Live data from Hacker News

How to start a school with your friends

prigoose.substack.com

11–20 of 78 posts

Re: How to start a school with your friends

#11
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any more details on this?

That's what the submitted link is about. GP posted a comment about the thing they submitted in addition to submitting it.

Ah, thank you. I had, admittedly, not read the article in OP. I thought this was very vaguely referencing another situation.

Re: How to start a school with your friends

#12
I read "How to Live Near your Friends"[1] article linked from this article, and I can't help but be amused by the author's attitude of "my friends should all move near me because that's the way we can all live near friends"

I mean they're not wrong, but also they could have made friends with their neighbours like the Stoop Coffee[2] author, or moved to be nearer to a friend group also. It's nice to see them really embracing their main character bias though (in this case, in a way that seemed to have successfully built a geographically aligned community)

[1]: https://prigoose.substack.com/p/how-to-live-near-your-friend...

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43473618

Re: How to start a school with your friends

#13
This is such a refreshing inversion of the ‘edtech’ trend—rather than trying to scale education through software, FractalU scales motivation through community. Makes me wonder: instead of designing better UIs for MOOCs or LLM tutors, maybe the real unlock is designing better social containers for learning.

Re: How to start a school with your friends

#14
I always wondered why no one creates new universities in the US. It seems like in the 1800s every rich guy started their own university, many with unique missions.

The existing university model in the US seems like it's ripe for disruption so I'm surprised no one has tried to create their own.

Re: How to start a school with your friends

#15
post #9

Love to see it! Wonder how to reconcile the description of almost-negligible admin overhead with this description of a similar effort that warns, "We wanted to keep costs extremely low, so we had parent volunteers do all admin for the school. It's going really well, but it's an insane amount of work." From my experience both teaching kids and organizing things, that seems like a much more likely outcome. https://x.co…

FractalU isn't a school. It doesn't need to keep records, comply with miles of state regulations (employee and volunteer background checks, record keeping, mandatory exams, ...). It doesn't need to be able to demonstrate to other schools (or universities) what the students achieved. It doesn't need to demonstrate to the state that it's actually teaching the students something. It doesn't handle any money, so it doesn't need an accountant. It doesn't employ anyone. It doesn't need to worry about firing anyone.

My kids attended a small co-op school when they were young--5 employees (4 teachers + "director" who was mostly a floating assistant/substitute), everything else handled by parent volunteers. There's really an enormous amount of administrative overhead.

FractalU doesn't have any of that because it's not actually a school.

Re: How to start a school with your friends

#16

I always wondered why no one creates new universities in the US. It seems like in the 1800s every rich guy started their own university, many with unique missions. The existing university model in the US seems like it's ripe for disruption so I'm surprised no one has tried to create their own.

It seems like all we’ve been able to do is churn out diploma mills with dubious (or outright fraudulent) accreditation.

Re: How to start a school with your friends

#17

I always wondered why no one creates new universities in the US. It seems like in the 1800s every rich guy started their own university, many with unique missions. The existing university model in the US seems like it's ripe for disruption so I'm surprised no one has tried to create their own.

It seems like all we’ve been able to do is churn out diploma mills with dubious (or outright fraudulent) accreditation.

Or predatory/misleading payment schemes, a la Lambda School

Re: How to start a school with your friends

#18
post #9

Love to see it! Wonder how to reconcile the description of almost-negligible admin overhead with this description of a similar effort that warns, "We wanted to keep costs extremely low, so we had parent volunteers do all admin for the school. It's going really well, but it's an insane amount of work." From my experience both teaching kids and organizing things, that seems like a much more likely outcome. https://x.co…

FractalU isn't a school. It doesn't need to keep records, comply with miles of state regulations (employee and volunteer background checks, record keeping, mandatory exams, ...). It doesn't need to be able to demonstrate to other schools (or universities) what the students achieved. It doesn't need to demonstrate to the state that it's actually teaching the students something. It doesn't handle any money, so it doesn…

> There's really an enormous amount of administrative overhead.

What kind of work does this administrative overhead in particular consist of?

Re: How to start a school with your friends

#19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FractalU isn't a school. It doesn't need to keep records, comply with miles of state regulations (employee and volunteer background checks, record keeping, mandatory exams, ...). It doesn't need to be able to demonstrate to other schools (or universities) what the students achieved. It doesn't need to demonstrate to the state that it's actually teaching the students something. It doesn't handle any money, so it doesn…

> There's really an enormous amount of administrative overhead. What kind of work does this administrative overhead in particular consist of?

All the things I listed in the first paragraph.
Post reply on HN