Twenty years ago, when Carlos Martinez – the director of Insight Academy in Ajijic – was teaching philosophy and physics at various universities in Mexico, he saw how a number of students were ill prepared for university level classes.
He and his colleagues tried different approaches to motivate them, but grew increasingly frustrated at having to go back to the basics that these students were sorely lacking, such as reading, writing and spelling.
Years later, he found the answer to this dilemma in a revolutionary, open-source method of teaching that is changing education in a big way. Its core idea revolves around the natural and spontaneous way we learn – curiosity – and builds from there.
“A new movement was taking off in Sweden less than 20 years ago,” says Martinez. “Kunskapskolan, which means ‘school of knowledge,’ is the most daring educational concept in the world, created around the idea of getting rid of the old system, not just because it is old, but because it doesn’t work.”
This open-source system has shown that, by disrupting government-run education, students show improvements in their efficiency, creativity and openness. The system caught enough traction in Sweden that it is now the country’s main education system, and is being tested in 37 schools in Stockholm.
From Argentina to Colombia, Kunskapskolan has been catching on. A group of families in Spain who were fed up with the school system got together to form clandestine operations in undisclosed places and start their own schools. There are now about 3,000 schools in the world doing this and most of them are in South America.
Martinez also saw the frustration in the Mexican school system. “School has become an ‘official nanny,’ a means of getting rid of the kids so the parents can go to work,” he says. “Many parents don’t really care what is going on during the day and kids live with a lot of stress because they’re labeled from their test results.”
Most countries have a system based on standardized tests, so the only way to see the difference between students is through these test results.
“The student is then categorized and assigned a label, similar to a tattooed barcode,” says Martinez. “The school system dictates how we’re going to label people, and when students are seen this way, they have no individuality, no background.”
Martinez’s initial frustration led him to develop a project similar to what is happening in Sweden. In 1980, he co-founded his first school in the State of Mexico, which was an all traditional school. He went on to co-found five more schools, all with the same government system. It wasn’t until 15 years ago that he was introduced to open-source schools.
“I was influenced by the Swedish schools, a model in which students have a personal coach and are encouraged to discover their talents and dreams. We’re always looking for the things our students are passionate about – what makes them tick. The beauty of this system is that you don’t teach them, you don’t tell them what they should know. Instead, you nudge them to find out, investigate, reach out to others and learn about learning.”
According to Martinez, this is an impossible concept to understand for 99.9 percent of people, because we’re so used to what we’ve been doing all along. The school system’s assembly line-like mentality places children in classes within their own age levels. Yet, our natural way of living in the world is to live among people of all ages.
Martinez’s latest school, Insight Academy, includes four coaches, a five-member board of directors and ten students, ranging from age seven to 15. The school is operating out of a converted house in central Ajijic. They hope, one day, to have their own facility.
Instead of bringing their individual lunches, the students take home a list of ingredients, bring those ingredients to school and prepare hot food for one other in the fully equipped kitchen. They also have daily chores and are expected to clean up after themselves.
Martinez notes how millennials tend to be more creative and able to live with less. “These young adults want to be on the road and see the world. They’re earning good money with online jobs. We need more people coming from the real world, not from the academic world.
“The old thinking is that one needs to be a certain age to accomplish a certain thing. We don’t buy into that. We believe that as soon as someone wants to do something and they put their focus on it, they can do it. We see this happening with our students. When we give them challenges that are designed for people five or ten years older, our students are able to solve them in a day. That says something.”
Carlos Martinez will give an Open Circle talk, “Does Education Need a Revolution?” on Sunday, October 15, 10:30 a.m. at Lake Chapala Society (opencircleajijic.org).