And the need for education reform.
Reading Time: 4 Minutes
And the need for education reform.
Reading Time: 4 Minutes
Traditional education was designed to be efficient and scalable, preparing the lower classes for a rapidly-industrializing 19th-century economy. Although it feels so normal today, it was a controversial invention that only became widespread because of trillions of dollars of government funding.
Unfortunately, the traditional education system prepares students for a world that no longer exists. It’s time to rebuild with the future in mind.
Most of the expensive, exclusive schools look nothing like your local public school; those prestigious schools are running a completely different playbook. They reliably transform students’ lives by leaning into academic pillars like interdisciplinary learning based in the real world, personalized curriculum geared toward each student’s interests, mastery-based assessments instead of cram-inducing tests, and project-based learning. Sora’s mission is to bring this exclusive, future-focused education to everybody.
Although memorization still has a place in learning, its power has been significantly weakened by the internet. Previously, skilled labor was driven by knowledgeable individuals recalling the proper facts or equations for the problem at hand; now, however, the most important skills include fully understanding the context of the problem, asking the right questions, and locating credible sources of information to answer them. The ethos of a liberal arts education—teaching students how to think—has never been more relevant.
Education should create adults who love themselves, their peers, and society. Students need to follow their curiosity and discover things they think are important and beautiful in the world.
Most of the world has access to the entire intellectual history of our species via the smart device in their pocket. Clearly, the issue isn’t access or available of information. We have more tools than ever at our disposal, but we don’t know what to build.
“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
In our quest to cultivate an enthusiasm for learning, we believe learning facts and content are important, but they need to be removed from the pedestal on which traditional schools have placed them. Students benefit from understanding fractions, why the periodic table looks the way it does, and the formative events in our history. However, learning these facts and others like them is only a means to an end; we must also consider why this information is taught, and how it can be applied.
No matter how well young Albert Einstein learned the rules of math or physics, he would never have revolutionized our understanding of the universe had he not been curious or rebellious. No matter the size of a boxer’s biceps, they’ll never be a champion with the disposition of pacifism. In other words, the attitudes and thought patterns that students hold matter just as much as the content they encounter. Let’s call these thought patterns Mindsets – the beliefs we desire all students at Sora to possess.
Below are brief introductions to the seven mindsets we work to develop in all of our Sora students.
The belief all skills and knowledge can be improved through hard work.
Constructing our narrative and cognitively grounding our actions in the impact we wish to have in the world.
Recognizing our thought patterns and blasting through self-limiting beliefs to achieve our goals.
You are in control of your own life. Author your narratives to internalize your locus of control.
Discover things that excite you, and then give them the space, time, and resources to explore those things, like a child discovering something for the first time.
Instead of competing, we should be helping each other thrive. We are equally dedicated to seeing these habits flourish in our peers as we are ourselves.
The human brain is a relevance-finding machine. To produce new knowledge, we connect what we already know to new experiences and information.