Carl Hendrick

I think lots of people are confused about this Alpha business. When you see someone who has advocated for a specific set of ideas for a long time go on to join or lead an organisation that seems completely antithetical to those ideas, then it's reasonable to be confused. Yesterday, I briefly discussed this with @PepsMccrea, and I argued that Alpha represents educational progressivism with a veneer of "learning science" (or what we have normally called "cognitive science" in England). Here, I'd like to expand a bit on that. I'm not going to cite every claim, because this has been part of common discourse here for at least a year (as long as Carl [and I think Peps]) have been working for Alpha. First, instrumentalism. In England, educational traditionalists (like Carl and Peps) argued that education and the education system is not designed merely to prepare students for the world of work. Instead, it is there to pass on cultural heritage, and knowledge for its own sake. Progressives on the other hand argued that it was more about "21st century skills" and railed against a system that "failed to prepare students for jobs that hadn't been invented yet." It's clear that Alpha is built in this vein. It runs courses on entrepreneurialism, media training, startup founding etc etc. NONE of their marketing that I have seen is about the joy of learning or being inculcated into a cultural or intellectual tradition. Second, long term learning. Proponents on this site have boasted about how students finish courses in a matter of days. One of the very first things I learnt from the traditionalist school was that learning is a process that occurs over the long term, and that short term performance means little. Third, "time back". Alpha uses an app called Timeback, which broadly - in my understanding - means that if students do well on their 2 hours of AI-enabled academics, they get more time to do other stuff. This again emphasises that academic education is something to be "got through" so we can get to the fun stuff: Navy SEAL training, social media, horse riding and...entrepreneurship. Fourth, in a similar vein, extrinsic motivation. Alpha has heavily pursued gamification and an extrinsic reward system. Again, English traditionalists used Self Determination Theory as a key plank of their arguments about schools and education, and extrinsic motivation as an educational lever has been widely derided based on simple findings from the SDT literature. Fifth, personalisation. Every so often someone here said we should teach shakespeare through rap or dance or whatever. Traditionalists thought this was awful. The content is the content, and it is our job to take students beyond their horizons, not pander to their narrow set of cultural experiences. And yet this is exactly what Alpha does. Writing lessons are based on students' particular interests, so Harry Potter and minecraft. Alpha students have spoken about how Romeo and Juliet etc is outdated and boring. Again, very much at odds with what proponents have said in the past. Sixth, trashing the traditional model. We suffered our way through Shift Happens and Schools on Trial (or whatever it was called) which went on and on about factory models and Gradgrind and sage on the stage etc. And yet Alpha promotional materials do the same. Seventh, children on social media. This was the most surprising thing this year, where students at Alpha schools were tasked with setting up an X account and getting a certain number of followers. This is obviously a safeguarding concern, and if an English school leader did this it is likely they would be out of a job pretty quickly. Again, opposing social media and teens on phones has been an important part of the traditionalist movement. Eighth, it's an experiment. This is a kind of trial - "we are trying to figure out if we can do this." There's a couple of problems here. First, children aren't guinea pigs (even if their parents are rich). Second, trialling it in the best possible circumstances (i.e. a rich private school) seems like a good idea because the risk is low, but it's also why it won't scale. Anyone who has tried to roll out educational change knows that there is an "adoption curve" and a chasm between your early adopters and everyone else. What works for one categorically doesn't work for the other. This is basically as close to an iron clad law of business and scaling tech as you can get. But also, if you really wanted to make change and improve the lives of children globally, you'd focus on the things we know work because we've seen them work! Everyone on that team knows about Michaela, Mercia, Ark King Solomon, West London Free School, Mossbourne, TTA and more. Schools that do incredible things for underprivileged students with a fraction of the budget. High academic expectations. Expert teachers. Brilliant behaviour. Knowledge-rich curriculums. If we really care about scaling educational solutions, let's start there. While we're at it, the focus of the traditional movement was always on disadvantaged students. What can we do for them? How can we help them? How do we serve those who need it the most? Alpha is so obviously not that. It's a hyper-expensive school for the children of elites. Of course, those students need educating too, but dedicating so much time and energy and intellectual capital to them seems at odds with everything that has come before. Ninth, and it's going to be hard to say this without being catty, but respect for academia and qualifications. I want to be super clear that I massively respect the intellectual acumen of people like Carl, Peps, Becky and others. But, they are not "learning scientists." To the best of my knowledge, nobody on the team has produced original research in that particular field. Again, that doesn't mean they are not worth listening to or whatever - but part of the traditional revolution in England was discovering these researchers who had made incredible findings about learning and the brain, within the confines of the peer-review and scientific inquiry method. I know that arguments from authority aren't empirical, but being able to rely on people like Kirschner, Willingham, Dunlosky and others was critical to the success of the traditional movement. Tenth, transferable skills. One of the founding principles of educational traditionalism is that you cannot teach generic or transferable skills like "Leadership" or "resilience", but the Alpha website and promotional materials are full of this stuff. Eleventh, track record. Alpha people have been talking about how fantastic their content is for at least a year, but we are now told that it is just "ok." Obviously most of it is proprietary, but someone posted some physics stuff last week and I thought it was pretty poor. Michael Pershan has blogged similarly, and Dan Meyer (!) has pointed to the objective data from a school that adopted Alpha and ended up doing worse. Twelfth, similar - ratification. Part of why England has succeeded is that we have objective metrics like standardised assessments and progress 8 that allow us to test the claims of schools and educationalists. Alpha has no such metrics, and instead we need to take their word for it that they are causing "2x learning." It's a surprise to see people who have been part of the positivist and outcomes-led policy movement wanting to be involved in this kind of non-verifiable model. Thirteenth, real books, but as a totem standing for traditionalism. A number of people have asked if Alpha students read real books. On paper. Great books. There hasn't been much of an answer, beyond a picture of a library. Ok, books are important, but they aren't really my point here. My point is that there is a romanticism around traditional education. Something that goes beyond the petty mechanics of pedagogy, and taps into something social and cultural about learning. That we are one link in a long chain of transmission, a chain which cherishes books not because of a fascination with bleached wood pulp, but because of what they represent: our ability to transcend the narrow confines of our lives and swim in the streams of collective human intellectual endeavour. Nothing I've seen at Alpha tells me there's anything like that idealism. Instead, it strikes me as a desiccated and hollowed-out vision of education, where students learn not from another human, but from an AI-generated screen. It doesn't surprise me that some people are interested in Alpha. It seems exciting and innovative as a business model. But it does surprise me that THESE people are interested in it. I harbour no ill will towards them, and as I've said I respect their work. I hope this comes across as respectful and measured. But it's no surprise that people are surprised.