I think it boils down to this:
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Deep, internalized emotional safety is at the root of many behaviors critical for learning (and living!): tolerance to discomfort (and therefore appetite for risk, unknown, long-term reward), patience, ability to re-scope situations, etc.
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I would argue children develop safety through an abundance of care and attention. Being vulnerable for the first ten years of life and totally dependent on others to survive, care and attention is associated with needs being met, and therefore safety. If met, this coupling can be “outgrown” as the growing adult builds confidence and self-reliance, realizing that they can meet their needs without social affirmation. If unmet, people continue striving for social affirmation, unable to see that they’re stuck in a kid psychology without a contrasting viewpoint to understand it from.
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If safety comes from an abundance of care, the greatest source of untapped care is (1) other students and (2) everyone else in society.
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For the first, the number of effective teachers could increase by a large factor if more experienced students paid understanding forward to less experienced students. Sometime in middle school I came to a pretty life-changing realization that I could make a positive impact if I focused my care and attention on children younger than myself. That’s a pretty satisfying, fun realization, and it unpinned a motivation to teach. I feel confident that other students could and would come to similar realizations, given the right environment.
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Now this is the fun part — as the ratio of students and teachers converges you can teach in smaller and smaller batches, and give students more options. Rather than a “one size fits all” education, a result of paucity of teachers, I can picture distinct chains of pay-it-forward teaching that form distinct “lineages” of care and pedagogy. This is similar to academia today, where professors have a lineage of students they’ve taught, but applied more broadly.
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Now that we can think in terms of pedagogical lineages, this is how you can engage everyone else in society. If you’re willing to break down the barrier between practice and theory, I as a software engineer today work at a tech company in order to get the mentorship and money I need, but in turn I have the ability to pay that forward to less experienced students through my own projects. The more formalized the project is, the more money I can provide. The less formalized, the more I would need to provide care and mentorship to have less experienced people contribute. Moreover, anything that a mentee creates is theirs and becomes part of a digital portfolio they use as a signifier of their tangible skills, one that can used by both prospective mentors and mentees for credibility and discoverability (search).
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A backwards-compatible rollout of this system would involve going from (6) to (4), starting from private industry and working down to younger age groups. This approach connects education with credibility (digital portfolio) with work in a beautiful way, one that’s reminiscent of apprenticeships and workshops but in a new expansive, digital context.
In my own life I am trying to do this by (1) forming a grouphouse of peer professional software engineers in North Berkeley, (2) work on projects together, (3) if particular projects have the capability to be built out, take on more peers and mentees, (4) split off and form a new grouphouse for a specific project.
There are several nice properties of this approach in theory (which will be evaluated in practice).
Combining shelter, community, education, work, opts out of many costs that are taken for granted. Why do these scopes require separation? Looking backwards, I suspect it’s because separate institutions specialized for these different roles. But also looking back, “mom and pop shops” were once a norm, and looking even further “the family farm”. In other words, while centralized institutions existed, at the small/local scale there were solutions that combined shelter, work, family, education (when children were expected to work at the business or farm). What’s stopping grouphouses from being the solution for the present?
If anything, many contemporary trends enable these scopes to be consolidated, at home. Remote work, rising cost of living (and exploding cost of education), social isolation, being just a few.
Moreover, I believe that they could come to complement specialized institutions, rather than replace them.