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How to start a school with your friends
- aspenmayer 1y agohttps://archive.is/nsiBo https://archive.is/nsiBo
- geverett 1y agoA coliving house in NYC started a 'university' that has taught thousands of students in the last two years.
- carom 1y agoAny more details on this?
- maxverse 1y agoThe Recurse Center[1] folks (also YC) started an un-school with friends! [1] http://recurse.com/ http://recurse.com/
- parpfish 1y agoI’ve been intrigued by recurse for a long time because the alums I’ve met are all very impressive. But when I think about applying, I worry that it’s just tapping into my addiction to external validation and credential-seeking rather than just learning something on my own. Or… that’s what I tell myself because I’m not nearly as bright as the recursers I’ve met
- fitsumbelay 1y agoD O P E !
- fitsumbelay 1y agoThere are HN readers who really do not understand that "dope" is a positive exclamation?
- ChrisMarshallNY 1y agoThat looks very cool. As someone that has given a number of classes and seminars, it gets fairly discouraging, how few folks want to learn. I think that establishing a learning-focused community (like this) would probably really get a lot of people engaged. Geeks like learning. Many others don't. It's always fairly demoralizing, when I encounter it.
- jbellis 1y agoLove to see it! Wonder how to reconcile the description of almost-negligible admin overhead with this description of a similar effort that warns, "We wanted to keep costs extremely low, so we had parent volunteers do all admin for the school. It's going really well, but it's an insane amount of work." From my experience both teaching kids and organizing things, that seems like a much more likely outcome. https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1917287461027459239 https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1917287461027459239
- CrazyStat 1y agoFractalU isn't a school. It doesn't need to keep records, comply with miles of state regulations (employee and volunteer background checks, record keeping, mandatory exams, ...). It doesn't need to be able to demonstrate to other schools (or universities) what the students achieved. It doesn't need to demonstrate to the state that it's actually teaching the students something. It doesn't handle any money, so it doesn't need an accountant. It doesn't employ anyone. It doesn't need to worry about firing anyone. My kids attended a small co-op school when they were young--5 employees (4 teachers + "director" who was mostly a floating assistant/substitute), everything else handled by parent volunteers. There's really an enormous amount of administrative overhead. FractalU doesn't have any of that because it's not actually a school.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> There's really an enormous amount of administrative overhead. What kind of work does this administrative overhead in particular consist of?
- CrazyStat 1y agoAll the things I listed in the first paragraph.
- The_Amp_Walrus 1y agoa school is an institution that teaches people your definition of "actually a school" seems to arbitrarily include a lot of reporting and paperwork and commerce that have nothing to do with the bit where you teach people stuff
- rahimnathwani 1y agoI love these sort of 'high agency', 'you can just do stuff' posts.
- pcthrowaway 1y agoI read "How to Live Near your Friends"[1] article linked from this article, and I can't help but be amused by the author's attitude of "my friends should all move near me because that's the way we can all live near friends" I mean they're not wrong, but also they could have made friends with their neighbours like the Stoop Coffee[2] author, or moved to be nearer to a friend group also. It's nice to see them really embracing their main character bias though (in this case, in a way that seemed to have successfully built a geographically aligned community) [1]: https://prigoose.substack.com/p/how-to-live-near-your-friends https://prigoose.substack.com/p/how-to-live-near-your-friend... [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43473618 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43473618
- parpfish 1y agoThe thing that stuck out to me was that they said there were 22 friends nearby. I have no idea how you’d maintain relationships with that many people that would be strong enough to justify “I’ll uproot my living situation to be by this person”. Maybe they actually just have 22 acquaintances that like their roommate matchmaking and apartment hunting skills?
- vianarafael 1y agoThis is such a refreshing inversion of the ‘edtech’ trend—rather than trying to scale education through software, FractalU scales motivation through community. Makes me wonder: instead of designing better UIs for MOOCs or LLM tutors, maybe the real unlock is designing better social containers for learning.
- TimTheTinker 1y ago> the real unlock is designing better social containers FTFY. Note - a lot of the classic social containers have been systematically disappearing since the 1970s in anything but rural areas for a variety of reasons. I'm not qualified to hypothesize the causes, but I do see the effects.
- yupitsme123 1y agoI always wondered why no one creates new universities in the US. It seems like in the 1800s every rich guy started their own university, many with unique missions. The existing university model in the US seems like it's ripe for disruption so I'm surprised no one has tried to create their own.
- SteveNuts 1y agoIt seems like all we’ve been able to do is churn out diploma mills with dubious (or outright fraudulent) accreditation.
- vector_spaces 1y agoOr predatory/misleading payment schemes, a la Lambda School
- fallingknife 1y agoWhat is predatory and misleading about it? I just looked it up and it's 17% of your next two years income. Seems pretty simple to me.
- econ 1y agoWe should extort grown-ups to pay for the younglings. 1-2% of your earnings forever. That way we get professionals who aren't a pack of hyenas looking to put the squeeze on everything an everyone. Those will rip you appart like a sheep with no effort at all.
- photonthug 1y agoAbout 1-2% of earnings forever, tech workers will be on a path for this anyway, it just won't pay for younglings at all. Suppose you need a bunch of certs to remain accredited in a competitive field. Several of the relevant certs are always expiring on any given year, the costs go up but the wages don't, and the field just gets more competitive so you need all the certs and a degree. If wages also go down because of AI, if you find it difficult to retire.. then yeah, even when you've paid in full for your education once already, you're kind of doomed to keep renting it. Employers tend tend to pay this (for now), but if you're ever not employed you'll have eat the costs yourself as a prerequisite for ever getting employed
- sakesun 1y agoSomething to do while AI take care of other chores.
- lakomen 1y ago[dead]
- sirodoht 1y agoI've been very inspired by FractalU. We've started something similar in London, UK, called Shoshin College [1] [1] https://shoshincollege.org/ https://shoshincollege.org/
- flawn 1y agoEver heard of https://code.berlin https://code.berlin?
- godsinhisheaven 1y agoI do find it a bit funny how all of these "democratized" and "decentralized" things always seem to come out the most centralized places, mostly New York. Of course, that's where the people are, so you know, it makes sense. Just funny.