Hacker Cinema
Most Likely to Succeed
2015 · Film · documentary · 86 min
Directed by Greg Whiteley
The current educational system in the United States was developed a century ago during the rise of the industrial age and was once the envy of the world. However, the world economy has since transformed profoundly, but the US education system has not. Schools are attempting to teach and test skills, when mastered, that still leave graduates woefully unprepared for the 21st Century. After presenting this problem, the documentary focuses on the story of a school in San Diego that is completely rethinking what the experience of going to school looks like. As we follow students, parents and teachers through a truly unorthodox school experience, the audience is forced to consider what sort of educational environment is most likely to succeed in the 21st century?
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2 comments on Hacker News
Public Schooling is explicitly about conditioning obedience. It’s more like that today than when it was first created.
What Montessori and Waldorf both intuited is that children have a natural state which is optimum for learning. I too disagree with many aspects of how they get there, but the orientation matters.
I even saw this growing up homeschooling, where arguably no institution is involved.
Homeschooled kids who hated learning and mostly felt no one cared what they thought were taught with textbooks.
Kids who were homeschooled with unschooling, Montessori, unit studies, or basically any other form of student-directed learning seems “in themselves.” They we’re curious, relaxed, interested in the world, helpful.
Their parents could be weird, they could be raised in a cult, still it held up.
There really is a fundamental gap in “what a human being is for” between authoritarian and self-determinate approaches.
Authoritarians truly have no idea what they are trading for in order to enforce the “values” they pretend to have. I’ve done a tremendous amount of work to introduce human-first approaches to education institutions. Authoritarians recognize this approach as one they can’t relate to and they are afraid of it. Even when teachers, parents, and students are willing, authoritarian admins will completely shut it down.
There’s one reliable way to distinguish these systems - tune into your kid as a parent and believe what you are feeling.
It can hard to do in the face of societal expectations & realities, it’s even hard for me sometimes and I have a lifetime of choosing my own path.
“Most Likely to Succeed” is an incredible body of research from Harvard on this and the documentary that goes with it hits even harder.
Parents/guardians who care about their kids deserve to trust their intuition about what they need.
I wrote my book to fill the gap I saw between teaching about leading people and developing leadership practices.
Amazon has the preface and first chapter in the "look inside" link above the picture of it https://www.amazon.com/Leadership-Step-Become-Person-Others/dp/0814437931, which develops what I wrote here more.
The movie Most Likely To Succeed http://www.mltsfilm.org is about project-based learning. The books and articles by the guys behind it, Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith, are on active education and I found valuable.
Here's a post of mine with a video of Ted and the movie director: http://joshuaspodek.com/another-problem-with-traditional-education-employers-dont-want-traditionally-educated-students and links to relevant posts of mine.