Can we scale cultures that support learning?

In February 2023, I published an essay called “Childhoods of exceptional people” where I looked for patterns in how various people who went on to do exceptional work were raised. There were several commonalities, but the key pattern, as I saw it, was that nearly all of them were raised and educated in cultural milieus that were very supportive of learning and achievement and were they had access to exceptional role models. Before school age, von Neumann, for example, would sit with his father at meetings where they discussed the management of his father’s bank. This week, I have a new piece in Asterisk that picks up on this theme. The animating question is: can you scale these types of cultures? I explore it by looking at how Montessori and early Jesuits approached scaling specific cultures in their schools. This pairing of examples is interesting to me because Montessori and Jesuits are in many ways opposites when it comes to educational philosophies, but they seem to have converged o

In February 2023, I published an essay called “Childhoods of exceptional people” where I looked for patterns in how various people who went on to do exceptional work were raised. There were several commonalities, but the key pattern, as I saw it, was that nearly all of them were raised and educated in cultural milieus that were very supportive of learning and achievement and were they had access to exceptional role models. Before school age, von Neumann, for example, would sit with his father at meetings where they discussed the management of his father’s bank. This week, I have a new piece in