An independent critique of Notschool.net

Notschool.net is an organisation that claims to be a non-profit alternative to children that are disengaged from classroom learning and other forms of structured education such as home tutoring. Notschool.net claims to offer an alternative means of education by distancing itself from the educational model of the school system. In this organisation, students are called 'researchers' and teachers are called 'mentors' - begging the question of how assigning new names to the people involved will somehow make children that are disengaged from structured education feel better about remaining part of a teacher/student relationship (hint: it wouldn't) and why the authors of this product attempt to use flimsy semantics to differentiate their educational model from the orthodox.

Having been a child that attempted and summarily rejected several methods of structured education, and having known many other such children, I tend to be deeply skeptical of products that claim to provide a successful alternative to children that are disengaged from 'classroom learning' - Such children tend to reject structured education in general, not just the most orthodox method of structured education that happens to exist (school.) This means that offering a 'toned down' alternative of a student/teacher relationship invariably tends to fail for these children, or at least be far less efficient than straight autodidactism.

The primary issues I see with products like this, based on my own personal experience of having rejected structured education and having met many others that have done the same, can be broken down to superfluousness, cost, and efficiency. Of superfluousness, the question that needs to be asked is whether products like this are at all necessary. We live in a time where autodidactism has never been so strong; information is quite literally available at the click of a button - entire libraries of educational material are published online, lectures and papers from universities all over the world are published online, there are well-furnished encyclopedias in droves, and perhaps most importantly of all, learners of various different levels gather online in order to educate each other in the form of instant or near-instant group communication. What can Notschool.net possibly hope to achieve in the face of all this, in terms of learning efficiency? Creating communities of teachers and learners is superfluous - they already exist, they are massive in comparison to Notschool.net, the comparative cost to run them is much lower and most importantly, the cost to take part in them is absolutely free. (See for example Freenode, a publicly accessible IRC network supporting hundreds upon hundreds of independent communities of learners and researchers for almost every subject. Other examples include Wikipedia, a collaborative multi-lingual encyclopedia, and Wikibooks, a reposity of collaborative text-books. These are just three of a great many large and free general learning resources on the internet.)

This brings us to cost; the cost of placing a child in the Notschool.net project is a mindblowing 5,500 pounds, which this non-profit organisation claims is required to offset it's costs. Even if schools pay this rather than parents, that's still a huge drain on the tax payer to provide access for children to an educational model that could never be anything but sub-standard in comparison to the level of education offered by autonomous autodidactism on the internet, especially when one considers the fact that this educational model must rely on the motivation of the subject to be at all successful. In which case, the subject might as well be educating themselves by means of a vastly superior model (the internet.) If this educational model instead attempts to artificially inject motivation by means of setting goals, targets, work, etc. it will simply fail outright by the kind of learner that has rejected structured education primarily because of that kind of third-party pressure that stands between them and their education.

Conclusions:

Notschool.net might have been a good idea ten years ago, before communities of learners began to spring up literally all over the internet, in every language. Children that reject structured education tend to do better the less structure is forced on them - the internet's unbridled potential for learners, coupled with its lack of structure, is already a near-perfect educational model for 'disengaged' pupils, and attempting to improve on it by adding structure is bound to make it less effective. This, coupled with the extraordinary price tag, really raises the question of why anyone would bother buying into Notschool.net when there is a far cheaper and more effective educational model available for exactly the kind of 'disengaged' children that Notschool.net is aimed at re-engaging.

Of course, Notschool.net might well work for some children, in the same way that school 'works' for many children in that they can be both educated and satisfied by it. But it's name and it's demeanour are extremely misleading - Notschool.net is certainly not the most effective educational model for children that are disengaged from 'classroom learning' (structured education.)