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Concepts that Explain the

School from Scratch Approach

 

Almost every major societal problem can be solved through because it was caused by school.

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The quickest and easiest way to understand my school approach is we need to completely align school with real life which means it has to operate more like a private sector business in as much as it has to be responsive to the needs of its customers who are the participants and their family.

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The debate about the direction of school comes down to one question. Can learning, for the masses, occur at the highest level without coercion or authoritarianism? If the answer is yes, we must immediately change direction so no further unnecessary brutalizing of people occurs. If the answer is no, we must explain why all the vital information people accrue through the method of optional, voluntary venues can't be expanded to all areas of learning.

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What people need to fully absorb is even if school is completely optional, life is not. This means the idea of people staying home and playing video games is incongruent with the reality that they need skills to become self sufficient. After high school, people are free to do whatever they want with no mandate from the government. Most people strive to become self sufficient whether being mandated or not. This flies in the face of the idea that people won't achieve things if they aren't forced.

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How many people, with means, would send their child into the world with only a high school diploma even though it represents 13 years and 11,000 hours of information? Almost none. This reveals what they actually think of the value.

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Imagine you find out your community is building a facility with the sole purpose of helping people achieve their goals. Whether their goal is a career change, career skills, getting in shape, learning a language, learning an instrument, learning how to garden or how to fix a car everything is acceptable. It will be staffed with people who are experts in various fields along with resources such as a chemistry lab, recording studio, language labs, fitness equipment, etc. Access to this facility is totally free and people are not required to use it in any preassigned way other than to follow general rules of public behavior. The staff's only mandate is that it uses its immense brain power to try and help as many people as they can achieve their desired goals by doing things such as forming support groups, suggesting information resources and generally doing whatever they can to help. No matter what the person is interested in, the staff tries to help with no judgment or malice.

What percentage of the community do you imagine would take advantage of this resource?

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Everything I'm proposing we're already doing in real life which proves the model and quells the idea this is a leap of faith. All I'm doing is taking what we consider the best ideas in society and calling it school.

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Ironically, the best example of successful school without force is right at school itself. It's called after school activities. They are voluntary, well attended and people say they get a lot out of them. After school activities cover essentially everything that is studied in school but people do it voluntarily.

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Here is a question for educators. Are cell phones a problem in after school activities? If not, explain why. 

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The two main reasons people think school has to be mandated are we need a well educated society and we need well rounded people. The problem with these goals is that they are impossible to define which makes designing a plan to accomplish them impossible. Furthermore, almost everyone agrees we are moving farther, not closer, to a well educated society.

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4 Concepts that must be met to have a school that legitimately serves the people.

  1. -Free speech is absolutely essential.

  2. -People want to be healthy.

  3. -People want to be independent.

  4. -We're only as happy as the people around us.

Any school idea that is in conflict with any of these four isn't set up to serve the people. The reason most school ideas will not be in harmony with one or more of these concepts is because they contain an authoritarian element where people are forced to do things against their will which will violate most of the concepts. School absolutely has to be 100% for the participant and 0% for the school.

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Two concepts staunch defenders of the current school system have to consider:

1. The current system is largely based on a system designed during the Industrial Revolution where the expressed goal was to create obedient workers.

2. Studies from several highly credentialed institutions conclude force fed information that is forgotten has no educational value.

If you want to verify these concepts research "Rockefeller's motivation for school agenda" and "What are the studies regarding force fed information that is forgotten and its value."

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Everyone only uses a “thimble” of knowledge to succeed in life—not an ocean. Despite 13 years and 11,000 hours of schooling, nearly all adults build their careers, health, and relationships on just one or two deeply learned skills: plumbing, coding, teaching, accounting, caregiving. The rest—biology facts, geometry proofs, historical dates—is forgotten trivia with no practical impact. Yet we force every student through the same vast, shallow curriculum, pretending breadth creates capability. It doesn’t. Mastery does. The thimble concept reveals a powerful truth: **you don’t need to know everything—you need to know *what matters for your life* and know it well.** This isn’t anti-learning; it’s pro-relevance. By helping each person find and fill their own thimble early—through voluntary, focused, real-world learning—we create self-sufficient, confident adults far faster, with less stress, cost, and wasted time. The thimble is enough. In fact, it’s everything.

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Garbage. This is what prevents many people from being successful in life and also causes many people unnecessary stress and anxiety. My definition of garbage is work or procedures that have no obvious productive value. School is the biggest offender. Homework, testing, mandatory attendance all garbage. The reason is the desired outcome can be achieved with none of this. Homework is busy work when the person who is forced to do it has no interest in it. We all have a finite amount of energy we are willing to expend to succeed. The last thing we should do is waste precious energy on garbage. It can be the difference between success and failure. Intentionally bogging people down in garbage as some kind of character builder is a crime against humanity. This is where society has to step up, acknowledge and recognize garbage, and root it out. We spend way too much precious energy defending garbage procedures. Eliminating garbage is the single most important bridge in helping people, especially low income, to achieve success. Let's make it easier not harder for people to succeed. We'll all be pleasantly surprised how much it improves the quality of society.

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School directs kids to defer their personal responsibility while attending by pretending they have none while in school. This seriously delays the growth process because kids first start seriously considering personal responsibility post school instead of working on it all along. This could be the reason we believe brains aren't fully formed until the age of 25 when it could be as simple as the muscle only got worked at a much later age.

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The goal of school should be to help people achieve whatever it is they want to achieve. People only want a well educated society for other people. What they want for themselves is success.

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Is there a societal need to force people to go to school and be force fed information they don't care about? This is probably the most important question about school. The only intelligent way to discuss this is by defining the goal because then we can figure out if it can only be achieved through force. My goal for school is "to help people achieve whatever it is they want to achieve." Obviously, if we used this goal it would be counter intuitive to believe people aren't going to use a service that is designed "to help people achieve whatever it is they want to achieve." I believe most people think there is a greater societal good that can only be achieved by having an informed and educated public which to most is a smattering of information about a variety of subjects which is what they would consider the goal. There are many problems with this. Who decides what a properly educated society looks like? How do we reconcile the fact that almost everything force fed is quickly forgotten and never materially used? Does this mean a farmer with little schooling is less important than an unemployed PhD? Do we believe information that is believed to be forgotten really rests in the recesses of our brain and has some unconscious value?

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The truth is pretty much everything beyond reading, writing and basic math is trivia because it's nice to know but has little, to no, practical value and this constitutes thousands of hours that could be redirected to useful activities.

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One thing that has always bothered me about school is it never seems like there are any defined goals. I asked a friend, who was a teacher, and he eagerly sent me a link detailing the goals of his school district. I was expecting a few easily identifiable goals followed by a plan on how to achieve these. What I got looked like a long, bad term paper written in a foreign language. I seriously couldn't make heads or tails of it because it was written in school speak from top to bottom. And, did I mention, it was long.

All I could think was this was very symbolic of the nonsense spewed in school and the obvious lack of focus. It reinforced my belief that school is designed to please school and not the community. It looked like people trying to impress each other with their academic wisdom.

So, I set about trying to define what I feel the goals of school should be. It came down to one sentence.

School's main objective should be to help people successfully transition into adulthood.

My belief is people owe society two things.

  1. -They can take care of themselves where they don't require a handout.

  2. -They take care of their health where they are not using unnecessary healthcare.

If school can take care of these two things our society would be exponentially better because people would be exponentially happier.

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How many people do you know who are complaining about not being well rounded enough or not having a thorough understanding of geometry and biology? My guess it’s as many people as I know. None.

The reason this is important is because these two concepts are the basis as to why people think our current system has merit. We’re trying to convince ourselves that being well rounded, which no one can actually define, is something the masses are striving for and that we all need to know a smattering of information about a variety of subjects such as biology and geometry to legitimize our communal intellect.

In real life, almost no one is concerned with being well rounded or knowing information which is essentially trivia. We want and need information that helps us solve life’s problems and this should be fine.

We, obviously, need people who are highly informed in many different areas but this constitutes a minute amount of the population on any given subject. So, why are we force feeding information to people who don’t want to learn it, will never use it or even remember it?

Society seems to be bubbling over with contempt about the elitist ways we go about a lot of things. We’ve reached a point where indefensible ideas are being heavily questioned. The next step is going from complaining to changing.

There is nothing practical about the way we conduct school which is confirmed by the fact that we have to force people to use it. We should measure the value of school by how many people are voluntarily and happily using it.

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If you ever hear a conversation about the value of college it is never about the experience or the invaluable information. If it's a serious conversation where people are trying to determine the true value, it's always about return on investment. Dollars and cents.

It's interesting that we wait until college before we will talk about school this practically.

The reason is probably because we aren't physically cutting a check to pay for k-12. Imagine if every year we were cutting a check for $15,000 for our kid to go to school. Now imagine if we had the option of foregoing school, keeping the money and finding ways to get our children the information we personally find valuable without school.

We understand that it basically impossible to function in society without being able to read, write or do basic math. It seems reasonable that for a few hundred bucks we could pay someone to teach us this. What other school information is so valuable that people can't really function without it? It seems the only other invaluable information is any that allows us to make a living.

If we were able to keep the money we now pay for k-12 it would amount to roughly $200,000. This would make for a great financial start for most people and there is still no law that prevents people from learning outside the four walls of school.

The idea is that we are becoming increasingly skeptical about spending thousands of dollars on the college experience because we aren't seeing the value in a lot of it.

Why not use that same skepticism when talking about the value of k-12?

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As I've done a bit of research on the origins of the current school system, I found that John D. Rockefeller was very involved in its construction. Rockefeller was very candid about the idea that he wasn't looking for geniuses, but obedient workers. If we were to apply this goal of creating obedient workers to our current system, we would deem it a success. I don't think the current public would agree that this was an ideal goal. I'm hoping people would rather have independent thinkers who can live independent lives. I'll go out on a limb and speculate that many of our current societal problems can be directly attributed to group think. There are quite a few ideas we're trying to normalize that would have been considered conspiracy theories not more than ten years ago. This is because we have a handful of people who are doing the thinking for the masses. School needs to be the place where we, not only tolerate independent thought, but we encourage it.

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When a person finishes k-12 school, what is the school going to do for them?

Are they going to follow up and find out if their education is working for them?

Are they going to help them find a job?

Are they going to provide food and housing for them if they need it?

Are they going to provide psychological counseling if needed?

Obviously, the answer to all these questions is no which brings up the question of why we have to be a slave to the whims of the school when they are making no guarantees about their product.

According to most people, school is so important that it has to be mandatory. This includes mandatory participation, mandatory course study, mandatory dress code, etc. Yet, no one with means would ever let their child out in the world with simply a k-12 education.

School demands a lot of the community considering it offers no guarantees and basically admits that the 13 years and 11,000 hours of k-12 is not enough to insure a person has enough skills and tools to live successfully.

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The people who should be most excited about my school plan are those who live in poorer communities.

My plan changes their situation from hopeless to hopeful by eliminating all the garbage which fills much of the school agenda and replaces it with practical, useful information.

We must be fully cognizant that it only takes one skill set to completely change a person's life. This skill set needs to be neither intellectually challenging or terribly time consuming. It only needs to provide a way to allow a person to be self sufficient.

Most people base their entire career off of one skill set.

This means essentially any one from any background has a legitimate chance at success because the information and skills they need are very small and uncomplicated.

It's not hard to list a plethora of ways to make a good living that doesn't involve years and years of sitting in a classroom especially if we have competent people around us, ready and willing to help, who are dedicated to helping us succeed.

The only thing school needs to change is its approach and mindset and then the masses will have a legitimate chance to succeed and be happy. We don't need to throw any more money at it or hire more people with advanced degrees.

We need to ditch the elitism in favor of trying to help.

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School can and should take care of the childcare problem because it's a huge expense that school can easily take care of.

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The one angle of my school plan that I don't talk enough about is how it is good for people affiliated with school. My plan solves school's biggest problem by aligning what the community wants with what the school is offering.

The first thing the community wants is not to be ordered around by school. This is remedied by taking all coercive elements from the plan. Next, parents don't want to be told what is best for their children. This is solved by having the child and their family decide what help they want from the school.

How is this good for the people affiliated with school?

The agreement that needs to be reached between the school and community is that the school is only there to help and holds no responsibility for the outcome. This immediately dials down most of the tension caused by an authoritarian situation and alleviates most of the stress felt by school people because school is no longer forcing an outcome that many don't find acceptable.

Lastly, one of my main goals for school is that it helps create a happier society. This means the people affiliated with school need to be happy as well. Like the classroom, a happier environment is one in which there is less authoritarianism. This means clearly defining goals and challenging people to meet them. The number one goal for school is how to use the staff and resources in the most efficient way to help as many people as possible achieve their dreams.

Optimally, creativity and innovation is being used to maximize efficiency and then shared with other schools to continually update and improve what is working and discard what is not.

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People don't fully appreciate the power of school. It's one of the few places, if not the only place, where we can make systemic change from the bottom up. This means, unlike top down change, it will be very durable because it truly reflects the will of the people and not just a handful of people. In essence, it means we can dramatically change the makeup and attitude of society simply by how we conduct school whenever we want.

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If we were ever to successfully install my vision of school it would be the biggest idea of my lifetime because it completely changes society, from the bottom up, which would make it very durable because it would be the will of the people. The reach of the change is impossible to imagine because there is such a domino effect. The way we would conduct business would be not to micro manage but to just detail what we were looking for and assume it would be taken care of because that was the way we were raised. There would be a clear understanding that you were responsible for yourself but the good news would be we've changed school so its primary goal is for you to succeed. It would be an entirely different society.

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Q and A about the Plan

School From Scratch vs Current Alternatives

The $200,000 Lesson  (An interesting metaphor about school and life)

 

 

Deepseek critique of my plan

Claude critique of my plan

ChatGPT critique of my plan

Gemini critique of my plan

Grok critque of my plan