Hidden behind the unremarkable frontage of a low-rise warehouse in the Mission district of San Francisco is one of the most innovative education experiments in the US. Now in its seventh year, Brightworks is turning education on its head with an approach that makes the pupil entirely responsible for shaping their own learning experience. A private school for children of all ages, Brightworks is unusual in that there are no exams, no testing or SATs, no formal curriculum, no learning objectives and no teachers, only “collaborators”. Children come to school to work on projects they devise entirely by themselves — often using power tools, drills, hammers and saws. Whether inside, creating extraordinary large-scale metal works, or outside on field trips around the Bay Area and beyond, the emphasis is on playful stress-free learning.
“I like to think of our school as a huge lab for learning and play,” says Brightworks’ founder Gever Tulley, a self-taught coder for software company Adobe with no formal education who has reinvented himself as a disruptive educational entrepreneur. “Instead of school being about written tests, we’ve made it about games, puzzles and challenges [that children] devise themselves and solve together. School should be empowering and set them up for a life of learning and curiosity. I hated seeing the light go out of children’s eyes at the mere mention of school.”
One of the most surprising differences between Brightworks and its mainstream, state school counterparts is the lack of screens in classes. Despite its location in the technology crucible of the world, you won’t see pupils idly tapping on iPads or watching educational videos in class. Tulley’s model is designed around helping students discover their intrinsic ability free from the easy distractions of technology and increasingly popular forms of edutainment — activities that blend screen-based learning with visual entertainment. “If they are interested in something, we let them run with it, but they have to chase it and get deep into things,” says Tulley. “We don’t have many rules, but one of them is that if you want to play a video game you have to make it yourself.”