Elementary school

I have principles. One of them is that school Valentines are indulgent and bad for the environment.

I have written Markets in Everything for school Valentine’s

And here are some quotes from Do Less for Preschool

Just fail, people. Don’t even put “crazy sock day” on your work Outlook calendar…

Oh no. If AI lifts the constraint of time, then what we are going to get is more crazy sock days. To stay ahead in the status competition, families will have to do Bluey-Crazy Sock Day every week. The ocean will become a thick soup of polyester Bluey-crazy-socks, size 3T, worn only once.

On principle, I did low-effort Valentine’s last year. I spent as little of my own time and money as I could. My kids wrote their friends’ names on the paper things. Smugly, I imagined that I’d saved the dolphins in the tuna nets and helped some other mom feel like she was doing okay.

Who do you imagine is upset? Not the other moms. My kids. The older one especially feels in his body that failing this test in February of 2026 will result in expulsion from the tribe and death in the outer darkness beyond the reach of the campfire.

Guess what I care about more than dolphins? We will do more this year.

Preschool kids do not care and should not be asked to care. I still believe that parents and daycare directors should do less for preschool. Truly, I see no reason, at all, for a preschool dress up day or Valentine’s Day party. Can someone think of the dolphins before it’s too late and the kid grows up and starts caring about the status wars?

I created a provocative title for fun. Tyler pointed me to this podcast:

Joe Liemandt – Building Alpha School, and The Future of Education (Apple podcast link)

I suppose I’m sold on their claim that most kids can learn basic facts and some academic skills from an iPad app. Listen all the way through if you are going to listen at all, because even some cracks in the tech product are revealed after the big pitch in the beginning.

I have been using Duolingo to review my high school French and Spanish. I think the few minutes a day I spend have helped drag some vocabulary back out of long-term storage. Although, as I recently heard a comedian say, “All my friends who have Duolingo are still speaking English to me.”

Folks should consider whether AI learning apps is just MOOCs again. Essentially, they need to get kids to watch (short, this time) videos of lecture content. MOOCs were longer lecture content videos. Maybe shorter is the key, combined with personalized feedback. Maybe not, for getting cheap effective comprehensive education that scales.

Last year I wrote Why Podcasts Succeeded in Gaining Influence Where MOOCs Failed

About half an hour in, Liemandt asserts that anyone in America would agree that kids learn life skills through “sports” not school. That’s an oversimplification, but I agree that sports ranks higher than “math class” for developing leadership ability.

Since they at Alpha School believe that have solved quickly learning facts, it’s interesting to hear how they do the rest of “education.” The school must fill enough time that the parents don’t have to see their kids half the day and also teach leadership/ communication/character. Alpha school is expensive ($40,000 a year) and there are many paid adults involved who are called “guides and coaches.”

The extracurriculars that Alpha school offers sounds a lot like what most kids can do in some form at a good public middle school or high school in America. I wrote about the value of outside-class activities in college here: The Value of Student Organizations and On-Campus Education: Anecdotal Evidence from Tim Keller

My students at Samford are especially good at taking on leadership roles and creating a thriving community. Residential college provides a good testing ground for leadership and there are real “market tests” of success for things like sorority events, as the Alpha school encourages for older kids.

I applaud people trying to innovate. I think we’ll see more educational apps in schools, and that will be great. I’m not trying to dump on Alpha School. I just think the underperformance arc of MOOCs should temper our enthusiasm.