What if we radically changed our high schools and turned them into something different?

Brandon Weber
10.14.15

What if we radically changed the way high schools work and exist?

It's no secret our schools are in trouble compared with the rest of the world. We're now at #27 in math globally, and it's not getting better.

But a new, innovative project — XQ's The Super School Project — really wants to change that:

<span class="redactor-invisible-space"></span>

This problem is not the teachers nor the parents.

It's that schools were designed to crank out future workers at a time when the Industrial Revolution was in high gear.

Most of us don't realize that our education system hasn't really changed since then, when it was designed to crank out factory workers. The whole goal was get people ready for repetition, routine, and defined tasks.

Factory education, if you will.

GIFs via XQ.

Thankfully, that's changed.

But schools have struggled to keep up with new ways of learning for a new-world economy, and they're still struggling.

High school students now can learn about robotics and smartphones and social media and other things in ways that nobody even considered not that long ago — not from textbooks and "parked in seat" learning.

Here's the challenge: How do we reinvent high school?

"If we profoundly change high school, we can reach not just the 50 million kids enrolled in public school, but the hundreds of millions who will follow them, and the billions of people worldwide that they will impact."

How about you? If you could reinvent high school, what would that look like?

From XQ's website:

"The Super School Project is a national movement to reimagine high school. In the last hundred years, America has gone from a Model T to a Tesla and from a switchboard to a smartphone, but our public high schools have stayed frozen in time. We believe American ingenuity can and must move education forward. This is a challenge, open to all, to build the Super Schools that will lead the way."

The Super School Project is accepting proposals right now to rethink high school.

Once the winning proposals are accepted, they will have a $50 million budget to try out the new ideas; it will be allocated over 5 years and supported by expert mentoring. They're aiming for at least five schools to receive the funding and implement the creative concepts that will reimagine what high school can be.

From things like altering school schedules to implementing new technologies and curricula, they're aiming high.

Here's a four-minute video that gives more information about this project:

democracy education general
Most Shared
True
XQ: The Super School Project

Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg are making a serious push to expunge people's pot convictions

National Expungement Week is Spetember 21 to 28.

Courtesy of Houseplant.

In America, one dumb mistake can hang over your head forever.

Nearly 30% of the American adult population — about 70 million people — have at least one criminal conviction that can prevent them from being treated equally when it comes to everything from job and housing opportunities to child custody.

Twenty million of these Americans have felony convictions that can destroy their chances of making a comfortable living and prevents them from voting out the lawmakers who imprisoned them.

Many of these convictions are drug-related and stem from the War on Drugs that began in the U.S. '80s. This war has unfairly targeted the minority community, especially African-Americans.

Keep Reading Show less
marijuana expungement national expumgement week stoner comedies Seth Rogen Evan Goldberg High Times seth rogen even golldberg national expungement week
Culture

Breaking down the conspiracy theory mindset at the heart of climate change denial

Becker1999/Flickr

Climate change is happening because the earth is warming at an accelerated rate, a significant portion of that acceleration is due to human activity, and not taking measures to mitigate it will have disastrous consequences for life as we know it.

In other words: Earth is heating up, it's kinda our fault, and if we don't fix it, we're screwed.

This is the consensus of the vast majority of the world's scientists who study such things for a living. Case closed. End of story.

How do we know this to be true? Because pretty much every reputable scientific organization on the planet has examined and endorsed these conclusions. Thousands of climate studies have been done, and multiple peer-reviewed studies have been done on those studies, showing that somewhere between 84 and 97 percent of active climate science experts support these conclusions. In fact, the majority of those studies put the consensus well above 90%.

Keep Reading Show less
conspiracy theories climate change
Nature

After going viral for helping a 91-year-old, this humble plumber now exclusively serves the elderly and disabled

via James Anderson

Two years ago, a tweet featuring the invoice for a fixed boiler went viral because the customer, a 91-year-old woman with leukemia, received the services for free.

"No charge for this lady under any circumstances," the invoice read. "We will be available 24 hours to help her and keep her as comfortable as possible."

The repair was done by James Anderson, 52, a father-of-five from Burnley, England. "James is an absolute star, it was overwhelming to see that it cost nothing," the woman's daughter told CNN.

Keep Reading Show less
Heroes

A mother's viral plea for kids with life-or-death food allergies is one we all need to hear

HR Mom/Facebook

I live in a family with various food intolerances. Thankfully, none of them are super serious, but we are familiar with the challenges of finding alternatives to certain foods, constantly checking labels, and asking restaurants about their ingredients.

In our family, if someone accidentally eats something they shouldn't, it's mainly a bit of inconvenient discomfort. For those with truly life-threatening food allergies, the stakes are much higher.

I can't imagine the ongoing stress of deadly allergy, especially for parents trying to keep their little ones safe.

Keep Reading Show less
popular