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@aresnick | |||||
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9. Human development is slow. Experimentation requires longer time horizons than most investment vehicles permit. To a first approximation, you can probably ignore research or reform efforts which don't have built into their structure deep acknowledgment of this.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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OK, via prompt by @vgr, 1 like = 1 opinion about unschooling twitter.com/vgr/status/120… …maybe more.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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1. Unschooling's greatest mistake was situating itself in the negative space of school. It doesn't have a coherent position on what learning is.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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2. Because unschooling is reacting to school's coercive structures, it has developed an overly naturalistic view of learning that's about "getting out of the way" which idealizes youth, learning, and often glosses over the complexities of actually learning and working.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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3. The future of unschooling is much more likely to be invented in the world of work than the world of school or unschooling. And it probably won't even be named as education per se for much of its infancy.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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4. Mostly we talk about "learning" only to make sense of either (a) doing something inauthentic, or (b) being a novice. At some point, you stop "learning" the guitar and start just getting better. The most radical perspectives abandon treating learning as a distinct activity.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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5. The most meaningful part of "unschooling" is the phase people go through in learning to learn and get things done without school-like structures. Understanding why we go through that phase has much more to do with psychology than education and is woefully under-explored.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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6. Education won't see meaningful reform until the time and money associated with schooling is made available for invention and experimentation. Unschooling, as long as it remains an "exit" strategy (in the AO Hirschman) sense, will never be instrumental to this.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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7. One's opinion about the relative decomposition of the premia which formal education earns people into human, network, and social/cultural capital is a far more important term in the mid-term future of school, learning, and unschooling than anyone's pedagogy.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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8. Education is a prematurely professionalized sector. Basic standards of rigor, consistency, shared vocabulary, and similar which other professions take for granted don't yet exist. Unschooling has inherited and amplified this hubris as a reactionary position and community.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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10. By framing its superiority in terms of rights, humane-ness, and ethics (as opposed to, e.g., efficacy), unschooling opts for the losing side of the political economy in conversations about the future of learning. This is a harsh critique of both unschooling and education.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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11. Unschooling hand-waves at the reasons school exists (e.g. "industrial revolution factory model"), but has failed to develop a coherent analysis of school's robustness to change and staying power. "What's adaptive about school for whom?" is an underappreciated question.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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12. School [and un-schooling] have much more to learn from kindergarten and the world of work than either appreciate.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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13. It is a deep and important question why, for the most part, graduates from graduate schools of education (having nominally studied how people learn and grow), are not some of the most highly paid and sought after designers/managers in fields where knowledge work dominates.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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14. A basic incoherence in discussions of unschooling, learning, and education, is that [mostly] people treat learning as a domain-independent activity. Domain specificity of methods' relevance/efficacy is ignored because of the political functions of discourse around learning.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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15. The set of things people worry about learning is ~arbitrary, a minute sliver of what's out there. The process of identifying, creating curricula for, and developing educators to support learning a topic is so slow so as to make content-first reformers largely irrelevant.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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16. Most discussions of learning wildly overindex on "fit" of topic-defined interest. Learning and motivation are driven by the social and cultural contexts in which people find themselves.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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17. When given the chance to focus on "cognitive" or "affective" factors in someone's learning, returns are almost always higher emphasizing the affective. We don't yet have fundamental explanations for this, but it is a fact largely ignored by unschoolers and schoolers alike.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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18. At most conferences, you hear about new ideas and new work. Unschooling/alt-ed conferences are much more similar to a political caucus coming together around values. Whether this is cause or effect, the intellectual stagnation has yet to even be identified by the sector.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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19. Unschooling [and school] has never really grappled with the reality that choice amongst "education options" is better understood as choice among "insurance products" than "investment products". i.e. it is about raising the floor to which you can fall.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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20. The timescale required to capture the long-term returns of human capital development mean that for all intents and purposes, only governments, churches, universities, and visionary billionaires will be in a position to meaningfully experiment with new K12 institutions.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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21. Much of the work of unschooling has as little to do with school and learning as remediating an unhealthy relationship to body image has to do with the theory of nutrition.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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22. One of the greatest unrecognized reform strategies is to leverage new, salient skills (e.g. programming) to create cover for new pedagogy. Doing this in K12 requires inventive, intellectual work connecting these skills to all the disciplines for which school is responsible.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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23. Dewey, Montessori, Reggio Emilia, Waldorf, etc.—the extent to which these have succeeded or not has ~nothing to do with their pedagogical efficacy. It is a political/financial/cultural fact. Efforts which do not have a historical analysis and story about this are unserious.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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24. One of the most important [false] things you learn in school is that you learn by being taught. In unschooling, many people never unlearn this, instead substituting other classes or courses for the classroom that's now gone.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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25. Many explain away counterfactuals about people who drop out/unschool/homeschool by pointing to privilege. This is a fascinating datum. If it were an honest point, then educators would be interested in the pedagogical and managerial insights of the upper-middle class family.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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26. There are approximately as many people homeschooled as there are in charter schools. "Charter school" is a design and governance mechanism. As is "homeschooling". Talking about them as though they are pedagogies—e.g. "Does homeschooling work?"—is pure confusion.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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27. Just as corporations have offered us new [often dark] visions of what the next nation states look like, so too will the first entities to figure out how to leverage tools like income share agreements to securitize human capital offer us new [maybe dark] visions of cities.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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28. The bias to emphasize the cognitive in education leads people to vastly overestimate the power of remote technologies and experiences to transform learning. If it is fundamentally social, much of it will be fundamentally local.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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29. To the extent unschooling recognizes learning is a slow, social, high-touch, and therefore local process it has one up on every company tackling this space which aims to be the first in history to create a large-scale, high-touch organization anyone wants to join.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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30. One of the most valuable skills those who unschool and support others who unschool develop is the ability to introduce people to a map of an intellectual territory without confusing exposure for attempted mastery. Formal education could learn a great deal from this.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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31. The most important ratio in the future of learning is the relative balance of dollars and minutes which go into (a) investigating how school works and could be improved, (b) investigating how "non-traditional" learning works, & (c) inventing new tools/approaches.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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32. Pick any organizational unit (company, lab group, whatever). The first 100h of activity on-boarding a junior colleague to that group likely represents 1000h (8–10m full-time) of rigorous activity for a young person. Unschooling should focus on organizing access to this.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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33. One of the cleverest sleights of hand—whose provenance I'm still mystified by—is that we discuss learning's future in terms of methods instead of entrants/products. Learning is one of the most "execution-dependent" and "recipe-resistant" activities I can imagine.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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34. Once you assume the moniker of "alternative", you've lost the whole ball game.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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35. Unschooling is really a battle against legibility. Competing with school will mostly be about subverting or competing with its measures of legibility. School's measures are far less meaningful than most will admit. In whose interest is it to improve them?
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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36. To the extent that unschooling (and school reform) must confront legibility, as work product becomes increasingly structured and digitized (e.g. Figma, GitHub, etc.) there is a growing opportunity to leverage passive process artifacts for analysis and evaluation.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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37. Conversely, most attempts to leverage portfolios or similar dramatically underestimate the sensing bandwidth constraints they're up against. Last I checked, MIT spends an average of eleven (11) minutes evaluating a candidate.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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38. Unschooling rightly recognizes an opportunity to unbundle (often leveraging online and community resources). Its efficacy requires knowing youth well (which dramatically increases CAC). No one knows whether, including that, there's any value to be unlocked by unbundling.
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Alec Resnick
@aresnick
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15. pro |
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39. Many undertake alternative educational arrangements/endeavors prompted by their own children. Though an authentic motive, it is not durable: Starting and growing the organization will outlive your kid's needs.
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