Location: Brooklyn, NY

Ever since I went to a magical after-school program (IMACS) that helped me go from hating to falling in love with math, I've been extremely passionate about education. To learn about education, I've read dozens of books, visited schools, did a lot of tutoring and teaching, and eventually started my own after-school computer science program here in NY, The Coding Space.

My biggest educational influences are Seymour Papert, The Sudbury Valley School, Blake Boles, John Holt, and John Taylor Gatto.

I believe that humans learn best at their own pace, voluntarily, self-directedly, so they have a chance to develop an intimate, positive emotional relationship with the material.

I believe that a lot of what traditional schools do is actively harmful to children: large classrooms, curriculum, lectures, tests, homework, etc. These one-sized-fits-all tools are useful for school systems to manage mass-education at scale, but they are woefully worse than more humane and tailored approaches.

For example, Bloom's Two Sigma Problem shows that literally all students can get A's in all subjects if instead of getting lectured at, they get a personalized tutor. Erik Hoel writes at length about how we used to produce Einsteins through what he calls Aristocratic Tutoring. Especially with modern technology, such as the internet, computers, google, wikipedia, not even including recent advances in AI, there are definitely cost-effective ways to get every child the attention they deserve. For starters, the flipped classroom model works wonders; that's what I experienced 20 years ago at IMACS. Secondly, if you remove the overhead of paying for extensive administration of a school, then you can much more affordably scale 1:4 teacher to student ratios.

This is why homeschooling is on the rise. It's growing at an insane rate right now!

Yet, it feels depressing to keep a child alone at home all day, learning with just mom, and on the computer by themselves.

It feels like there should be another option that's a vibrant, social place for children to go that's a culturally rich environment to learn, be creative, make friends, go on adventures, do projects, play make-believe, have fun, learn lessons, have space for academic rigor and play, silliness and serious productive fun, time to run around outside and focus time inside, time to read whatever you want, time to go on a walk with friends.

Given how much I care about this, I fear that I might have to create this "school" myself: provide this vision, recruit the leaders, teachers, other parents and students, to help get it off the ground. If this sounds like your life's work, please reach out!

However, I'd be much happier to find that a school close enough to my dream, close enough to where we want to live, and just get to send our kids there, without having to start it ourselves! Would you know of such a school?

Is a Montessori school close enough to what I'm looking for? What about Waldorf? Are there any other good pre-existing options in my area?

My fiancé Emily and I are planning to raise a family in Brooklyn, NY. We currently live in Prospect Heights. We plan to have 2-3 kids.