Synthesis: Is this the future of education?
At 6:30 AM every Tuesday, my kid joins an online cohort from around the world, to attend her weekly Synthesis(https://www.synthesis.is) class. In her group, they solve problems, discover, ask questions, and figure out rules as they play games designed to teach learners how to think.
I’ve witnessed my ward build strategies, improvise, negotiate and learn together as the groups compete with each other to solve abstract, three-dimensional problem-based games. With almost zero teacher input, children learn as they go, make course corrections, reflect on their actions, and in the process, develop arguably the most critical skills for success in life: collaboration, reflection, embracing chaos, and becoming antifragile.
Compare this with a regular school: she walks into a classroom full of kids from the same socioeconomic class, culture, and beliefs. She spends most of her school time a passive learner, with no sense of agency, one among 30 other kids watching the teacher do her thing. She spends hours solving Math problems that she may never again encounter in life. In science, she memorizes parts of random animals, balances chemical equations as if her life depended on them, and studies for tests that happen almost every other day.
At Synthesis, I get a personalized video message from the teacher about my ward’s performance in class, areas of improvement, and how we parents could help her on the way ahead. And this happens within hours of her class. The feedback is direct, with action points and areas of improvement expected in the next class. It helps the learner reflect, course-correct, and meet expectations, while they’re still in the zone. And twice a week, I get an email from Synthesis about the course, what children learned, and what they will learn in the next few classes.
Contrast this with a regular school: Feedback comes in always late, once in three months in the form of a report card, with the generic “ She is doing well in her exams(duh, we can see it in the scores!). Let her spend more time with her books”. As a parent, there is nothing much we can do with this feedback. We still don’t know what she is learning at school, what her academic interests are, we still don’t know if she is developing the skills she will need to thrive later in life. The school doesn’t bother engaging parents in our wards’ learning, emails are rare, and personalization is almost zero.
At Synthesis, learners have agency. they can be their own self, there’s no need to conform, have serious fun, learn at their own pace, and from people they learn naturally: their peers. For me, the biggest takeaway: learning to fail, over and over again, till you’re comfortable with it. It develops in them a growth mindset, enabling them to reach higher levels of achievement in their chosen fields.
Coming from a society that applauds success, and looks down on failure, I believe the ability to fail, learn from it, and go forward is and has been a superpower for mankind. Anything that has helped us move forward as a species has been possible only through our capacity to learn, unlearn and relearn.
At school, failure has serious consequences: you’ll be left out of your class, made to go through “special” classes, and nowadays, asked to move out of the school. Children try their best to avoid failure, developing a fixed mindset, a mindset that could hamper them for life.
So if you’re a parent looking to give your ward a learning experience that could truly unlock their potential, try it out!
Note: This article is based on my personal experience with Synthesis and I have no other interests in them.
