No grades, no timetable: Berlin school turns teaching upside down

> The pupils decide which subjects they want to study for each lesson and when they want to take an exam.

So the student learns what they want to learn when they want to learn it. The student focuses on a subject when the brain is ready and interested. Sounds efficient.

OTOH, one of the really valuable things about a curriculum is that it serves as a guide to a complex and bewildering subject.

A curriculum, at its best, is like a highly knowledgeable person telling a novice: "Study these nineteen subtopics and you'll grasp this field pretty quickly. If you study these other nineteen subtopics, you'll just waste a year of your time and never really get a clue." Which also sounds efficient.

How to reconcile?

What I'd like to see is a completely opt-in curriculum with introductory classes and transparent requirements. Simultaneous dense "civil education" class focusing on the specific applications of fields to everyday life. Teachers would only have interested students by definition, so they could offer more in-depth classes.

I wish somebody would try it. Nobody needs to know sines and cosines, and somebody who doesn't care about math is not going to appreciate being forced to learn. Conversely, everybody should understand percentages, calculating interest, etc. So the idea is, you'd run a "civil education" class around 8-9am, which would focus on a wide spread of practically applicable and necessary skills. Then there'd be regular "introductory classes" for each course, which would present the premise of a course, the requirements, and an overview of the topics covered, and further specializations and occupations the skill was necessary for. Then the rest of the school day would be opt-in classes.

The premise here is that people don't retain knowledge from classes they don't care about anyways. I don't know if that generalizes; that would be the main point of critique for this approach. I think traditional schooling is based on the premise that you can force kids to learn. I've never seen any evidence or long-term studies to support this claim.

as Platz already pointed out

> Set subjects are limited to maths, German, English and social studies, supplemented by more abstract courses such as “responsibility” and “challenge”.

Also, there is some accountability in the system. That means there should be some scale to determine if the student has met the required work for the week.

> Rasfeld’s institution tries to embed student self-determination within a relatively strict system of rules. Students who dawdle during lessons have to come into school on Saturday morning to catch up, a punishment known as “silentium”. “The more freedom you have, the more structure you need,” says Rasfeld.

Edit:

Here is a link on their website on learning guidance. It is google translation of their german link. So it is a bit hard to follow.

https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

Or Montessori, [1]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montessori_education