Our Learning Philosophy

Everyone’s a student. Everyone’s a teacher.

Students need the opportunity to learn from and teach each other. They also can and should aspire to become peer teachers themselves. Adult teacher-guides should always be looking for ways to step back so students can step in and should also feel comfortable learning and teaching new domains. Students engage in peer-teaching through Schoolhouse.world (a program with roots at KLS), by being TAs, or teaching core classes.

Learning should not be bound by time or space.

The educational experience should not be bound by the walls of a classroom or the traditional academic calendar. When learning can happen outside the classroom, it should. At the same time, by having an extended school day that coincides with parent schedules (8:00 a.m.-6:00 p.m.), students should have a chance to complete all their work during the school day to get proper time for family, hobbies, non-academic interests, and rest at home. This also includes internships, travel or specialized off-campus academic/sports programs. Through use of video conferencing (and other asynchronous mechanisms), students and teachers are not constrained to only working with people in the same physical space.

We all learn at different rates, and in different ways.

Some people catch on to things in quick bursts; others overcome hurdles as they work towards comprehension. Quicker isn't necessarily smarter. Teachers all know this, yet our existing education system does very little to accommodate this reality.