The Big Idea

Let’s tap into the vast knowledge in our neighborhoods. Let’s tap into the joy of playing, exploring, and discovering. Let’s open learning up to everything and everybody. And then let’s celebrate it and give people credit for it.

Imagine a system of awards, like merit badges in Boy Scouts, for raising a puppy, mastering multiplication tables, cooking Thanksgiving dinner, or demonstrating the sales process in a retail store. Imagine that each time a child receives an award, a bit of money from community donations is put into his education account. Over time, a portfolio of accomplishment and a scholarship fund grows.

Here’s how it works:

The Awards

Anyone can design, teach, or earn an award. Each award represents a module of learning or skill that follows a template. Each consists of vocabulary and main ideas/concepts, activities, and an experience in community.

You can choose your award and earn it, or someone can give you an award because you demonstrated that you have mastered it. You can customize an award and then ask someone to award it to you. You can write an award for a friend, colleague, employee, or neighbor.

Each award has an icon so you can build a portfolio of icons. If you teach an award to someone, you receive the award’s icon with silver rim on it. If you designed the award, your icon will have a gold rim on it.

The Technology

All of the awards are in a wiki system, like wikipedia. When you design or edit an award, you link it to other awards and tag it into categories. Raising a puppy may go under “animal care.” Streams of awards add up to all the awards needed to be a veterinarian or fireman or a good citizen. You can browse the system to see what other people are doing and the paths they took to get there.

Your put your award icons up on your personal social networking page. Your icons are linked to the page of the person who honored you with the award. Your portfolio of awards becomes your resume for school and employment applications and advancement.

The Scholarship Program

A system of giving feeds into a scholarship program for children. A child receives community appreciation in the form of money for each merit badge earned. Donations are divided into the number of awards earned and then are distributed into individual education accounts.  A child sees how small deposits of money, over time, grow. Maybe parents, grandparents, and others will be able to add to the child’s account.

The Networking System

We spread the word using the Obama campaign system. Hired field organizers go to their communities, meet with people and ask them to hold house meetings. They show videos, tell stories about their experiences with the system, and then sign people up to get involved.  Organizers open offices, sign up interns, form neighborhood teams, and set goals. They look for local sponsors who want to financially support awards or groups of awards. The field organizers are responsible for data collection and reporting, for further training with the organization, and for contributing ideas to the whole system.

Ethics

As with all human systems, whether friendships, businesses, or nations, this system depends upon the strongest ethical behavior of its participants. The first awards are each of the Hawaiian values. Both universal and systemic in nature, they form the basis for how we all work together.

The Big Vision

As the system grows organically in the community, it is easily and voluntarily adopted by teachers in schools. A few children ask the teacher to give them credit for awards for reading Harry Potter or setting up a series of science experiments. The school PTA offers the ethics awards. A few teachers begin to use the system and find that they get more help from parents. Teachers can easily assess student progress and their own effectiveness.

As the basic skills are categorized on the wiki system, teachers are no longer the sole sources of information and skill-building. Teachers, parents and students see which skills are mastered and which are yet to be earned. A student explores the many different ways to learn the skills and goes at his own pace. A student sees how the skills are connected and have meaning in his life.

After using the new system, grade levels, grading and testing seems archaic. Schools and then school systems become self-organizing, data-driven, networked, respectful, inclusive, and inspiring.

Financial support for learning and community commitment and appreciation are linked.

The vision is grand, but the beginnings are simple. We don’t have to change our vast, complex, industrial, chaotic educational system. All we have to do is create this one. This new system has the capacity to gradually and organically replace the old.

I’ll keep you posted on its progress.

Lynn Rasmussen