A New Vision for School
Alpha Schools as a blueprint for future education
I first learnt about Alpha Schools from a thread on Twitter (nope, not calling it X):
At Alpha School, teachers shift from traditional roles like grading and writing lesson plans, to supporting students’ emotional and motivational needs and teaching life skills. This impactful transformation frees up teachers to mentor, motivate, and coach students to become self-driven learners.
The premise seems simple enough: outsource a majority of the academic rigour to AI, bring in human teachers to equip students with the necessary life skills required to succeed in adulting.
It’s an interesting concept to me because I already use AI regularly to learn many things outside of my field of expertise (which, to be fair, is very limited). Recalling my own formal education, if I had the power of AI during my Junior College or University days, things like fretting over a thousand and one shoddily printed notes and trying to understand how to square a circle (Philosophy 1101) would have seemed much more accessible and enjoyable. Of course, there is the part of education which involves The Student's Struggle. Though it might not seem like it, the optimist in me would argue that having the grit and resilience to sit through difficult material; digging up some internal patience and spending countless hours poring over esoteric texts to find that one quote just so your list of citations doesn’t look like it underwent weeks of intermittent fasting; and being able to communicate ideas clearly in ‘academic-speak’ are necessary and valuable skills. In short, these are knowledge skills—how people interface and engage in the process of understanding, thinking, and knowing. Of course, the realist in me disagrees: a large part of me wishes I knew something more relevant and practical to the world of adulting today, rather than how to differentiate between Doric and Corinthian columns (here’s a tip: it’s all in the capital—the top of the column).
I am reminded of a story I tell my students whenever we are on the topic of technological progress and change. It’s a story about context: before the printing press became mainstream, the work of the monastic Catholic monk was to scribe out and memorise the entirety of the Bible. There was this one particular fellow, Johannes Trithemius, who firmly believed that books were the Way To Go. Books, then, were extremely expensive and difficult to produce. Not only was writing a skill that few had, but if you were to go to any modern museum today, I recommend you find one with an ancient text—not only are many of the pages well-preserved, but the very ink used to write on them was often hard to procure as well. Books then were just expensive artifacts, and an expensive library was often a good testament to the wealth of its owner.
So anyway, as the Abbot of a monastery, Trithemius would get all his monks to scribe down the Bible by hand on manuscripts, eventually compiling them into books. To him, much like a painter begins his apprenticeship in art by imitating the great masters of his time, it is only through the act of copying the Scriptures can a religious person can truly be in touch with the Word of God. Jo did not discount the printing press, for he knew its potential and value to proselytising to the masses, but was adamant that it did not replace the work that monks and scribes were doing (i.e., memorising, writing, understanding). Worst still, he feared that it would eventually become an excuse for monks to become lazy and neglect the devotional aspect of their work. Of course, we all know how that ended: eventually, the work of memorising, scribing, and engaging with the Bible became obsolete, as books became a more permanent, long-lasting, and, importantly, a tangible store of value than whatever was inside the monk’s head. The cost of books plummeted, as did the value of the monk and scribe insofar as offering the Bible-as-a-Service (a book was far easier to maintain than a fully-grown and frail human).
Usually, I tell this story to my classes in hopes of eliciting a more critical response: how do we quantify and qualify knowledge, and what are the effects of technological change on this process? If, like the monks and scribes in the story, they are presently tasked to regurgitate tons of information—albeit knowledge practical to the current STEM paradigm—all within the tightly-controlled, laboratory setting of the final year examination, are we not merely experimenting with their futures, rather than securing or maximising each of their potential? If [my students] are just stores of knowledge skills, and society is valuing and evaluating them based on those skills—through formal assessment, certification, etc., then I would say that the traditional schooling method is desperately short-changing them for the future. Which brings me back to Alpha Schools.
One of the biggest ‘commitments’ by Alpha Schools is that their students complete core subjects in a maximum of two hours, daily. Some statistics promoted:
2.6x Growth: On average, Alpha students grow 2.6 times faster than peers on nationally normed MAP tests1.
99th Percentile: The majority of students consistently outperform national averages.
Top Performers: Our best students achieve up to 6.5x growth.
I’m not so much interested in the granular details, but more into the possibility that each lesson is largely customised to the individual student’s learning needs—a true differentiated instruction—rather than a blanket one-size-fits-all approach. In tandem with this is the huge push on building life skills through workshops and thriving beyond the classroom. Even in the subject of General Paper, which I teach both in school and in my private capacity as a tutor, I found myself reverting to that modality of uniform approach, especially when it comes to the very knowledge skills that are foundational to the subject: reading, writing, and the understanding of concepts and ideas. These are necessarily individualised skills, because everyone reads and writes in their own time and pace. Yet, the threat of examinations looming over and existential dread of wasting a ‘successful future with so much potential’ mean that many of them try to short-circuit the process. They frequently obsess about, and often ironically ask me to provide writing and knowledge shortcuts such as frameworks, paragraph structures, and approaches to evaluation. While I am all too happy to provide, I can’t help but think whether I am inadvertently harming them in the long run by speed-running their knowledge skills at the expense of actually valuable adult skills (which is why I try to incorporate my 10 Rules). I have students who scored pretty well (okay la, they got an A) in my subject, only to tell me later that they still don’t understand or see the value and purpose of General Paper. This sometimes triggers my imposter syndrome, which is only soothed by the thought that I am helping them do well in their exams and get into the university of their choice. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.
At this point, I want to take a step back and examine the larger education climate in Singapore. A recent debate that blew up the headlines was the poor handling of a bullying case. Besides the usual diatribe of ‘monitoring’ and ‘reviewing its processes’, MOE was indeed too slow to address the main issue. But the fault rests not only on MOE’s shoulders. For a 9-year-old child to start hurling death threats, the obvious causes are threefold: a lack of parental guidance at home, having friends who enable such behaviours, or learning such behaviours online. The three are not mutually exclusive. As I read how the story unfolded, a part of me really wanted to see things like caning and public shaming brought back again—perhaps, the Old Ways are really the best. But I stopped myself: these are 9-year-olds who might not be acting out of malice. They might be struggling with pain they don’t know how to express. Then some are mal-adjusted to big social settings, who misread social cues and assume that hostility is the best strategy for survival. If many of my students closing the cusp to adulthood are still struggling with many of these social skills, what more the younger ones who have not yet even begun the journey of growing? In today’s world, where knowledge skills are taken for granted by virtue of certification and school sorting, and human skills are often overlooked, an education that helps children build these very skills that define our humanity is worth pursuing.
This is not to say that traditional schools don’t already do some of these. On top of an unscaleable mountain of marking, lesson planning, and delivery, teachers now have to conduct Character and Citizenship classes, serve as career guidance counselors, serve as regular counselors, teach sex education, be equipped and informed of the latest tech tools for teaching… Teachers want to teach these skills, but are increasingly overloaded with a lot of other duties on top of their classroom teaching. Teachers want to differentiate their instruction and cater to every possible student need, but it is vastly easier said than done, especially when both the quantity and quality of student needs today are innumerable. And don’t get me started on class sizes—I already did that, here!
When I started in my first school, a then Senior Teacher told me that as I get more proficient in class and master my craft, the time it takes to plan and deliver a lesson reduces drastically. Having now done 13 years of that, I would say that the greatest enabler and time-saving tool is really not better teaching (though that has its place), but really AI in the classroom. Rather than use it to generate ready-to-run lessons, I create contexts where I ask it to challenge my own thinking about an issue and to point out gaps in my teaching, as a student might normally do in class. So when Alpha Schools say they have largely divorced the academic component from the other humanist components of education, it piqued my interest and curiosity.
The best use-case for AI thus far has been in the knowledge skills department—decentralising how people acquire knowledge and interface with said knowledge goes a long way, especially in areas where such things were once highly prized, or tightly controlled. Teaching kids how to learn as much as what to learn is now definitely the main purview of AI. I won’t comment on the other use cases of AI, but it is so transformative in schools to the point that the total number of users shows a steep drop in ChatGPT queries from late May, when the June holidays/Spring Break typically start.
The narrative behind the data tells me that an increasing number of students are using AI to cheat/do their homework in order because it is the path of least resistance when playing the Education Game. Instead of trying to constantly prevent the use of AI, I really like what Alpha Schools is doing by leveraging it wholesale and focusing on the important bits like public speaking, entrepreneurship, and working through difficult emotions. Can it help to reduce such instances of bullying? I highly doubt it. But freeing up academic rigour and focusing on why students learn and how they relate to each other in the process of learning is surely the first step in a long, transformative journey to update our educational blueprints for the future. The number of times I’ve had to speak to students about what they want to do in the future and the even greater number who reply that they have absolutely zero clue indicates a big chasm in their educational journey (don’t get me wrong, these talks are often the highlight of my day). Schools may be equipping students with the knowledge they need for an uncertain future, but definitely not the wisdom to navigate it well. It is a clear sign that many of my students now have back-to-back lectures to prepare them for the Preliminary and Promotional exams, and all other ‘non-academic activities’ are put on pause.
Current classroom education is going the way of Trithemius and his monks, eventually outclassed by a technology that promises knowledge proliferation without rival. Unlike them, however, who at least saw their copying, their memorising, and their knowledge skills as a route to God, I fear that sans God, when the time the need for actual connections between individuals and the communities they inhabit schools is required—like in the time of a crisis, the next pandemic, or even a major protest or war—there will be no more schools and no actual humans, who can actually be bothered to start caring anymore.
Thank you for reading this far. And as always, keep being the brightest star for others.
MAP stands for Measures of Academic Progress, and are computer-adaptive assessments that measure students' academic growth and achievement over time in subjects like math, reading, language usage, and science.