The Wonder School

1250 words, 6 minute read

Would you send your child to a school that didn’t teach reading, writing or arithmetic? Suppose that same school had a track record of producing PhD’s too young to toast their own success? 

It’s a wonder that anyone in our society learns anything at all. We have turned the whole process of education upside down. We begin by teaching abstract tools, the three Rs, before we give students any sense of how to use these tools IRL. We have modeled our educational system on ‘machine learning’. We educate our children as if they were LLMs (AI for you muggles) and they’re not! 

This is not how humans work. We set goals, guided by transcendental values such as Beauty, Truth, and Justice, and then we design, assemble or manufacture tools to help us achieve those goals.

Our education system reverses the process. We drown our children in tool making exercises, long before they have any inkling of why they might want such tools. To paraphrase Jacques Ellul, we suppress curiosity and purpose in favor of La Technique, technical skill.

Only children who manage to swim up through the swamp’s tangled undergrowth to reach the surface are allowed to climb onto lily pads and contemplate the stars. Those who do not make it to the surface, the majority as it turns out, are considered just so much collateral damage. 

Even those who do make it are often ‘changed’ by the ordeal. Some no longer have any interest in lily pads or stars; they are content to gorge themselves on the lavish buffet spread out on the swamp’s surface. 

Others are just grateful for the relative security of the pad. They are content to live out their days in sloth, never bothering to raise their heads (“Don’t look up”). Not satisfied with the severity of ‘kill or be killed’ natural selection, we have added an arbitrary layer of cultural selection. Brilliant!

We apply the same logic to the education of physicians. Day One, the med school class is full of young idealists, anxious to devote their lives to the wellbeing of humanity generally and the welfare of their own patients specifically. We soon put an end to that!

Suppose you’re the evil overlord of some hostile alien civilization (R U?). Your job is to stifle intellectual development on Planet Earth. How do you do that when the planet is covered with 2 and 3 year olds, chirping like hungry chicks in a nest, asking their never-ending questions.

Your predecessor in this job, Herod the Great (c. 0 CE), came up with a clever solution: Slaughter all 2 year old ‘boys’ (sic)! But how did that work out? Now you’ve been sent to come up with a more effective, and possibly less abhorrent, solution. 

According to the Handbook of 20th Century Atrocities, when you cannot eradicate some social phenomenon by force, the next best thing is to co-opt it. And so you did! You designed an education ‘system’, powered by curiosity, but virtually guaranteed to extinguish that curiosity. You’re a marvel! Would you mind if I put your name in the hat for a Nobel? Or would that be an anti-Nobel?

Your genius was to insert a layer of technique (the legendary 3 R’s) between the questions and their answers. “I’d love to answer your questions, Susie, but first you need to master trigonometry. Let me know when you’ve done that, and then I’ll be glad to help you.”  

Learning begins with curiosity and children are nothing but question-boxes. Why wouldn’t they be? They are thrown naked, ignorant, and defenseless onto an alien shore (Earth). They can’t afford to be bored…yet; their survival depends on figuring things out…quickly. From their first cry in the delivery room to the last gasp on their death bed, they are collecting data points for their own personal Mappa Mundi. 

Perhaps a future generation of extra-terrestrial overlords will see some value in Earthlings’ insatiable curiosity. In anticipation of such an eventuality, I propose a pilot project, a test market. Let’s set up a small chain of magnet schools; we’ll call them Wonder Schools. Our motto: “Today’s question is tomorrow’s Nobel!” 

So if my Wonder Schools are not going to teach the 3 R’s, what will they teach? The curriculum will grow out of the specific interests of the students and their teachers. No two schools, no two grade levels, no two semesters will be the same. 

To accommodate the wide range of students’ curiosity, we’ll need to ‘stock’ our schools with enthusiastic, creative teachers who have multi-disciplinary interests. Our curriculum will emerge from the ground up, student directed. If this sounds a bit like 4th/5th century (BCE) Greece, or 9th century (CE) monastic Europe, or 15th/16th century Italy (Renaissance), I’m ok with that. 

Traditional miseducation introduces new subjects to students as they mature biologically. We will not do that! Our pre-K curriculum will mirror our Grade 12 curriculum…but at a very different level of depth, obviously. We will teach Quantum Mechanics to toddlers. 

Geometry will be non-Archimedean. Topology will be non-orientable. Set theory will be taught without Bertrand Russell’s precious Axiom of Foundation. We understand learning as a lifelong spiral, not a straight line. Of course, students will not study every subject every year; but neither is it ‘one and done’. Older students will often choose to re-explore, at a deeper level, subjects that they were exposed to at a younger age. 

And what about those pesky 3 Rs? Can you do university level work without the ability to read or do arithmetic? Of course not! So we’ll have special skill workshops. When a student wants to learn to read or write or do math, we’ll have resource rooms available for them…but the impetus to learn must come from the students themselves.

And of course our schools will be full of musical instruments and art supplies to enable students to be creative in multimedia. James Joyce (Ulysses) described the world as ‘signs we are here to read’. The Wonder School takes Joyce seriously. We trust our students to pick out the signs; we’ll help them read them.

David Cowles is the founder and editor-in-chief of Aletheia Today Magazine. He lives with his family in Massachusetts where he studies and writes about philosophy, science, theology, and scripture. He can be reached at david@aletheiatoday.com.

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