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Thanks for your comment. COVID reminded us how important a school's role is in providing a safe place for students to be & learn (so that parents/guardians can

Thanks for your comment. COVID reminded us how important a school's role is in providing a safe place for students to be & learn (so that parents/guardians can work or otherwise support their households). You may have seen the data on COVID's disproportionate effect on women leaving the workforce to tend to childcare duties that would otherwise not have been present if schools were open. For many online school families, they have struggled with this for years before COVID and will continue to struggle with it after; we are designing this program precisely to address this challenge. I also wanted to address the last part of your comment: all kids of the same age learning the same thing is indeed a disadvantage of today's traditional education system. I hope you'll agree that there's nothing biological about 10 year olds needing to learn the exact same thing at the exact same time. Children proceed along unpredictable paths of learning at unpredictable paces and our jobs as educators (or in my case, as someone who supports educators) is to enable as much of that flexibility as possible for the children.

lazyasciiart 5y ago
Those online school families should send their kids to school. The only good reasons for not doing so are ones that would also prevent them from going to your fake school. And instead of an idiotic sneer about biology, perhaps you could share why you appear to have decided that "academic bonding", as you called it earlier, is so contemptible - and what you find so awful about kids being around others of the same age.
- amarkumar81 5y ago
  We may need to agree to disagree on the point about online school families. As a principle, I try not to judge any parents' choices on what school they select for their children. Education is an incredibly complex issue and we should all strive for all parents to make informed decisions about their families. Online school families, as a particular example, have a wide variety of needs that draw them to the model of learning (e.g., a child being medically homebound; a child who practices/trains for competitive sports or arts; or a child who desires flexibility in where, when, and how fast they work on their academic courses). The point about academic bonding is that students in any one of our learning pods will be from a range of ages (generally no more than 3 years apart at most), given the freedom to work on different subjects at the same time, and encouraged to work at whatever pace is best for them. In other words, I agree with you that academic bonding is a really good thing, but it is just hard for us to nurture given the flexibility inherent in our model. Therefore, we take extra care to make sure that the students build relationships over the other parts of the pod experience.
- seibelj 5y ago
  You want to send kids to a uniform school, learning uniform things, in an assembly-line manner. The home schooling / unschooling movement believes that every student is different, how they learn best is unique to them, and the factory schools are overpriced / inefficient / run by corrupt unions. The movement is growing because people don’t want their kids to suffer in the horrible schools designed to beat the desire to learn out of them. Parents have the right to determine how to raise their kids and that includes their education. The moment the state requires you to send your kids to an indoctrination camp is the moment I leave the country.
  - reilly3000 5y ago
    I think something like this is one of the only reasonable ways to pull off a decent unschooling experience with working parents. During the pandemic school year we pulled our kids out of the system and had a generally positive experience with homeschooling which evolved into unschooling as we learned more, but we never had the time and energy we had hoped to create those learning moments, and our kids' drive was hopelessly oriented towards video games. Even still, they made interesting projects and became quite articulate, if not traditionally academic. Public school is a mess at best- completely outsourced to Pearson and oriented towards an outmoded model of authoritarian compliance, it fails to prepare kids for life and beats the curiosity right out of them... but its also rather turnkey for working families and difficult to compete with their resources for a well-rounded experience.
    - seibelj 5y ago
      I agree. What we need are experiments like KaiPod - actual innovation in the education space. The educational model of the 1800s is not what we need in education today. If we let the funding follow the student, then the ~$20k spent on educating each child could be used by the parent to select the best option. Unfortunately we continue to give money to the "free" schools and force parents to spend extra to actually educate kids. It's insanity.
- dang 5y ago
  Hey - you can't attack another user like this and you can't call names like this in HN comments. Please review the rules and stick to them, regardless of how you strongly feel about education. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I normally don't make moderation comments when people are criticizing YC startups (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Thoughtful critique is fine, but what you posted here was egregious and the kind of thing we ban accounts for. No more of this, please, regardless of the topic.
  - lazyasciiart 5y ago
    Oops, I'll go back to poker- faced sarcastic remarks that are superficially civil but represent other comments as the most vacuous inane strawman argument I can find, like he did here.
    - dang 5y ago
      I really think you're misreading the other commenter quite badly. Even if not, though, this is one of the guidelines that you, like all users here, are asked to follow: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Please don't miss this one either: "Don't be snarky." or this one: "Be kind." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

lazyasciiart 5y ago

Those online school families should send their kids to school. The only good reasons for not doing so are ones that would also prevent them from going to your fake school. And instead of an idiotic sneer about biology, perhaps you could share why you appear to have decided that "academic bonding", as you called it earlier, is so contemptible - and what you find so awful about kids being around others of the same age.

amarkumar81 5y ago
We may need to agree to disagree on the point about online school families. As a principle, I try not to judge any parents' choices on what school they select for their children. Education is an incredibly complex issue and we should all strive for all parents to make informed decisions about their families. Online school families, as a particular example, have a wide variety of needs that draw them to the model of learning (e.g., a child being medically homebound; a child who practices/trains for competitive sports or arts; or a child who desires flexibility in where, when, and how fast they work on their academic courses). The point about academic bonding is that students in any one of our learning pods will be from a range of ages (generally no more than 3 years apart at most), given the freedom to work on different subjects at the same time, and encouraged to work at whatever pace is best for them. In other words, I agree with you that academic bonding is a really good thing, but it is just hard for us to nurture given the flexibility inherent in our model. Therefore, we take extra care to make sure that the students build relationships over the other parts of the pod experience.
seibelj 5y ago
You want to send kids to a uniform school, learning uniform things, in an assembly-line manner. The home schooling / unschooling movement believes that every student is different, how they learn best is unique to them, and the factory schools are overpriced / inefficient / run by corrupt unions. The movement is growing because people don’t want their kids to suffer in the horrible schools designed to beat the desire to learn out of them. Parents have the right to determine how to raise their kids and that includes their education. The moment the state requires you to send your kids to an indoctrination camp is the moment I leave the country.
- reilly3000 5y ago
  I think something like this is one of the only reasonable ways to pull off a decent unschooling experience with working parents. During the pandemic school year we pulled our kids out of the system and had a generally positive experience with homeschooling which evolved into unschooling as we learned more, but we never had the time and energy we had hoped to create those learning moments, and our kids' drive was hopelessly oriented towards video games. Even still, they made interesting projects and became quite articulate, if not traditionally academic. Public school is a mess at best- completely outsourced to Pearson and oriented towards an outmoded model of authoritarian compliance, it fails to prepare kids for life and beats the curiosity right out of them... but its also rather turnkey for working families and difficult to compete with their resources for a well-rounded experience.
  - seibelj 5y ago
    I agree. What we need are experiments like KaiPod - actual innovation in the education space. The educational model of the 1800s is not what we need in education today. If we let the funding follow the student, then the ~$20k spent on educating each child could be used by the parent to select the best option. Unfortunately we continue to give money to the "free" schools and force parents to spend extra to actually educate kids. It's insanity.
dang 5y ago
Hey - you can't attack another user like this and you can't call names like this in HN comments. Please review the rules and stick to them, regardless of how you strongly feel about education. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I normally don't make moderation comments when people are criticizing YC startups (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20%22not%20more%22%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...). Thoughtful critique is fine, but what you posted here was egregious and the kind of thing we ban accounts for. No more of this, please, regardless of the topic.
- lazyasciiart 5y ago
  Oops, I'll go back to poker- faced sarcastic remarks that are superficially civil but represent other comments as the most vacuous inane strawman argument I can find, like he did here.
  - dang 5y ago
    I really think you're misreading the other commenter quite badly. Even if not, though, this is one of the guidelines that you, like all users here, are asked to follow: "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." Please don't miss this one either: "Don't be snarky." or this one: "Be kind." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html