Our course is based on all of the following principles:

Innovative education 

Most traditional education is deadening. Teachers rely on lectures far too much, even though studies continually show that this is the least effective method of learning. Admittedly, there are some gifted teachers who are dynamic, charismatic, and passionate – teachers who have the students sitting on the edge of their seats, excited to learn. Nonetheless, we still discourage teachers from dominating the classroom. The best education will involve and engage the students in learning. The root of the word “education” comes from the Latin “educare,” which means to draw out. We are attempting to draw out of the students the best that they have to offer.

Often we write an amount of money on the board. These will vary from school to school, but the figure could be $25 at a state school, and up to $500 at a private university. We then ask the students what this number represents. They will guess all kinds of things, but the correct answer is that this is how much the average class session at their university is costing them. 

In other words, if they ditch a single class, they may be squandering $500. We talk about how so few people actually value their education. They might spend that amount of money for good seats to a concert, and at the end, they would be standing up and cheering, calling the performers back for an encore! Yet we’ve rarely seen students who will do the same thing with their professors at a university class. When students finish the first class session, it’s doubtful that they will rise to a standing ovation and call the professor back for more! This just shows how little we value education, and how things like entertainment seem to mean so much more to people today.

We even involve the students in a discussion of their education – asking them to raise their hands if they have fallen asleep in a class, if they have ditched a class, if they have wanted to ditch a class, if they have ever taken a class that they felt was a waste of time, and if they have even had a class in which they could not understand the professor. Almost every hand will go up each time. 

So we do things differently in this class. We use a lot of innovative exercises, in which students learn by doing. We have the students use improvisational techniques, which have proven to be one of the best ways to get students to think quickly, spontaneously, and creatively. It inspires greater creativity and innovation. As Einstein said, “We cannot solve the problems of the world with the same type of thinking that created them.” We need to develop leaders who can think in new, creative ways.

Transformative education

 Traditional education is based on the premise that teachers have all the power and students have none. It is based on the idea that students should sit quietly, obey orders, and be passive recipients of “the truth.” 

 The eminent Brazilian educator Paolo Freire decried this “banking method of education,” a model in which professors are the experts who possess all the knowledge, and where they need to make “deposits” of facts into the empty brains of the students. (Personally we call this the “bulimic form of education,” because students gorge themselves on tons of facts for the test, then regurgitate all the answers out onto the exam, and they’re gone; people don’t retain any of this information within hours of the test.) 

 As Freire put it, “liberation education” is “the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it. It strives for the emergence of consciousness and critical intervention in reality.”

 “There is no such thing as a neutral educational process,” he wrote. “[E]ither it is used to bring about conformity, integrating the younger generation within the present system, or it becomes the practice of freedom: the means by which men and women deal creatively and critically with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

Intrinsic motivation – There will be no busywork

 A tremendous body of research points to a startling conclusion, at odds with most education in the United States: When people are primarily motivated by the desire to get an award (such as a good grade), they will perform much worse; they will have less creativity; they will do the bare minimum to meet the requirements; and they will quickly lose interest in the subject after they earn the reward. True learning needs to come from intrinsic motivation – in other words, the natural passion and excitement that students find in a subject all by themselves.

After all, what is the message that parents send their children when they say something like “If you do your math homework, then I’ll buy you some ice cream”? The implicit message is that the children would not want to do math homework in the absence of a bribe; in other words, the parents are essentially saying that math homework has no intrinsic appeal, and it is a distasteful task. 

 For example, in a famous series of experiments at Stanford, researchers gave children many games to play. In the control group, the children could choose any game that they wished. In the experimental group, the children were given gold stars, “good player” awards, and other incentives to play with Magic Markers. After the experiment was finished, the researchers observed how the children behaved. Children from the experimental group no longer had much desire to play with Magic Markers, now that there was no reward or incentive attached. They found it to be worthless and uninteresting – something that they would only do if they got paid for it. On the other hand, children from the control group continued to play with Magic Markers, because they naturally found it to be fun and interesting. Surprisingly, rewards and incentives kill people’s interest in a subject! This phenomenon has been studied and observed again and again.

The same is true, of course, with punishments. When students are motivated by fear, then this is not a sustainable method of learning.

Students should be doing work not because of fear of punishment or bad grades; they should not be doing it for external rewards like gold stars or good grades. They should be doing everything because they find it thrilling and meaningful and personal.

 If there is anything that they believe is useless to their education, we encourage them to participate in an act of civil disobedience. They should not just be doing work because an authority figure told them to do so! They should not be engaged in readings that bore them and seem overly academic and arcane, with no personal meaning. Everything that we give them is supposed to be done because they love it.

Of course, if they do engage in civil disobedience, they have to explain why it is meaningless to them. They can’t just blow off their work or be slackers, and then use the excuse that it didn’t have meaning for them. This philosophy is not an excuse for laziness or sloth. Instead, it is based on the honest principle that education needs to be deeply meaningful.

 “If the colleges were better, if they really had it, you would need to get the police at the gates to keep order in the inrushing multitude. See in college how we thwart the natural love of learning by leaving the natural method of teaching what each wishes to learn, and insisting that you shall learn what you have no taste or capacity for. The college, which should be a place of delightful labour, is made odious and unhealthy, and the young men are tempted to frivolous amusements to rally their jaded spirits….Scholarship is to be created not by compulsion, but by awakening a pure interest.” -  Emerson

Personalized education that is relevant to each student’s life

This is a course that asks students to explore their deepest dreams and hopes and visions for the state of the world. It is not like many academic courses, where students complain that they are reading things that are boring and meaningless to their lives: the symbolism inherent in the character of Queequeg from Moby Dick, or the names and dates of rulers in the 17thcentury Habsburg Empire. 

In some ways, this should be the most personal and important course that any student will ever have the opportunity to take. It’s all about what they want for their futures – their life goals and aspirations. 

Students take the leadership and initiative for their education

The success of this course depends on the students, not the teacher. It requires them to take leadership over their education.

For example, we always give midterm evaluations. (Most universities only offer official evaluations at the end of the semester, when it’s too late for the professors to change anything that was going wrong!) Yet, whenever we get feedback that something is wrong, it gives us a chance to challenge and agitate the students. If we hadn’t given out the evaluations, would the students have never voiced their complaints about the course to us? Were they simply going to sit back and accept mediocrity? Were they going to be passive, perhaps complaining to each other about things that they don’t like? Or were they going to take action to change it? This class is all about leadership and authority.

We always tell the students that the success of this course depends on them. We can be as dynamic and passionate as possible, but if they are passive and inactive, this class will be a failure. There are many opportunities for them to take charge of their education – to make this the best class they will ever take. 

Difficult and challenging

This is also going to be one of the most rigorous and demanding courses that the students ever take. This is for many reasons: 

First of all, it involves a tremendous amount of work. They will be writing up a blueprint for transforming their community – one that should be so compelling and professional that it could win $50,000 from foundations and wealthy donors. They are also going to be volunteering in the community for at least 40 hours throughout the semester. And they are going to be working on a portfolio that will challenge them to push themselves beyond their previous limits of personal achievement.

Second of all, this course asks them to reflect deeply on some of the most important, personal questions that few people ever ask them: what would it take for them to get arrested, or to risk death?  What are the biggest personal challenges that they face, and what are some strategies they could use to overcome them? 

Ultimately, this is going to be valuable. When asked why the U.S. was going to undertake such a difficult challenge as putting a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy said, “We choose to [do] things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” 

There are other reasons why the course’s difficulty may be one of its most enticing and exciting aspects. As we will discuss later in the course, people can grow far more from facing adversity than from indulging in comfort and ease. People are going to benefit far more from confronting a challenge than from taking it easy and avoiding risks. Indeed, there is plenty of scientific evidence for this. Later, we will be discussing the notion of flow – the concept of people’s optimal state of happiness, joy, and productivity. Scientific research shows that people are most likely to enter the flow state when they are pushing themselves just beyond the limits of what they previously thought possible. This is when we test ourselves and experience the greatest growth and contentment.

Teamwork and “win-win”

 Unlike most courses at the university, which are fiercely competitive, and where students are being individualistic, this is a course that changes the paradigm of education. The success of each student depends on the success of the others.

The students will be placed in transformation teams, where they must help each other perform to their full potential. There can be no “free riders,” as in most group activities, because the group is only as good as its weakest member.

This model is based on the organization that won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, the Grameen Bank. They showed that some of the most impoverished women in the world could help lift each other out of poverty. But they were dependent on each other for success. If even one member of the group defaulted on her loans, then they all were unable to borrow money any more. 

Similarly, in this class, the transformation teams only succeed when every member succeeds. If one person is drowning or falling apart, the other students cannot ignore that person and just focus on their own goal attainment. As Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny… You can never be what you ought to be until I become what I ought to be.”

Fun

This class ought to be a joy. Our experience is that students love to come to class. They laugh more in this class than any other course. 

Inspirational and empowering

Finally, this course should be inspirational. This is a class about hope and optimism. Unlike most courses at the university, which analyze problems, this is a course about solutions. Most of all, it should empower the students to come up with their own solutions – to claim their own power to make a difference in the world. 

When I heard the learn'd astronomer;

When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me;

When I was shown the charts and the diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them;

When I, sitting, heard the astronomer, where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room

How soon, unaccountable, I became tired and sick;

Till rising and gliding out, I wander'd off by myself

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time

Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

 -- Walt Whitman