Tag: knowledge

Outschool.com Takes Education Out Of Schooling

Kerry McDonald

Supporting education beyond schooling is a key feature of many educational technology platforms. While some may be integrated into conventional classrooms, complementing a traditional curriculum, emerging technology is increasingly helping to separate education from schooling and catalyze new models of K-12 learning. As its name implies, Outschool.com is focused on out-of-school learning that helps families and organizations to access high-quality content in an array of subjects. Its flexibility and variety engage learners around the world and facilitate the expansion of new learning communities outside of standard schooling.

Instructors choose to share their knowledge and passions, and they are publicly rated by participants, offering transparency and accountability.

Founded by Amir Nathoo in 2015, Outschool now offers over 10,000 live, video-enabled classes for young people ages three to 18. Connecting online in small groups with dynamic instructors, learners select content ranging from typical academic subjects to more adventurous classes such as pet trick training, forensic science, engineering with Minecraft, and wilderness survival skills.

Prices vary by topic and course length, but the introductory wilderness survival class, for example, costs $45 for a total of three, 45-minute classes. Instructors choose to join Outschool to share their knowledge and passions, and they are publicly rated by participants, offering transparency and accountability. They undergo background checks and are then free to offer whatever courses interest them while catering to learner, and parent, demand. Teachers set their own prices and Outschool takes 30 percent of the enrollment fee.

Supporting Passion-Driven Learning

Trained as an engineer, Nathoo’s inspiration for launching Outschool was tied to his own childhood experiences.

My parents were both teachers and although I had an amazing standard education in the U.K., my most impactful learning happened outside of school,

he says. In the early 1980s, Nathoo’s parents bought him a computer, a BBC Micro, and he spent hours tinkering with it. “They gave me unlimited screen time,” recalls Nathoo. “I loved playing computer games and I became inspired to try creating games myself.”

Spotting their son’s burgeoning passion for computers, Nathoo’s parents found a retired economics professor who liked computer science and offered to mentor Nathoo. “That learning experience based on my interests has turned into a career in technology,” he says.

When I think of the skills and learning that I use today, so much of that happens outside of school. Being a technologist and an entrepreneur, it’s always been my idea to apply technology to enable more of the out-of-school learning that has been so valuable to me.

Prior to starting San Francisco-based Outschool, Nathoo worked as a project lead for Square, the payment processing company. He was intrigued by how technology-driven marketplace models such as Airbnb, Lyft, and Etsy revolutionized entire industries, and he was dissatisfied that the same level of transformation was not occurring in education.

As Nathoo began to create the Outschool digital platform, he was intentionally looking for models outside of the existing education system. “The real lightbulb moment came when I learned more about homeschooling,” says Nathoo. He was introduced to this type of education from a San Francisco friend who was homeschooling her children. “There are a bunch of presumptions about homeschooling that I really didn’t see among the homeschoolers in the Bay Area,” says Nathoo.

I found that there was this group of people customizing and curating their kids’ learning and giving them a lot more freedom than they would typically have. And they were doing it socially, hiring teachers, forming groups and creating a much more dynamic style of learner-directed education. To me, this looked like the future.

Nathoo realized that this was the learner-directed education model outside of schooling that he was seeking to support and scale. The path forward became clear: create a product that served this existing audience, build a business around it and then use this business to make the ideas of learner-directed education mainstream.

I had the belief that once other parents had seen the power of this model, at first after school and on weekends, we could cause a big change in how people saw kids learning,

he says.

Global Reach, Local Impact

With a product plan, bold vision and seed capital from Y Combinator and others in 2016, Nathoo and his team built the Outschool platform and launched the first Outschool class in 2017. Since then, more than 60,000 learners worldwide have attended Outschool classes.

During his initial days incubating the Outschool idea within California homeschooling networks, Nathoo contacted Julie Schiffman who had been actively homeschooling her children for years and was very involved in the local homeschooling community. A former public school special education teacher, Schiffman left teaching because she was distraught by what she saw as a widespread practice of over-labeling and over-medicating many children with disabilities while offering limited support to children with serious emotional and behavioral disorders.

Nathoo’s vision is to make interest-based, learner-directed education a mainstream option for many more young people.

“It was insanely depressing and I had to leave the profession altogether in order to preserve my health,” says Schiffman. She began wondering how she could help to fix the problems of conventional schooling. At first, she believed that change could come from within the system, but after she started researching alternative education models, like homeschooling, she became convinced that lasting change would need to come from outside the system, by embracing and helping to expand new and better models of education.

When Nathoo called Schiffman on the phone one day in 2015 to tell her about his Outschool idea, she was spellbound. “I had to literally sit down and stable myself,” Schiffman recalls. “I fully recognized from the moment he told me what he was working on that this was the education revolution.” Schiffman’s children have used Outschool for some of their interest-based learning, including classes on building their own YouTube channels and video-editing. The relevant content and global reach mean that learners frequently take classes with peers and instructors all over the world, often retaining connections long after a class ends.

Outschool continues to expand, raising $8.5 million in Series A funding from Union Square Ventures and Reach Capital earlier this year. Nathoo expects Outschool’s digital platform to grow quickly, but he is also focused on helping to support co-learning communities, micro-schools, and other experimental education models.

Our goal is to provide a service to these types of in-person learning centers so that the kids there can get access to teachers and content to pursue their interests and to fulfill their learning goals.

Schiffman is in the process of opening one of these in-person community centers in Marin County, California, where she plans to rent out space to various instructors and vendors offering a host of different classes. She has been getting advice from Nathoo on how to make her community learning model, known as Home Base, scalable and replicable, with the aim of growing to multiple locations within the next two years. Nathoo explains how Outschool can help:

Local learning centers can focus on providing a great, local, social environment while not worrying about content, and kids can access far more teachers and content globally through this combination of online and in-person learning.

Ultimately, Nathoo’s vision is to make interest-based, learner-directed education a mainstream option for many more young people. He wants more children to have the opportunity he did to pursue passions outside of a conventional classroom that can ultimately lead to fulfilling lives and livelihoods. Now as a parent himself, Nathoo can relate even more personally to what parents want for their children’s education and well-being. He says:

When parents realize that letting kids pursue their interests is a way to get them excited about learning and is a better way to help their kids thrive in the world, that’s really powerful to see.

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Do You Talk About X in Open Borders? Yes!

Bryan Caplan

The modal question about Open Borders is, “Do you talk about X?”  The answer is “YES” for all of the following…

1. Do you talk about the historical pattern of global poverty rates?

2. Do you talk about people’s attachment to their country of birth?

3. Do you talk about overcrowding?

4. Do you talk about the global poor’s ability to function in a modern society?

5. Do you talk about global apartheid?

6. Do you talk about the level of illegal immigration?

7. Do you talk about human smuggling?

8. Do you talk about the effectiveness of immigration law at preventing and deterring illegal immigration?

9. Do you talk about immigration as a civil right?

10. Do you talk about whether the plight of the immigrant is our problem?

11. Do you talk about whether there is a right to immigrate?

12. Do you talk about whether this right is absolute?

13. Do you talk about America’s open borders era?

14. Do you talk about how America’s open borders era ended?

15. Do you talk about the potential dangers of open borders?

16. Do you talk about whether we should look before we leap?

17. Do you talk about the Antarctican farmer hypothetical?

18. Do you talk about the connection between mass consumption and mass production?

19. Do you talk about the benefits of immigration for immigrants?

20. Do you talk about the benefits of immigration for natives?

21. Do you talk about how much immigration actually helps immigrants?

22. Do you talk about why immigration helps immigrants?

23. Do you talk about how much a trillion dollars of gains really buys?

24. Do you talk about whether open borders is “trickle-down economics”?

25. Do you talk about how immigration affects native workers?

26. Do you talk about how immigration affects you personally?

27. Do you talk about the effect of immigration on average national incomes?

28. Do you talk about the Arithmetic Fallacy?

29. Do you talk about what open borders would really look like?

30. Do you talk about the effect of open borders on the visibility of poverty?

31. Do you talk about “swamping”?

32. Do you talk about diaspora dynamics?

33. Do you talk about Puerto Rico?

34. Do you talk about brain drain?

35. Do you talk about what good for places versus what’s good for people?

36. Do you talk about zombie economies?

37. Do you talk about how immigration’s fiscal effects vary by immigrant skill?

38. Do you talk about whether open borders and the welfare state are compatible?

39. Do you talk about rival versus non-rival government services?

40. Do you talk about how welfare states prioritize the old versus the poor?

41. Do you talk about the cost of educating immigrants’ children?

42. Do you talk about the effect of immigration on the sustainability of retirement systems?

43. Do you talk about the best way to measure immigrants’ overall fiscal effects?

44. Do you talk about Net Present Value?

45. Do you talk about empirical estimates of  immigrants’ overall fiscal effects?

46. Do you talk about whether more immigration is likely to save Social Security and Medicare?

47. Do you talk about empirical estimates of immigrants’ overall fiscal effects as a function of their education and age?

48. Do you talk about Milton Friedman’s arguments against open borders?

49. Do you talk about the parallels between the fiscal effects of native births versus immigration?

50. Do you talk about how human beings value their cultures?

51. Do you talk about the value of Western civilization?

52. Do you talk about the cultural dangers of admitting non-Western immigrants?

53. Do you talk about terrorism, mass rape, human trafficking, Sharia, and the decline of English?

54. Do you talk about numeracy?

55. Do you talk about the statistics of terrorism, including the share of terrorism committed by foreigners?

56. Do you talk about the Skittles argument against refugees?

57. Do you talk about immigrant crime rates?

58. Do you talk about the effect of immigration on overall crime rates?

59. Do you talk about the “What if it happened to you?” objection to statistical evidence?

60. Do you talk about first-generation immigrant language acquisition?

61. Do you talk about later-generation immigrant language acquisition?

62. Do you talk about immigrant assimilation across generations?

63. Do you talk about how modernity makes assimilation slower?

64. Do you talk about how modernity makes assimilation faster?

65. Do you talk about the social importance of trust?

66. Do you talk about the effect of immigration on national trust?

67. Do you talk about trust assimilation?

68. Do you talk about how much trust a successful society needs?

69.  Do you talk about the cultural benefits of immigration?

70. Do you talk about immigrants’ desire for freedom?

71. Do you talk about immigrants’ disdain for freedom?

72. Do you talk about the danger that immigrants will vote to “kill the goose that lays the golden eggs”?

73. Do you talk about how Democratic immigrant voters are?

74. Do you talk about Indian-American voting?

75. Do you talk about immigrants’ specific policy views?

76. Do you talk about how immigrants’ specific policy views vary by education?

77. Do you talk about the effect of immigration on actual government policy?

78. Do you talk about immigrants’ political assimilation?

79. Do you talk about whether immigrants undermine natives’ support for the welfare state?

80. Do you talk about “Magic Dirt”?

81. Do you talk about research on “Deep Roots”?

82. Do you talk about whether Deep Roots research shows that “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk” are illusory?

83. Do you talk about national IQ?

84. Do you talk about the effect of immigration on national IQ?

85. Do you talk about whether you’re virtue signaling?

86. Do you talk about whether IQ research shows that “trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk” are illusory?

87. Do you talk about the effect of immigration on immigrants’ IQs?

88. Do you talk about human genetics?

89. Do you talk about “keyhole solutions”?

90. Do you talk about imposing admission fees and surtaxes on immigrants to help less-fortune natives?

91. Do you talk about why tax-and-transfer schemes are any better than simple exclusion?

92. Do you talk about restricting immigrants’ eligibility for government benefits?

93. Do you talk about requiring immigrants to learn English?

94. Do you talk about requiring immigrants to acquire cultural literacy?

95. Do you talk about the dangers of Islam?

96. Do you talk about Muslim bans?

97. Do you talk about keyhole solutions for the dangers of Islam?

98. Do you talk about restricting immigrant voting rights?

99. Do you talk about the political feasibility of keyhole solutions?

100. Do you talk about the bracero program?

101. Do you talk about H-1Bs and other work visas?

102. Do you talk about the fairness of keyhole solutions?

103. Do you talk about Sodom and Gomorrah?

104. Do you talk about what utilitarians, egalitarians, libertarians, wealth-maximizers, meritocrats, Christians, and Kantian should think about open borders?

105. Do you talk about whether immigrants have a right to immigrate to your house?

106. Do you talk about who Jesus would deport?

107. Do you talk about the connection between open borders and socialism?

108. Do you talk about immigration and political polarization?

109. Do you talk about why conservatives should favor open borders?

110. Do you talk about why liberals should favor open borders?

111. Do you talk about citizenism?

112. Do you talk about Trump’s views and policies?

113. Do you talk about the best argument against open borders?

114. Do you talk about whether any human is illegal?

115. Do you talk about the best way to frame the immigration debate?

116. Do you talk about immigration as charity?

117. Do you talk about immigration as justice and abundance?

118. Do you talk about open borders with Canada?

119. Do you talk about why you talk so much about the United States?

120. Do you talk about whether you hate America?

121. Do you talk about earlier cosmopolitan transformations?

122. Do you talk about Brexit?

123. Do you talk about public opinion on immigration?

124. Do you talk about scaring people with extremism?

125. Do you talk about the Overton Window?

126. Do you talk about whether open borders is another crazy Ivory Tower Proposal?

127. Do you talk about how to get there from here?

128. Do you have endnotes?  Lots of them?

129. Do you have references?  Lots of them?

130. Do you have acknowledgements?  Lots of them?

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Doubly-Damned Lies II

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

More observations on government statistics, government info, and government data:

  • When I shared the previous effort, Doubly-Damned Lies, there were objections … predictably.
  • I was given the example of homelessness in the Bahamas, as the result of the recent hurricane. The claim was implicitly made that statistics would somehow make a factual situation better,  that facts organized into appropriate knowledge would indicate a bright line along the path which should be taken.  But, is there a statistical, one-size-fits-all?  Why not let the facts speak directly to each case at hand?
  • Some statistical treatment of emergency situations, however, may shed light on the problem.  There is the case, documented by Edward Tufte, about how epidemiology made a giant step forward.  In this case, the statistician immersed himself in the environment of the facts, and the design of the research was ad hoc.
  • Cyclical statistical report formats become artifacts of some historical set of facts.  They become institutions which preserve some status quo.
  • There is always the danger that statistics published with good intent will be ill-used by others with ill intent.
  • We are exposed to the damages of statistical treatment poorly designed.  Every statistical investigation must be designed by designers with pre-existing biases.  Do these biases affect the outcomes?  For examples, I heartily recommend two books recently read, The Mismeasure of Man, by Stephen Jay Gould, and Predictably Irrational, by Dan Ariely.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Do the Math

Kilgore Forelle

Nobody asked but …

Have you come to the conclusion that we, the people, are innumerate?  If not, how do you account for the fantasy of voting or the illusion of government education?  One of the major goals of government schooling is the cultivation and advancement of innumeracy.  Another major goal, of course, is illiteracy.  Look for distorting of the knowable (history), masking of the process (cloaking of the present, reason), and obsessing over predicting the unpredictable (prognostication).

There are two types of students — those who are convinced that math is not in their skill set, and those who are identified as math gurus but bundled up and exiled to sterile lands of abstraction.  The ones who buy the myth of incompetence are then glorified in reverse as being regular folks.  The few who are tricked into believing their own competence are shamed into obscurity by anti-intellectualism.

State monopolized schooling, strengthened by so-called standards, is controlling not only actual government schools but private, parochial, unschooling, and home-schooling.  The status quo thrives on the myth that the “king is good” to cover the reality that “it is good to be a king.”

I have before ranted about the confusion between product and process.  In the case of math schooling, the process has become so convoluted that the product is corrupted.  We are producing math innumerates and math nerds because those two products perpetuate the wayward process — and neither can excel at day-to-day, genuine numerical cleverness.  The poor math perceiver thinks that quantities are either mysterious or complex.  You see this in numerous walks of knowledge.  Accountants, for instance, mask the commonsense of their trade with linguistic yadda, so everyone else will see them as experts of their trade.  Consequently, commoners do not understand the technical difference between a deficit and a debt.

— Kilgore Forelle

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Bad Choices and Shifting the Blame

Kent McManigal

I don’t blame manufacturers or retailers for the misuse of their (non-faulty) products. Not even with products known to be really dangerous if used according to their purpose.

When someone buys something dangerous and makes the choice to misuse it, that’s where the blame lies.

It doesn’t matter if you’re talking guns, opioids, cars, or anything else.

If you misuse something it’s YOUR fault if you die from it and YOUR fault if you harm others. You are not the victim. I hold YOU accountable. And, if the shoe is on the other foot, as it has been a few times, I accept my responsibility.

Yes, I get it. Where drugs are concerned, people foolishly abuse drugs manufactured by people who just want to make money from addicts. It’s easy to say someone shouldn’t make something that people can get addicted to. Even though people can apparently get addicted to anything. They don’t force anyone to use their products (unlike government). They are simply meeting a want, even though we might dislike that want.

So, being addicted doesn’t change anything. To have become addicted, you still had to make the choice to use something known to be dangerously addictive at least once. Unless you are one of the vanishingly rare cases where someone drugged you without your knowledge and you became addicted, you chose the path. I feel bad for addicts, but that’s no reason to attack the manufacturers, treat them as criminals, and ignore the voluntary choice the future addict made.

Nor is there any legitimate reason to treat addicts as criminals instead of as people who may need medical help. Prohibition is still evil.

The choice to misuse a product is still a choice, and it’s not helpful to coddle those making these choices or to shift the blame to someone else.

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City Shuts Downs Preschoolers’ Farm Stand Citing Zoning Violations

Kerry McDonald

It’s like something out of The Onion: city manager shuts down preschool farm stand out of fear that, if allowed, “we could end up with one on every corner.”

Farm Stand Shut Down

Alas, this is not satire. It’s the current predicament facing the Little Ones Learning Center in Forest Park, Georgia, just outside of Atlanta. In an area where access to fresh fruits and vegetables can be limited, this preschool has stepped up to prioritize growing and selling fresh produce from its school gardens. According to recent reporting in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Little Ones has often sold its produce with generous discounts to local food stamp recipients and other neighbors and has been acknowledged as a leader in the farm-to-school healthy food movement.

That is, until the city shut down the bi-monthly farm stand program last month for zoning violations.

Despite protests from community members, city officials are holding firm to their stance that allowing one farm stand could lead to an unruly proliferation of fresh produce.

“Anywhere you live, you’ve got to have rules and regulations,” Forest Park City Manager Angela Redding said. “Otherwise, you would just have whatever,” the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

That “whatever” is exactly the hope and promise that irks central planners. Whatever symbolizes what is possible when individuals and organizations spontaneously create new streams of value for their neighbors. Whatever are opportunities for mutual gain through voluntary exchange. Whatever are new inventions, new services, and new ways of living and being that augment our existence and improve our future. Whatever is freedom.

Central Planners Are Threatened by Freedom

Freedom is the threat. Central planners are uneasy with spontaneous order, or the decentralized, peaceful process of human action that occurs when individuals follow their diverse interests in an open marketplace of trade. A preschool finds it beneficial for their students, parents, employees, and neighbors when they emphasize immersive gardening, sustainably-grown produce, and farm stand commerce. Students enjoy it, parents value the experience for their children, teachers choose to work in this farm-focused environment, and neighbors are willing to pay for the garden bounty from a twice-per-month farm stand. It is a beautiful example of the beneficial gains achieved through free markets.

That is, until the city’s central planners intervened out of fears that allowing one neighborhood farm stand to operate could lead to many, un-zoned farm stands. This is particularly poignant given that this preschool is located in one of the most disadvantaged counties in Atlanta. Little Ones preschool director Wande Okunoren-Meadows told Mother Nature Network: “According to the United Way, Clayton County has the lowest child well-being index out of all the metro Atlanta counties…So if we’re trying to move the needle and figure out ways to improve well-being, I’m not saying the farm stand is the only way to do it, but Little Ones is trying to be part of the solution.”

Zoning is often considered to be a protection mechanism, ensuring that neighborhoods remain orderly and livable. Yet, zoning laws in this country have a long history of racist tendencies. Granting power to government officials to control housing, commerce, and neighborhood development has previously led to unfair practices and unfavorable results. Decentralizing that power by eliminating questionable zoning practices can ensure that power is more justly distributed among the individual citizens of a particular community. Sadly, children’s lemonade stands are also routinely shut down for similar reasons, often with the same outrage.In the case of the Little Ones preschool, power would shift from city planners to local neighbors and businesses.

The city has offered Little Ones an opportunity to hold their farm stand in another part of town, but it is far away from the preschool and its neighborhood. City officials also said that Little Ones could pay $50 for a “special event” permit for each day it hosts its farm stand—a fee that is prohibitively expensive for the school and its small produce stand. For now, the school is selling its fruits and vegetables inside the building, but the indoor location is leading to far fewer sales as passersby don’t realize it’s there. The Little Ones parent and educator community is hoping that the city rules can be changed to allow for occasional outdoor farm stands.

Cases like Little Ones preschool expose the deleterious effects of zoning regulations. “It’s like shutting down a kid’s lemonade stand,” Okunoren-Meadows says. “Nobody does this. It just shouldn’t happen,” the preschool director told Mother Nature Network.

Sadly, children’s lemonade stands are also routinely shut down for similar reasons, often with the same outrage.

We should be outraged when young entrepreneurs are prohibited from producing and selling something of value to their neighbors due to restrictive regulations that centralize power and weaken neighborhood dynamism. Some states, like Utah, are passing laws to protect young entrepreneurs from these zoning and licensing challenges. The key is to look beyond preschool farm stands and advocate for more freedom for all.

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