- Incremental changes are going to be insufficient.
Higher Ground's mission is to redesign education
from the ground up.
Our schools are the marriage of rigor and individualization.
We are the new way.
- With over 100 locations around the world,
Higher Ground is building schools
that will challenge all your assumptions
about how education can and should work.
- We have an approach
that is not only going to make your child feel loved,
but is going to make your child develop
into their true self.
- If we could create a generation of people
who look for solutions, who have a sense of optimism,
and could take the core values
that we hold true at Higher Ground
and write them large in the world,
yeah, I think it would be a better place.
- Higher Ground is an education company
that owns and operates schools,
serving children birth through adulthood.
But, in the long range, our goal is to
entirely change people's expectations of education.
- Parents today are often faced with two stark options
when they're choosing a school for their children:
There are the traditional schools
that emphasize academic rigor without individualization
or support for the unique needs of that child.
And then there are progressive schools
that let children go from project to project,
following their interests,
but without any clearly defined goals.
And, our schools are the third option.
They are the marriage of rigor and individualization
that lets students thrive
because they're given the structure
that enables them to do so.
- Every element of our program,
whether it's the curriculum and the scope and sequence,
they are an aspect of this environment
that allows the developing human child
to acquire the skills and the character
that they need to make the most of their life.
- Children and people are capable of learning,
of growing, of changing.
We need to create an environment
that acknowledges and supports that,
and expects the best out of children.
-
Higher Ground understands
that there are a core set of skills
that human flourishing requires.
And students still have to learn
and demonstrate mastery of all these core ideas.
But because they're built into the curriculum
and the environment itself,
students can do this through self-directed learning.
- The school environment is designed to be both
functional and beautiful.
When students want to work together in small groups,
they find spaces set up for that work.
The environment flexes to the needs of the lesson,
rather than forcing the lesson
to fit into a structured environment
of a traditional school.
- How many hundreds did you got?
- 100. - Hundred.
- Can you give me the one 5 in there please?
Let's put it there.
- The education in middle and high school
becomes more and more interdisciplinary,
and more and more students get to choose
what things to pursue,
and they get to choose how to demonstrate mastery
of specific curricular objectives.
And then, that goes beyond the classroom even further
to students getting internship opportunities,
entrepreneurship— going out into the world
so they can really pursue their passions
and explore as much as possible.
- But can reforming education like this
be done incrementally,
or does it require rebuilding the entire institution
from the ground up?
- Massive scale in education requires four things:
It requires, one, original curriculum and pedagogy—
an understanding of what is the right program.
Two, it requires teachers, educators, guides.
Three, it requires an operating system,
and a management approach.
And four, it requires real estate.
And Higher Ground Education is doing something
radical in each of those four areas.
We've full-on embraced the kind of
challenge of doing everything,
and really attacking the problem at a systems level.
We've proven it.
We're reaching about 10,000 kids in five short years.
I don't see why that can't be
What the world needs are men and women of character
that have the capacity to learn, to know,
and to solve problems.
And only education can help us discover those people
wherever they are, so that they can lead.
The student of the future has, one,
this deep capacity for great work,
for concentrated activity.
Two, this insatiable curiosity.
And then, three, this love of humanity.
This love of the good, this sense of wonder,
you know, that we see in every three-year-old.
I don't think any of those have to go away.
- I think, like, "Man,
what if we had had this education growing up?
Like, how much better would we be?"
Not only at our work, but at life,
in feeling successful and in feeling satisfied in our work.
- We are motivated by the goal of bringing this
approach to every child globally that we can.
- This is what we're trying to build,
and it's something that hasn't been built yet in the world.
And that's an exciting thing to say.