Our new structure is not much to look at

David Jenkins, Simin Shokrullah and Benazir Noorzad have been working hard these past few weeks to mobilize from their communities in Bo City and Kabul the first two breakaway learning clusters. And as MOGwee transitions to The BreakAway Learning Project, it’s time to reconsider the shape of things.

David Jenkins reviews potential study spaces in Bo City

Take our project, for example. When we started as a C-corporation, we imagined a marketplace of curiosity-driven conversations. Our focus was on the value-added which a for-profit corporate structure could bring to a fee-based marketplace. But we learned with time that curiosity doesn’t drive teen learning activity. Instead inflexible curricula, schedules, tests and college-admission drive them. What the heck happened to our teens? Re-awakening that curiosity, we learned, would take a transformation of the whole teen learning system, beginning with a social movement to break-away from schools.

That’s when my friends and I realized we couldn’t get there as MOGwee, but need to dissolve this corporation and re-define ourselves as a not-for-profit organization. We’re striving to change the way people look at the teen learning process, and we know that in many cases, that’s hardly a profitable venture. But if The BreakAway Learning Project can get its first few learning clusters going in some of the most challenging places, we’ll keep pushing toward that stick-in-the-mud mainstream.

Now there’s another structure that we’re revisiting, and that’s the brick-and-mortar place called school. David spent the early days of March visiting and photographing apartments, houses, even storerooms half-filled with merchandise. We have been struggling with the financial reality that teens need safe, dedicated, wifi-enabled study space and supervising mentors, and yet can’t afford much more than US$20 per student, per month. When Sierra Leone’s low-quality and over-priced wifi costs are added, it seems nearly impossible to make an affordable package.

Will the Bo City cluster get started
in this storeroom?

But our students are persistent, and so we are finding a solution in expanding their numbers. By tripling the cluster as 3 groups of 8, creating a rotation schedule that provides each student 30 hours per week of wifi-enabled access to the study space, and supplementing the professional mentor with volunteer peer mentors, we can achieve a product that meets the students’ needs and their budgets.

We’re revisioning “school” as something much simpler-- lights and chairs, electric sockets and a router-- even as we’re creating for each student a completely personalized learning plan, with the best of online courses, tutorials and chats.

Possibly the favorite space found yet

Our new structure is not much to look at. But you’d be amazed what 20 bucks and a router can do!

The School Bias: Why homework takes precedence over learning

It's been a rocky start for MOGwee, and I'm learning the difficulty to create a marketplace that balances supply and demand. Actually, the supply part has not been hard to build. Visiting musical conservatories, universities, political action groups and art studios from Nairobi to Phnom Penh, and working through my local teams, we easily find amazing people who are eager to share their perspectives and skills. We have uncovered incredible personal stories, and put together Study Projects that (we think) could excite young people to look at everyday problems--from trash to hand-washing to election campaigns-- in new ways.

But demand has been the tough nut to crack. And I mean really tough. I was disappointed, but not too surprised when one American high school teacher told me that her students have second-grade reading levels, and that she would be unable to attempt any of these studies in class. MOGwee targets bright students who are personally driven to learn. But it looks like those very students are the most straight-jacketed, least exploratory of all.

"Our focus is on AP test scores," one principal told me. "Our students will only go above and beyond if they get college credit," another principal said. "This is all very nice, but my daughter has homework, band rehearsal and lacrosse," one mother complained. I realized that MOGwee sits to the side of the conveyor belt that is teen college-prep, and that's a fatal place to be.

But what's startling is how many young adults admit (if you ask them), that they feel lost and meaningless in the process. Why am I factoring this quadratic equation? Why am I listing the three properties of igneous rock? Why am I making a Prezi about the water cycle? One secondary teacher remarked thoughtfully, "Our students' days are regulated from the moment they wake up til the moment they go back to sleep, and we can hardly depart from curriculum. But when they're 17, we say, 'So whad'ya wanna be when you grow up?'" What do we expect?

David Jenkins (right) initiates plan with Principal Kamara,
United Methodist Church Secondary School in Bo City, Sierra
Leone, for pilot group of "independent study program"
(homeschooling is not legal) under their auspices. 

So recently I began working with my partners in Sierra Leone and Afghanistan to try to help young people break away from the conveyor belt process. Let's call it the Breakaway Learning Project. We're mobilizing the (very few) teens brave enough to say "no" to standard curricula, and setting them up in small mentored teams with individualized curricula that draw on MOGwee, edX, Coursera, Khan Academy, Brilliant, Codecademy and more.

I believe the demand for inspiring, individualized learning is out there. It just needs to be emancipated.