Academics and character

Academics in SoM schools will focus a great deal on critical thinking, problem solving, experiential learning, and out of box thinking. The whole curriculum will be based on projects and activities. Projects will be of those kind which will challenge kids according to their cognitive abilities and academic level. In the age of Artificial Intelligence and the newer AI product, chatGPT4, there is a dire need of human race to focus globally on developing those aspects of our minds and bodies that collectively make us better than machines. Merely memorising the whole french revolution from history books (class 9) or memorising definition in physics to score well in exams, only benefits the child by developing his ability to memorize, and by developing his ability to discipline himself to sit and memorize while he ignores the desire to do something more interesting.

If he likes to score well or top the class, he also develops determination to score well and persevering against odds. These 2 qualities, termed as Grit collectively, are critical for success in life. But are these enough?

Moreover, when the task is to memorize, most students do not feel any interest in studies and thus they do not persevere enough as they would have done if studies were more interesting.

To make studies more interesting and to make children ready for tasks that require actual human skills beyond memorization, I think we all would agree that children need to think and solve problems (which are relatively lesser focus in most schools and colleges). This is possible through projects and problems that make children think, not those projects that can be bought from the market or copied from the internet, but those which need deeper thinking to solve them while using knowledge of millions (or may be billions) of people on earth that is available on Google or chatGPT or a future tech product. 

There will be least amount of teacher to student lecturing in SoM classrooms (probably not more than 10-20%). The whole curriculum will be project and problem-solving based. Students will work on projects and solve small real world problems as per their abilities. 

This project/problem based approach is well tested for almost all age groups. Even Montessori system for Kindergarden involves critical thinking and problems solving. There are some alternative schools in India which follow Project Based Learning (PBL) Curriculums for 8th and 9th class students also. Ex: Mirambika Free progress school, New Delhi (I shared a video about it earlier). 

Also, there are many schools in the west which follow PBL curriculums. 

PBL curriculums can be followed in both urban and rural areas. There are ways to implement PBL or a similar curriculums without spending much.