products. This batch process method mirrors the automotive factory and is intended to do so. This whole factory approach to education is a major reason why educational unions are metastasizing and bringing educational progress to a grinding halt.
“If a time traveler came back from the early 1900?s, and looked at schools, they would look relatively the same. And there’s something wrong with that, because children and our world have changed.”
Specifically, we now have the technology to deal with children on individual basis, which we’ve never had before. This means that, instead of treating students as interchangeable parts to push through a designed-for-the-average manufacturing process, we can now tailor individual programs to suit individual talent levels and personalities, as the Khan Academy approach is so famously doing.
He started researching where success was actually taking place at a broader scale in schools, in early education. What ties these schools together is the notion of child centeredness, he says, which is providing individualized education where the student learns at his or her own pace in ways most nurture them and their education.
Exactly.
The more he imagined what his vision would look like in reality, the more it sounded like a home school environment but with a larger group, skilled teachers, and a curriculum that focused on exposing children to experiences, as well as skill-building.
Which is why homeschooled kids typically kick the asses of kids from a ‘factory’ school.