Altschool offers a customized curricula for every student.

By Anna Argemi

I have always find it rather ironic that the fathers of cutting-edge technology of the last few decades are fiercely anti-technological when it comes to education matters. The fact that Steve Jobs and other Silicon Valley geniuses sent their children to “low technology” schools, such as Waldorf or Montessori, seem to be a clear message about the dangerous and highly damaging relationship that can be established between kids and technology. They already are an impressed generation.

But, what would happen if we changed the equation and, instead of slaving kids in front of screens we did the exact opposite: put technology in service of education to get every student to explore his/her learning potential at its most? This is the philosophy that inspires Altschool.

Is there any point in a teacher giving a lecture to a classroom with 30 students, each of whom their own profile, skills, and working rhythm? It is not a trivial question. And the answer is no, there is no point because nowadays artificial intelligence enables the customization of each student’s learning process. The alliance between teachers and engineers is already a fact in the American school Altschool, founded by the former Google, Max Ventilla.

Every morning, students arrive at the school with a different “education playlist”. The playlist works through artificial intelligence, which’s algorithm analyzes the previous day’s work of the students, and suggests a program on the following day that it is not repetitive and adapts to their needs and to what they want to learn. The playlists are developed with the collaboration of teachers, who enter their observations on each students every day in order to “feed” the program.

The school considers that academic improvements are important, but it also values the growth of non-academic features, such as perseverance, team work and proactivity. These characteristics and academic knowledge are key for kids to succeed in the future world, according to Ventilla.

The first Altschool opened in 2013, and currently it is a network of 7 schools located in San Francisco, Palo Alto and New York. The school’s website claims that technology and knowledge are transforming society at an accelerating rate, so it is time to accelerate our thinking about learning.

In a video, Ventilla explains that the traditional education model, developed in the 19^th century, would foster mass education due to the need of mass workers.  The classic school transforms children into computers, in a manner of speaking, but computers already exist, and therefore doing their work does not provide any added value. The new disruptive education system that Ventilla is trying to implement tries to adapt to the new 21^st century needs and train men and women with personal skills that make them professionally successful.

I finish as I started, with my pleasant surprise due to engineers’ interest of renewing an old fashioned school system. To me, it would seem more logic is the initiative came from politicians, academics, pedagogues, or parents, but, engineers? Is a school such as Altschool really the school of the future? Only the future will tell.

Source: El Pais