Description: Newton is an idea for an open-source high school curriculum. One that uses a student’s own interest to construct a curriculum specifically for them.

Overview: The current educational system is broken.

And it doesn’t need to be fixed. It needs to be completely rethought and redesigned. It is a system that sees only 68% of students graduate from high school, and ranks 24th out of 29 in math when compared to other industrialized nations. It is a system that dictates a teachers’ curriculum with “classroom standards” and “teach to test” methodology. It is a system that sees students discouraged by constantly focusing on the negatives instead of working with students to create a better classroom experience.

But we are not teachers, professors, or even parents; we are those students. Students who have been through the system from start to finish, who have experienced its successes, failures, and contradictions. And we have felt the voice most often left out of the conversation about education is the student’s.

What if students could to design their own curriculum? What would it look like and how would it work? What if we were exposed to more? What if more was expected of us? And how could we have been better prepared to use our innate abilities in the world we were about to enter?

We tried, and while we don’t claim to have all the answers to our country’s educational problems, this is one step toward rethinking how education is done.
-
Newton Project - PDF
-
Self-initiated student project
-
Special thanks to Michelle Rhee, Noam Chomsky, John Maeda, James Victore and John Beilenberg for taking the time to talk to us.
-
Co-contrbutiors: Chris Thompson, Adam Hook, David Bigelow, John Ellis