"Hacker School is a three-month, immersive school for becoming a better programmer. It's like a writers retreat for hackers. We (Nick, Dave and Sonali) run the program every four months in New York and meet Mondays, Tuesdays, Fridays and Saturdays from 11am to 7pm. We provide space, time to focus, and a friendly community dedicated to self-improvement.

Structure: Unlike most schools, there are no grades, teachers, or formal curricula. Instead, Hacker School is entirely project-based.

We have a morning check-in at the start of each day. During this time we close our laptops and share what we worked on the previous day, what we plan to do that day, and where we're stuck or need help. This social pressure keeps everyone focused and accomplishing what they say they will. It also fights scope creep, because someone in the group will surely notice when your spell-checker starts turning into an OS."

"I certainly still lie awake some nights worrying that I am in denial, that Simon has some gross deficiency not yet identified, and I am did him great a disservice. I worry constantly that I should limit his reading and solitary time and push him into sports and classes and social activities. But just when I am about to write that check for ice hockey classes I touch base with my instinctive sense of my son, this imaginative, overly verbose happy creature, and decide not to risk ironing out his uniqueness.  Until we can figure out more creative ways to educate and encourage introspective boys who are neither high achievers nor troublemakers—boys “in the middle,” like Simon–I will keep holding my ground, my breath and my tongue, and shoo away the well-intentioned label makers who cross our path."

"Although homeschooling is growing in prevalence, its educational outcomes remain unclear. The present study compared the academic achievements of homeschooled children with children attending traditional public school. When the homeschooled group was divided into those who were taught from organized lesson plans (structured homeschoolers) and those who were not (unstructured homeschoolers), the data showed that structured homeschooled children achieved higher standardized scores compared with children attending public school. Exploratory analyses also suggest that the unstructured homeschoolers are achieving the lowest standardized scores across the 3 groups."

"…many ways in which this year’s graduating class has been ill served by their elders…enter a bad job market…hangover from decades of excessive borrowing…inherit a ruinous federal debt.<br />
…their lives have been perversely structured…members of the most supervised generation in US history. Through their childhoods & teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached & honed to an unprecedented degree.<br />
Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured."<br />
<br />
"No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America…<br />
<br />
…cultural climate that preaches the self as the center of a life. But…they’ll discover that the tasks of a life are at the center. Fulfillment is a byproduct of how people engage their tasks, & can’t be pursued directly…The purpose in life is not to find yourself. It’s to lose yourself."

"MySpace & Facebook just looked overstructured & Disneylanded…<br />
When a friend of mine joined Twitter, I thought, "Oh, this sounds dreadful,"…join[ed] it for a laugh, so I could make fun of it later. To my great surprise, I found it nicely understructured. & very fast…<br />
I also find it effortless—that may be because the way I use it is largely content-free, but it's actually been a very nice experience. I would miss it if it disappeared; I would miss the company of people I've gotten used to having around in a virtual way.<br />
What I'd miss most about Twitter is its astonishing power as an aggregator of novelty. It does in a few hours what one hundred professionally produced magazines could scarcely do in a month, skimming the world's weirdest, most wonderful things & depositing it on your desktop to be snacked on.<br />
<br />
Having boasted for years at watching less television than any NA male my age, I may unfortunately have found my television."

"The credentialing system of college will ultimately prove less important than whether you use your college years to generate a body of visible and durable online work, openly accessible to the world, shouting who you are louder than any "graduated with honors" certification on a transcript one must pay to see…You must consciously and conscientiously build your online presence…the biggest danger of the Internet in your generation is that people are keeping themselves from taking advantage of it…So much oversight and review has been worked into the hierarchy and politics of higher education that it has made itself incapable of valuing or accommodating the very media and methods that could accelerate your learning…Feel the energy of living knowledge sustained by the new media. Don't sit in the voluntary detention of self-censorship, kept from more involved participation online by worries over whether you will get a good grade in college."

"More than anything Trade School for me is an archetype of the plausible alternative to over-structured, hierarchical and standardized learning we now take for granted and use in the developmental transformation of over 1.1 million school children. Trade School is an opportunity to subvert the teacher/student relationship to be reciprocal. For me it’s about valuing our collective knowledge and not the expertise of just one person. It’s about finding ways to eliminate currency and the problematic funding structures that currently drive educational institutions and their “innovation”."

[kickstarter here: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/OurGoods/trade-school-0 ]

"There are four teachers in my daughter's class of eighteen-- meaning if something is going on with your child, a teacher is going to see it. Most of the parents in this class seem to be involved in the school to one degree or another-- meaning if something's going on at the school level, we're all going to hear about it. Most of the parents spend at least a couple minutes in the classroom in the morning or afternoon-- meaning if something happened that day, they're going to find out.