Free Education for a Free Society
Learning is Awesome.
Everyone's a student.
It's time to give away what you know and learn something new.
The Future of Education
Freedom looks very different than the world of tyranny we currently live in. Let these principles guide the future:
- A Makers Education — crafts and trades, understanding the world around, making useful things from the time a toddler can rub their hands together.
- Learning Needs — from well-designed visual material to ensuring that emotional and psychological needs are met.
- Mentorship Culture — we lift each other up, never putting down. Students help teach younger students.
- Passions-based — self-direction with guided exploration.
The Revolution
- culture, access and format — liberatory without authoritarianism, inter-age and intergenerational for greater social harmony. — free lessons/courses/curriculums to learn what you what when you want, allowing learning to happen in any kind of setting (standard or non-standard).
- instructional/educational content and material — the tragic state of the world is an abominable state of information disorder, incorherent explanations and bad design; competent design and intelligent instructions, as exceedingly rare as they are, are truly revolutionary.
The potential to truly revolutionize education exists in the potential to profoundly improve the learning experience through competently designed, intelligent instructional material.
By "profound", consider this: the first lesson for the lrn software takes an entire semester of state university's Intro to Python Scripting and puts it most appropriately into one single lesson that you can do and understand completely in an hour.
This is not reasonably better, it is absurdly better. It's improved by such an order of magnititude that it makes the capitalist marketplace of academia look no better than a racketeering industry.
The term "gap between academia and industry" has been used widely to discuss this problem in nice non-accusing language. It refers to commonality and frequency of students coming out of a four-year computer science degree program successfully with certificate in hand, going to coding interviews for a new job, and simply being unable to write any code. Plainly, this is fraud. It's not even remotely acceptable for university's to be selling what are considered as "job-earning certificates" at such enormously high pricepoints with such terribly deficient knowledge, but the academic industrusty is guilty like numerous others of racketeering off the service it claims to provide at the expense and suffering of its victims, in this case are those burdened by debt and no opportunity, trying to professionally pursue interest areas of theirs with no actual/reasonable path towards anything than can be construed as "successful" in that attempt.
The Pedagogy of Uselessness
Pedagogy is the methodology of teaching and instruction, and must be based on an understanding of how humans learn. Tragically the public schools of the nation are pedagogically insane and retarded.
Praxis is the Point
Praxis is an educational term for the application of knowledge while learning.
If you can't use it, don't use it, never make any use of it at all — what use is it?
None. It's useless. It cultivates a cognitive style or pattern of retain and regurgitate to only then forget and seldom comprehend in an intelligent way.
Praxis is essential for learning to be effective and rewarding.
It follows a cognitive style or mental model or pattern etc reasonably described as:
- Retain
- Regurgitate
- Forget
…and repeat.
The world of education is plagued by this pedagogy of uselessness, from elementary school through technical courses in universities.
The pedagogy of uselessness is a crime.
See this short post on algreba and diagnostics for an instance of useless pedagogy.
Competently designed, intelligent instructional material
There's an incredible potential to revolutionize education and learning through the visual design and presentation of information. While there are numerous other factors for improving learning experiences, visual design of the information itself carries potential that is truly revolutionizing.
Edward Tufte has very effectively demonstrated the contrast between terrible information design well-designed sets of information.
Design does not mean decoration, here, regarding information and educational material, it's about effective communication.
Here's an example of what Tufte calls "chart junk":
This instance of chart junk not only requires way too much deciphering to qualify as "easy" to understand, it's impossible to glean from it what these words are even refering to.
Here's that same data set presented with a sane, effective design:
Eliminating needless graphics and focusing on meaning through words clarifies that data.
The Tufte design books demonstrate how significant, crucial, and profound it is to apply simple sanity and intelligence to the design of information, communications, and educational material.
Design principles exist and can be followed and applied, with notions like Tufte describes: "smallest effective difference" and many others.
So many areas of learning, perhaps all, can vastly improve from effective design.
From athletics like skiing:
Craft methods and trades can all benefit greatly, consider some basketry patterns:
And arborist/horticulture/silviculture techniques for regenerative woodcutting
The supplemental materials for the lrn computer programming lessons are a big part of what makes the lessons so much more educational compared to standard existing options. Here's a couple examples:
This must be applied to all educational material. Doing so will be revolutionary.
Educators and Professionals Collaborating with the Efficiencies of Open Source Software Development
One particular tooling of the software industry, the source code management tool, by providing decent means of collaboratively working together remotely via code-hosting severs on the Internet, gives us a usable, proven solution for collaboratively developing lessons.
Developing lessons
Lesson Hubs - decentralized repositories/databases of lessons
Comprehensive database(s) of lessons on the making and doing of EVERYTHING
Git servers, such as Gitlab and Github, provide an excellent means of collaboration among software developers and can work just as well for facilitating collaboration in developing lessons.
Widespread collaboration among:
- subject matter experts
- educators
- designers
…can all collaborate to produce lessons, without necessarily needing to ever meet in person.
Lessons will be a set of svg, md, yml and other plain text (generally speaking, media files can of course be supplemental but the most profound potential for improvement exists not in going multimedia but through solving the most-wretched-state of neglect in the realm of diagrams and sane visual explanations) files.
A couple simple plugins will be needed for the vector editors (inkscape/illustrator/etc) and git server ui to accommodate lesson/curriculum specific functionality.
Stay tuned I guess… and pray…
revolutionize.school is work 
of the Lamb