Needs

Our metrics are wrong.

Education has been reduced to a systematic process; an assembly line into which students are fed at about age 3 and from which students emerge at roughly age 18 with diplomas and varying degrees of basic, foundational, rudimentary rote knowledge. The students have little influence over their own destinies, little motivation to pursue their own passions, and little opportunity for inspiration from their fellow students, instructors, and other partners in mass-production.

Though there are myriad problems with such a system, all others pale before one great crime: Such a system affords no room for individuality. Without individuality there is no such thing as an individual purpose and without a sense of purpose there is no such thing as individual motivation. The desire to learn and create which burns so brightly in future artists, scientists, philosophers, doctors, educators, mathematicians, musicians, writers, and poets is not merely ignored, but actively suppressed in the name of a one-size-fits-all model: Complete your assigned work. Get good grades. Get into a good college. Graduate. Join the workforce. Work. Retire. Die.

The mainstream notion of success is measured in terms of how well we perform in each of these roles. Better grades indicate better students. Better colleges indicate better degrees. Better salaries indicate better jobs. Yet these metrics only have meaning in the first place for those who are bound to these definitions and these pre-defined "canned lives". Our metrics are wrong precisely because they cease to have meaning in a population of individuals.

One student in this model is interchangeable with another, all set in the same purpose governed by the same external authority. Why choose when someone has already chosen for you? And thus the spark of genius inherent in so many is doused in all but a few. It is the greatest gift of humanity that those few students resist: they alone strive to advance the world in their own indiviual ways towards an ideal state. Without them, there would be no progress. Not everyone may be the model employee: someone must be the employer. Without these individuals creating value outside of the system, the value which enables the system to thrive in the first place would not exist.

Einstein once argued that above all else, schools should emphasize such individuals and their contributions: "In teaching history, there should be extensive discussion of personalities who benefited mankind through independence of character and judgment". In this Einstein was not concerened with reading history, but with writing it, for through exposure to Great Thinkers and Their Ideas students would begin to see their own individual paths open up as well.

It is from this philosophy which we begin in our quest to restore a sense of individual achievement to the educational system, and in so doing, prepare society for a new generation of Great Thinkers.