BreakAway Learning Project: Kabul

What is BreakAway Learning? Our Kabul cluster explains the simple and radically individualized approach to learning, ahead of our May 15th first Indiegogo launch.

What do we mean by Equality when we're talking about teen education?

What is equality? And when some of us get together talking about secondary education, why do I get the feeling we’re talking about different things?

Alexis De Tocqueville sees human equality as an inexorable force driving the ceaseless advance of democracy. He writes about equality in the opening of Democracy in America, “it is universal, it is lasting, it constantly eludes all human interference, and all events as well as all men contribute to its progress.” Equality then, is an undeniable fact. Human exertions continually reveal it, “some unknowingly and some despite themselves,” and thus what Fukuyama calls The March of Equality toward the ultimate political model, continues unstoppable.

The view of human equality as self-evident is central to the Jeffersonian view of democracy. Neither he nor Locke believed in an equality of physical endowments or intellectual capability (Jefferson was an aristocrat and slave-owner), but it was the idea of equality in the eyes of God, the equality of claims on life, liberty and happiness, the equality of a right to dignity, that formed the cornerstone of Western liberal democracy. The kind of equality Jefferson was talking about might not be visually evident, but it is morally self-evident that, under the eyes of our Creator, every human equally deserves opportunity and the tools for self-realization.

Education as a vertical

It should be no surprise, then, that underlying our day-to-day interaction with schools, curricula, education policies, and standardized testing, the desire to assert and protect equality motivates us. The No Child Left Behind Act drew on a vision of education as a vertical along which deviation should be minimized; the Every Student Succeeds Act of 2015 took this construct further--the vertical itself should be revisioned as a model in which everyone is on top.

Everyone is a winner

If education were an Olympic sport, while some teams are doping their athletes, ours would be preparing a hundred gold medals and a podium wide enough to hold all the contestants.

Of course these visual metaphors reflect an ideal behind legislation; in practice, the tools to effect greater equality involve reshuffling students and teachers, focusing time and resources on a few core competencies, standardized testing, and the re-allocation of (mostly state) funds. The focus is not on

When minimizing deviation
means minimizing choice

equal opportunity through individual choices, but toward equal learning outcomes through greater standardization. A key to social fairness, equality in education, according to this OECD policy brief, is enhanced when states minimize the sorting of students by aptitude and “manage school choice to contain the risks to equity”. (italics added)

Equality of opportunity and equality of outcomes can be consistent goals when they relate to essential life skills, particularly literacy and numeracy. These are baseline needs for functioning within an economy, for accessing new knowledge, managing one’s finances and communicating effectively. Governments should place high priority on young people mastering these skills and mastering them consistently.

However, secondary education should be something different. Teens’ strengths and emerging interests become much more diverse than can be well served by a system focused on delivering equal outcomes.

We see, then, a contradiction within the Western ideal of equality as it relates to education. Jefferson described humans that are inevitably equal, against all visible odds, equal in their claim to liberty and their right to their own pursuits. An aristocrat and founder of libraries, he emphasized the importance of cultivating literacy and virtuous citizens, but he also advocated for a very limited government, trusting the “moral sense and sympathetic instinct” of humans to guide their own development. On the other hand, the march toward universal success as a recasting of equality takes as its given that humans are born (or come to kindergarten) distinctly unequal, and that it is the role of an active state, through the narrowing of choices, the selection of a core of knowledge, and testing, to cast a K-12 corridor that reduces variation in outcomes.

The narrowing of choice and emphasis on equal outcomes seems even more inappropriate as the range of freely accessible online learning content has grown exponentially. As Clay Christensen pointed out in his 2010 book, Disrupting Class, the potential for completely individualized, personally-motivated learning has been around for years, but the design of school buildings and classrooms, allocation of teachers and supplies, still tends toward a monolithic, homogeneous process into which the child is inserted. Christensen optimistically predicted a sea-change within a year or two. But students are still covering books in September that reflect a state-endorsed curriculum and multi-year textbook procurement cycles; classes are still geared toward standardized tests.

Many families accept the inevitability of an equal-outcomes, managed-choice approach to secondary education, because it has been seen as inextricably connected to America’s other obsession: college admissions. I wrote about this mythical corridor earlier. Once admitted to college, these teens have grown into a passive, tell-me-what-to-think generation hardly equipped to grab life by the horns.

Plato and Nietzsche shared the view that humans deeply desire the dialectic, the ability to reason, judge, assign value, and have value assigned to ourselves. Hegel called it thymos, a demand for dignity that is an intrinsic part of the human soul. The ability to take up (or put down) a book, to become impassioned about a particular issue and follow it closely, to listen and respond to intrinsic interests within ourselves, to articulate opinions at odds with authority, is essential to our human dignity. But these are nearly impossible to replicate in an environment of homogeneous and predetermined content, and where achievement is measured as content mastery.

Dialectic doesn’t yield results we can benchmark, and so the teen’s desire for dignity and dialectic runs head to head with our social demand for equality of outcomes. And when any learning innovation is ultimately judged by the same measures of standard aptitude, then we are not only suppressing that dignity, we are telling ourselves it doesn’t exist. Even in praising the march toward equality, Fukuyama warned that “we risk becoming secure and self-absorbed last men, devoid of thymotic striving for higher goals in our pursuit of private comforts.”

How to restore the balance of thymos in the teen soul? Families with adult children may have a clue. When the years of tests, grades and admissions have passed, individuals go back to being individuals. Will they visit a library? Read the news? Express concern for others? To start seeing your teen as a human, imagine ahead a few years. When all of the contents of required curricula are forgotten, will the roots of dignity and intellectual curiosity remain? If you’re not sure, it’s time to start planting the seeds.

What's Behind the 'Social Solidarity' that America's Liberal Progressives Feel for Schools?

BreakAway Learning has started to grow organically in Kabul and Bo City, but as I practice our Indiegogo pitch on friends and family in the West, I’m discovering some paradoxical defensiveness about schools. And it’s making me think again about what is social solidarity, particularly in reference to the education of children.

[Parenthetically, I should say that The BreakAway Learning Project is agnostic about school attendance. We create time rotations in our learning clusters that enable teens to continue attending school if they wish, and some of them do. And while I personally think that school regimes suck up young people’s time and energies and convey a view of secondary education as a narrow college-prep corridor, I put my energies into the creation of individualized learning plans for each of our teens. I think if our product is right, teens will decide for themselves what is the best use of their time. Risk-taking and individual agency, after all, are what’s important.]

In the first place, it’s difficult to have an honest conversation about schools without coming across as teacher-bashing. Teachers have assumed a kind of ennobled victimhood in America, such that the only acceptable conversation about them is with regard to needed pay raises, better supplies, etc.

Other industries and services, from airlines to police forces to hospitals, can undergo a tough consumer scrutiny without counter-accusations that the consumer has dehumanized the flight attendant, cop, or nurse. Rather, a system is dysfunctional, and so even the noblest, most capable professional, has disappointed us. Why can’t we have that conversation about schools?

But there’s something else going on, too, and I see it paradoxically in our most affluent, highly-educated, ‘liberal progressive’ class from Alameda to Arlington. It looks like social solidarity, but remote, impersonalized, simultaneously claiming to empower identity while destroying it, celebrating tolerance of every ethos while avoiding identification with any and clearly disdaining people and communities that have one.

--Take for example Matt Damon’s support and narration of Backpack Full of Cash, a documentary funded by the teachers’ federation that criticizes the growth of privately-managed charter schools in Philadelphia, a city with an abysmal school performance record. The film lashes out against re-allocation of public funds to corporate-run schools, but never interviews

any of the students or parents that choose these alternatives. Are those families not also valued decision-makers? (Damon’s own children attend private school). Why in the area of education, particularly, do wealthy people feel so passionate about collective decision-making on behalf of lower-income people, whom they simultaneously lionize and patronize?

--Liberal progressives are hilariously schizophrenic in their love of children, too. They seem to advocate for children more strenuously in the abstract than in the publicly tantruming, snot-dribbling, stick-swinging, sibling-fighting, quick-witted, sarcastic, smart-ass concrete. As one who started having kids when I was still a student, I have advanced from the pity of affluent, middle-aged Georgetown mums (I studied at Montrose Park with #1 in Goodwill front-pack), to frowns and jabs on airplanes as our brood multiplied, to the age-old “helpful” remarks of the sister-feminist at shopping-center-meltdowns (pregnant with #5), You’ve heard of contraception, right? Indeed! It is from the ranks of these abstract, cerebral lovers-of-children, that we seem to hear more self-certain views about how they should be educated and raised, than from the puke-spattered, war-weary parents of actual kids.

--Perhaps the liberal-progressive skepticism toward alternative-education reveals that the core of their mutated-liberalism is not the individual at all (sorry, John Locke), but the collective. Dana Goldstein warns her ideological peers, “Liberals, Don’t Homeschool Your Kids” in Slate, “Could such a go-it-alone ideology ever be truly progressive--by which I mean, does homeschooling serve the interests not just of those who are doing it, but of society as a whole?” Wouldn’t a Jeffersonian liberal have held that it is indeed the mosaic of individual decision-making within a limited state that is conducive to, well, life, liberty and some kind of happiness?

--As schools, particularly secondary schools, are not just about literacy and numeracy, but are the incubators of children’s worldviews, I’m startled by the daily deference to an untransparent machinery whose cues and lexicon signal what are acceptable and unacceptable norms. During our first son’s enrollment at a Falls Church public school, we attended a tomahawk-making party on December 22nd. Our second son now studies film at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan, where

there is a Feminist Club, a Jewish Club, and an African-American Club, and where one unhyphenated prom was followed by Queer-Prom. The absent identifications speak louder than the named ones. Interlochen recently launched a “Community of Care” project to “directly address campus climate issues that leave students feeling marginalized; to promote the identification and sharing of best practices that promote diversity and equity”; the project involves the selective removal and replacement of facilities staff along hard-to-define parameters, seeking, “staff who have increased experience working with diverse populations and demonstrate high levels of cultural competency”. It is just this well-intentioned-seeming social-engineering that may cost a very competent Upper-Peninsula-born landscaper his job this semester, while sending subtle signals to my 16-year old son about what is valued and what is not.


I’m learning a few things about the American elite’s school solidarity these days, like a foreign film you should tell your friends you really enjoyed. It’s a signal that says “I’m diverse and tolerant and open-minded.” The truth that schools are zip-code specific, that real financial choice is out of reach of most families, that some of the most vocal advocates have personally mixed feelings about children, that schools grind individuality out of children, that their emerging expression is preempted by an elaborate signaling of acceptable language and thought, is not discussed at the backyard wine-and-cheese of this cohort. To acknowledge this reality is to stare, slack-jawed and belly-button-scratching at the foreign film and say “Huh?”

Clearly, I have a long way to go in refining my pitch for crowd-funding for BreakAway Learning among the group of Americans with the most financial capability to make a difference. Perhaps if the students in Kabul and Bo City, like Damon’s subjects in Philadelphia or my baby-hauling student self, look pitiful and poor enough, American funders will rally around a good cause. Little will they suspect that these teens are charging forward, becoming masters of coding and artificial intelligence, multi-lingual biochemists, writers and entrepreneurs. Individually and unapologetically, they will outstrip their American peers. Just watch! [And while you're at it, check us out on Indiegogo at https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/breakaway-learning-project-kabul-kids/coming_soon/picahttps://www.indiegogo.com/projects/breakaway-learning-project-kabul-kids/coming_soon/pica ]

The Corridor Myth in Teen Education

When we were still trying to make a go of MOGwee Inc (a private, C- corporate aiming to create a marketplace of one-on-one, inspiring chat), my colleagues and I believed that creative, inspiring, one-on-one chats would find a home inside of secondary schools. I personally wrote to more than 400 secondary social studies teachers in Arlington, Bethesda, Brooklyn, Palo Alto, Austin and Ann Arbor-- cities where I thought, if anywhere, teachers would be pushing students to chat with a Khmer Rouge survivor, or with a first-time Afghan voter, or with an Ebola-treating medic.

I tried reaching ambitious high-schoolers from multiple angles-- from their Boy and Girl Scout troops to their churches to their school administrators and parents-- only to be pushed back with the same messages. That wouldn't fit into our curriculum. We really don't have time. My son's so busy with sports and clubs. His APs are taking all his time. Would there be any credit for doing this? Translation: School defines what teenagers prioritize, not teens.

The rhetoric of secondary education: We are preparing young people to get into college.

The myth of secondary education: There is only one way forward. The smartest and most ambitious teens believe they are moving down a narrow, segmented corridor with many bolted doors; they must satisfy without question the demands of every gatekeeper to advance to the next segment of the corridor. As they advance through each door, the inane and discontinuous demands of each gatekeeper are apparent. But that doesn't deter them, especially if they and their parents are aspiring and hard-working. PSAT? check. National Merit? check. AP tests? check. SAT? check. Entry essays about self-awareness and changing the world? check.

Teens believe they are moving along a narrow corridor,
divided in segments with bolted doors between. To pass
to the next segment, they must fulfill the tasks
assigned by the gatekeeper. 

Talking to 20-somethings casts a new light on the problems that teen tunnel-vision creates down the road. Within one or two years of high school graduation, many young people are caught off guard by the question of what they will do with themselves; the same adults who have given them no agency in their schedule, classes, reading, suddenly expect an inspired life-decision. Many move through college in a continuing auto-pilot of ticking-boxes, satisfying requirements, trying to keep parents and instructors happy. A few years later they see that even happy parents and instructors have no further guidance, no idea how the next leap will work.

And it's the later-20-somethings who have taken off their blinders, cast a glance back along the path they traveled, and realize that they could have come to the place where they're standing now by a thousand different ways. The corridor is a fiction. Getting out would have been as easy as taking a step to the side. And outside the corridor is a vast field to run, to zig-zag, to tumble down or to surge in any direction.

I have offered this metaphor to school administrators and students to try to visualize a behavior that I think is harming our young people. I don't believe that teens are inherently narrow-minded and self-constraining-- quite the opposite. This is a learned behavior at odds with the instinctive rebellious, sarcastic, destructive, creative, risk-taking nature of teens. But the corridor is a socially revered construct, which adults having emerged from it, disillusioned, go on to reconstruct for their own children. How do many young adults stay on their parents' health insurance? Go to college. What kinds of expenses are eligible for tax-preferred college savings accounts? Full-time enrollment at an accredited university. When could college savings accounts provide for housing? When the young person is full-time enrolled at college. When HR officers click the drop-down menu to identify your highest level of education attained, and there are only 3 or 4 options, what is the baseline she's looking for? A 4-year college degree.

Is it any wonder, then, that our brightest, most ambitious young people are collectively brainwashed from about 14-25, believing their lives to be a narrow corridor? And parents, teachers, administrators, counselors, whether they really believe the myth or not, carefully maintain and rationalize it. We are building a foundation. They are learning how to learn. They are learning to take responsibility. They are becoming leaders and thinkers. Few will say that the corridor itself infantilizes young people, removes agency, risk, consequences, and any interaction with the real world. Baby hawks and polar bears are more prepared for the roles they will have to play as grown-ups than our young people.

Breaking the corridor-illusion is not about exposing children to risk or 'leaving them behind', it's really about breaking the monopolistic hold of universities on the American imagination and the American income. It's about calling college what it is--a consumer product. It's about admitting that teens are really very unique and will naturally move in a million different directions when given the opportunity. Secondary education is not a corridor, because by the time young people are 14, 15, 16, it gets harder and harder to argue credibly that there are universal standards, universally useful knowledge. It's a field-- wide and rolling -- with possibilities that parents, teachers and counselors can't anticipate. And mentoring young people to find their own zig-zagging paths is something more difficult, but necessary, to raise capable adults. 

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.

Team of Teams

Sezim Zhenishbekova leads MOGwee Bishkek

Taking a cue from Stanley McChrystal’s insights about constructing an adaptable, multi-national team, I’m glad to gather my friends across 9 countries as mobilizers for MOGwee. 

From Peter Koroma in Freetown and Esther and Emmanuel Zamble in Abdijan to Dmytro Potekhin in Kyiv, Sezim Zhanishbekova in Bishkek, Shams Niyozov in Dushanbe and Simin Shokrullah in Kabul, 

Lan Thai Vo leads MOGwee Ho Chi Minh City

to Myo Min Thu in Yangon, Sovannarote Kang in Phnom Penh, Kim Phuong in Hanoi to Lan Thai Vo in Ho Chi Minh City, we are a team of teams.

Simin Shokrullah leads MOGwee Kabul

Esther Zamble leads MOGwee Abidjan
with her father, Emmanuel

 Each of my friends—university students, professors, and activists—reaches out to their friends, identifies opportunities where enterprising personalities merge with fascinating life stories, great skills, and access to internet. It begins with brainstorming—a young poet in Yangon, a painter in Kabul, a musician in Abidjan, a family of bee-keepers in Bishkek—who can we find? How could we turn it into video-chat? How can we photograph and describe and sell this experience to others?

And as our teams begin to hold small workshops, café meetings with their friends and colleagues, we are beginning to see a team of teams take shape. See their progress at facebook.com/mogwee/.