This story was originally published by Reasons to be Cheerful
Walking into Brightworks could be a shock for helicopter parents — there are no rows of desks, no hallway passes and no bells to jolt students from one class to the next. Instead, the K-12 school is alive with invention, autonomy and what founder Gever Tulley calls “the energy of a big multi-generational family household.” In a quiet pocket of San Francisco’s Presidio, just a short walk from the Golden Gate Bridge, a sandy beach and a winding forest creek, the three school buildings buzz with purpose and possibility.
The topic this semester is space. In the basement workshops, student Reza proudly shows off a Mars habitat model; another is designing an alien restaurant. In the light filled atrium, Bix is writing a screenplay about alien politics, and Truman discusses his model of Larry Niven’s imagined Ringworld, giant wheels where humans will hover in their habitat held in place by centrifugal force. In a transformed room-turned-planetarium, kids recline on couches pushed to the side, gazing at student-constructed celestial projections. Others are working on terraforming Venus or sketching Martian gardens.
“I think it’s arbitrary to form collections of kids that are all exactly the same age and they only play with the exact same age,” Tulley says. “That seems very unhealthy to me. It also seems weird about schools that parents drop off their kids at the perimeter and then are somehow not invited to be in the mix.”
Therefore there are no traditional grades or classes at Brightworks. Students are grouped into “bands” by interest and maturity, not by age. There are no teachers — just “collaborators,” and parents are invited to visit and join as they please.
The post No Teachers and No Curriculum: Is This the School of the Future? appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
