How don't we want to design Atlas?
How do we want to design Atlas?
What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. […] the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualising you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations.
What are we trying to do?
What is 💸?
Where does it get its value?
"Money's a matter of functions four,
A Medium, a Measure, a Standard, a Store."
What is credit? Where does it come from?
What problems are we trying to solve?
A future without school probably still involves "credit" of some sort.
We want to disintermediate ourselves in performing both of these functions. This is already trending as "competency based" and "mastery based" education.
But there's a more fundamental problem…
Certain forms of knowledge and control require a narrowing of vision. The great advantage of such tunnel vision is that it brings into sharp focus certain limited aspects of an otherwise far more complex and unwieldy reality. This very simplification, in turn, makes the phenomenon at the center of the field of vision more legible and hence more susceptible to careful measurement and calculation. Combined with similar observations, an overall, aggregate, synoptic view of a selective reality is achieved, making possible a high degree of schematic knowledge, control, and manipulation.
Schools are designed on the assumption that there is a secret to everything in life; that the quality of life depends on knowing that secret; that secrets can be known only in orderly successions; and that only teachers can properly reveal these secrets. An individual with a schooled mind conceives of the world as a pyramid of classified packages accessible only to those who carry the proper tags. New educational institutions would break apart this pyramid.
[The teacher as narrator] leads the students to memorize mechanically the narrated content. Worse yet, it turns them into "containers," into "receptacles" to be "filled" by the teacher. The more completely she fills the receptacles, the better a teacher she is. The more meekly the receptacles permit themselves to be filled, the better students they are.
Education thus becomes an act of depositing, in which the students are the depositories and the teacher is the depositor. Instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiques and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat. This is the "banking" concept of education, in which the scope of action allowed to the students extends only as far as receiving, filing, and storing the deposits. […] apart from inquiry, apart from the praxis, individuals cannot be truly human. Knowledge emerges only through invention and re-invention, through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.
Jean Piaget’s very strong idea that all learning takes place by discovery is emasculated by its translation into the common practice known in schools as “discovery learning.” It is disempowered in part because discovery stops being discovery when it is orchestrated to happen on the preset agenda of a curriculum but also in large part because the ideas being learned are disempowered. […] Most physics curricula are similar to the math curriculum in that they force the learner into dissociated learning patterns and defer the "interesting" material past the point where most students can remain motivated enough to learn it. The powerful ideas and the intellectual aesthetic of physics is lost in the perpetual learning of "prerequisites."
This is impossibly labor intensive approached naively.
What do we know about Atlas what Atlas needs to do?
What are its nouns and verbs?
What do we know about how people will use Atlas?
Doesn't this
already exist?
Where are we now?
Where do we go from here?