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Department-based faculty tell kids what they’re supposed to study, then use grades to signal how far they are from “expertise.”

That design principle may be great for teachers who return to school year after year (and therefore become more and more “expert”). But what about the students? They graduate into an increasingly VUCA world.

But what if departments shifted focus from expertise to initiative?

What’s worth learning in school?

“Conventional curriculum is chained to the bicycle rack,” he says. “It sits solidly in the minds of parents: ‘I learned that. Why aren’t my children learning it?’ The enormous investment in textbooks and the cost of revising them gives familiar elements of the curriculum a longer life span than they might perhaps deserve. Curriculum suffers from something of a crowded garage effect: It generally seems safer and easier to keep the old bicycle around than to throw it out.” As a result, “the lifeworthiness of the multitudinous facts and ideas in the typical curriculum is spotty,” he says. “It seems not to have been thought through very carefully.”

“Knowledge is for going somewhere,” Perkins says, not just for accumulating. But too often, we tend to focus on short-term successes — scoring well on a quiz, acing a spelling test. Unfortunately all of that test knowledge, all of that accumulated knowledge we thought was worth knowing, becomes useless if not used.

sense of inclusion and engagement in a common enterprise can have academic benefits as well as social-emotional ones

each takes responsibility for advising 28 of the house’s students, whom they follow through the end of sophomore year.

houses have not just missions, colors, chants and symbols but also hand signs and mottos—each classroom contains four colored containers.