Plan

Though the centerpiece of the Great Thinkers program is a course titled "The History, Lives, and Philosophies of Great Thinkers and Their Ideas", discussed below, the program as a whole is a comprehensive educational philosophy aimed at replacing the environment of passive, coerced, authoritarian, one-way learning with a more participatory, enjoyable, creative, and curiosity-driven approach.

We have highlighted the primary differences of our system below. Almost all of these have the primary objective of engendering a true and lasting love of learning in students.

Faculty Selection

The teacher in such an environment functions as a source of guidance, advice, and inspiration, and it is on their ability to act as such that faculty are rigorously selected. Any trace of apathy toward student learning or a sense that it is “only a career” will disqualify an applicant. Our bar is very high: many comfortably employed faculty in the current system of education frankly will not meet it. However, we intend to pay equally high salaries commensurate with the enormous importance and responsibility given to instructors, in many cases exceeding twice the current market salary. This is possibly the most important job in all of society: our instructors have the ability to indelibly alter the future of all humanity for better or for worse.

While merely lacking teaching experience will not disqualify an applicant, lacking teaching ability will. Both green and veteran teachers will be welcomed alike, but only if they're good.

The same guidelines which apply to faculty will apply to administration: everyone from the principal to the janitor will be expected to keep students first in mind. It is impossible to effectively institute our other changes without highly effective staff and faculty.

Learning: End and Mean

Have you ever had to answer an eight-year old's incessant questioning? Children are natural learning machines. It is thus one of the most glaring paradoxes of the modern world that such curiosity should require a coercive model of education in the first place. It is understandable and indeed quite beneficial to establish fixed foundational learning objectives to which students are held. Standardized testing toward these objectives provides a reasonable and theoretically consistent method of assessing performance across schools, students, and years. However, proclaiming these objectives the end goal of the course is a tremendous mistake! Encouraging the child to continue to follow his or her own natural curiosity is the proper goal of learning, for it is this goal which sets students on a lifelong path of learning and achievement; from this all else follows. Contrast this with an authoritarian environment of coerced learning: the learning ceases as soon as the coercion is removed.

Consequently, while students will be guided towards learning foundational knowledge, they will also be given a great deal of freedom to follow their own curiosity towards their own learning objectives in our program. This will allow the Great Thinkers latent within our students to manifest. Could you imagine what would have happened if Mozart were brought into a modern school and forbidden to practice music because it was interfering with someone else's view of what knowledge was “important” for him? An open system of learning - as both a means of accomplishment and an end in itself - is not a sufficient condition for genius to emerge, but it is certainly a necessary one.

The “Why”

Some of our finest moments, greatest discoveries, and most important life lessons have nothing to do with a specific field of instruction and everything to do with a shift in the way we think in general. As previously mentioned, Great Thinkers instructors will be pre-selected for their ability to inspire students. However, this alone is insufficient if students are to ultimately direct their own learning and develop sustained interests of their own. Thus a component of our education will focus on topics such as creativity, morality, aesthetics, and philosophy, presented in an accessible manner with plenty of Q&A. Dogma will be avoided here; the objective is not to impress existing systems of morality on students, but to spark a student's own moral thinking and to aid that student in ultimately developing a value hierarchy.

This approach is well supported in the literature of developmental psychology, and particularly by Kazimierz Dabrowski's theory of Positive Disintegration.

Project-Driven Focus

Why exercise foundational knowledge in an austere, detached theoretical exercise when it is possible to exercise it in the real world and use it in a real context? Traditional academic exercises are a last resort for the students who do not seem to be picking up the foundations they require in any other way. "Assignments" in our program preferentially take the form of real-world creative projects (short or long-term) coupled with periodic “show and tell” style progress reports. The student chooses these projects him or herself; the alternative is having a traditional exercise assigned by the teacher.

In addition to exposing students to knowledge in a hands-on way they may otherwise never experience, there is a subtle incentive in this system designed to get them thinking for themselves: the students must come up with their own projects. If they cannot or choose not to, their alternative is a rote exercise of the traditional form. Almost all students would find a project of their own choosing more enjoyable - but to do this they must take up the burden of thinking for themselves and must start making their own choices.

Flexibility

Beyond the general principles outlined on this page, our program will be extremely flexible in order to meet the individual needs of each of our students. Gifted and talented programs, specialty programs, programs for students with learning disabilities, and a flexible Montessori-style system of academic advancement will be made available and publicized to all students and parents who wish to avail themselves of such programs. Comment forms will be provided at the entrance of the school and students, faculty, staff, and family members alike will be welcome to make any additional suggestions for the improvement of the program.

The Great Thinkers Course

At the heart of our program is a class offered to all students known as “The History of Great Thinkers and Their Ideas”, in keeping with and expanding upon Albert Einstein's vision of an ideal education. The last period of every day will be devoted to examining the work, life, and leadership of a creative thinker, including what character traits and circumstances contributed to making their lives and ideas so revolutionary. Students will then engage in a hands-on replication of the famous idea in a simplified form, whether as a simplified scientific experiment, an artistic, musical, or literary endeavor, an observation of natural, psychological, or social dynamics, or an open-ended dialogue.

This component is not intended to teach appreciation or history, though these are secondary benefits. The primary purpose is to close the single greatest barrier to significant achievement: the notion that ideas lie completely outside of the reach of the student and are therefore not worth trying to grasp. When great ideas are broken down into their core insights and replicated in some form, the students will gain understanding of the nature of the challenges which they face and confidence in their ability to solve them with hard work.

The Great Thinkers course pulls everything together: The placement of this course at the end of the day ensures that it is the freshest thought in students' minds while returning from school and may even replace some of the content-free schoolbus chatter with a meaningful exchange of thoughts on the day's work. It operates synergistically with the project-driven focus by fueling ideas for new projects and new directions for existing ones. It provokes students to their own intellectual passions and pursuits, sheds insight into the forces which moved their predecessors, teaches foundational knowledge in a real-world setting (and extends beyond it into knowledge of the student's choosing), and has the potential to be a lot of fun for the students.

The Ultimate Goal

We recognize the amazing potential inherent in our students and seek to cultivate it to the fullest extent possible. While it is unrealistic to assume that every student will become a world-changing genius, the focus on flexibility and inspiration will unquestionably provide an ideal environment for them to flourish where they are found. Furthermore, we hope that our environment will challenge students to cultivate their own intellectual interests which they would otherwise defer until college. Skills acquired during the early years of life tend to be learned very thoroughly and exercised very consistently. Such subject-specific competence will additionally enable students to reach higher levels of personal development faster; it is this competence which is the vehicle for actualization of a desire to manifest an individual personality and accurately represent the self.

But the journey does not stop upon graduation from high school: given a basic education which engenders curiosity and competence, the next (collegiate) phase of education for a young adult will shape and refine this competence and personality into a vehicle for achieving the student's established goals. We call our realization of this next phase in education Project Polymath.