The founder of Intrinsic School and her architects certainly think so. What do YOU think?
Personally, I see some cool stuff, and yet overall something doesn’t sit right. Why, for example, is a school that is pushing the envelope on personalized learning still organizing its students by grade level? Shouldn’t mass groupings by age be the first thing to go?
And is it a good thing to have kids spending 50% of their day on a computer? I suppose the right way to think of it is that a kid is spending half of his or her day doing research, but for a new model of personalization, it feels awfully . . . well . . . depersonalized.
And why is that coastline place set up to have kids literally facing a brick wall? Who thought that was a good idea?
I don’t know — I think this feels more like something that was designed for kitsch, not kids. It’s angular, when learning is round.
What am I missing here? What do you see?
Britton Swingler says:
Learning by grade (though I realize it seemed like a logical distribution for large groups of children—age) may be the single most detrimental thing we have been doing to kids in the history of public education.
I am a mother of seven who has had three children in public school and four who are homeschooled. I have seen far more vibrant learning experiences happening within groups of mixed-age (mixed-grade if you will) children than I have in any of the single grade classes. Perhaps (a big perhaps here) this is partially due to a lessoning (or an erasure) of the peer to peer pressure, self-consciousness and comparisons a child is so keenly aware of when a group only contains others their age.
It’s interesting to also note that this mixed age group observation doesn’t necessarily include the necessity of the kids being like- minded. The stimulation of the various ages, development, maturity and knowledge levels provides a rich, stimulating environment, regardless of topic.