Billionaire School
So what do we think about The School That Oprah Built?
Not many hand-picked groups of 150 girls have $40 million standing behind their learning . . .
I heard about it on National Public Radio yesterday, and then today Newsweek arrived and Favorite Daughter read it to me in the car. Quite the personal project. It reminds me of what Andre Agassi has done with his school, in the sense that it's a very personal education project for disadvantaged kids he relates to, and Bill Gates (with his new honorary title of most influential on education in the last decade), all of which then got me thinking about how major education benefactors have ALWAYS been major-factors, whether they turned out to be "bene" or not.
Stray thought - Walt Disney had special apartments built on Main Street USA for himself and his family, to watch benevolently over his world while children experienced it. Oprah is having a house built on the grounds of her South African campus so she can do the same. The only difference I see, is that Walt never SAID it was about Schooling instead of Dreaming.
I dream of the day we can enjoy the fulfillment of dreams without pretending it is School.
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Economics | Education | Feminism | Leadership | Andre Agassi | Bill Gates | Oprah | Personal Charities | Personal Vision | South Africa
Creepy
Submitted by NanceConfer on 5 January 2007 - 11:34am.
That's how the whole thing strikes me.
152 students. $40 million. (To start?)
It's her money and good for the chosen girls.
For a few years anyway. And then what? The goal is they will live in a luxury most of us will never see and don't need and then go back to their villages and lead their people to a better life.
What a crock.
I hope I am wrong and one girl grows up to be the leader that changes life for all the poor in South Africa but is institutionalized luxury the way?
But Oprah gets to feel better about her childhood. And gets to give to kids who are so miserably poor that they are grateful for every scrap. Unlike those ungrateful American inner-city kids -- she's had it with them!
The school is just a vanity project run amok.
Nance
The Money's Not the Thing
Submitted by JJ Ross on 5 January 2007 - 12:43pm.
"School" construction is most of that cost and would have to be capitalized over 30 years or whatever; it's not really like just spending a cool quarter-mil directly on each of this current crop of seventh graders! 
That's the upfront part that is more like Disney than school district -- investment rather than operating cost.
Oprah's annual operating costs per girl might be more in line with the usual for live-in prep schools?
But while I was casting about for school construction data, I found this confidently far-advanced harbinger of change -- from a surprising source, the construction pros, not the hidebound instructional operation experts. Read the first few pages, it will blow your mind. Not just the usual about tech changes, but radically redesigning and re-integrating School as "learning communities" for all people (not just kids!) to learn and do everything, new public-private partnerships to pay for it all, serving Grandma and toddler in a real garden instead of test prep disguised as kinder-garten. Shopping mall complexes for learning, with natural light, onsite health care, you dream it and it's around the corner -- and I only read through page six!
First Free Children's Room
Submitted by JJ Ross on 5 January 2007 - 12:00pm.
There you go, good example . . . a real free gift compared to compulsory schooling, free in admission AND free from coercion or co-option.
Ironic that free school (meaning forced upon all kids, hard to wrap my mind around that even as I say it) promised social progresss to save so many kids FROM forced labor and exploitation by desperate social and economic forces, when a century later it would itself become the very labor and exploitation from which they desperately need saving.
Even as local government took over both libraries and schools from private benefactors and churches, libraries seem to have stayed more true than schools to this noble purpose of a Children's Room: to "attract and better serve" children -- rather than corral them, count them and force them to work for free all day as the staff dictates.
"The Andrew Carnegie Free Library in Carnegie, Pennsylvania opened, complete with a Children's Room, on May 1, 1901.
This Children's Room was specifically designed for the use of children, including low bookcases, so that children could reach the books themselves. Hence, the Andrew Carnegie Free Library was the first suburban library in the world to open to the public, complete with a room specifically designed to be, and dedicated as, a Children's Room. . .
Miss Charlotte Keith, the first Children's Librarian of the newly-opened West End Branch of The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, started a Children's Storytime to attract and better serve the young readers of her district."
Are "public" libraries public only when the taxpaying public pays and operates them, or was Carnegie's first Children's Room historic because it WAS openly public and free despite also being privately run, without government funding or control? Are Bill Gates' influential computer high schools still public schools if he's paying the bills? If Oprah wanted to build and run a girls' political leadership prep school in NYC instead of South Africa, and Bloomberg designated it as a free "public" magnet to which all girls could apply, and if the City sponsored vouchers or scholarships for the selected ps students, payable to Oprah, would that make it both? Neither? Right, wrong, weird?
Put all this culture clash together and what DO we think Oprah is doing? More Carnegie library, more Disneyland, more Agassi, Gates or Bob Jones? Chris Whittle, Moe and Chubb, Bill Bennett, spas and summer camps, Osama Bin Laden's camps? Maybe a little Prime of Miss Jean Brodie or the Vatican? Could we make the case for a little of all of these, perhaps? . . .
Neverland
Submitted by JJ Ross on 5 January 2007 - 12:10pm.
What if Michael Jackson did EXACTLY what Oprah is doing (as another entertainer who rose from childhood abuse and exploitation to vast wealth, still haunted by that upbringing) --
Let's say he threw obscene private money at a few handpicked boys to come live with him on his lavish estate constructed especially for their indulgence, so he could be their friend and companion and benefactor and they could idolize him . . .oh wait . . .where IS he now, not South Africa looking at school plans, I hope?
God, i hope Micheal Jackson
Submitted by Tara Parks on 12 January 2007 - 4:47pm.
God, i hope Micheal Jackson never builds a school.
school
Submitted by housewife (not verified) on 16 January 2007 - 10:01pm.
How cool would it be if Oprah built a school here in the US????
With or without her house it's called giving back.
More Cool If
Submitted by JJ Ross on 18 January 2007 - 2:47pm.
she could give back by building a whole different thing that transcends school, and let impoverished girls be the first to flourish and show it can be done (keep calling it school or get a different word, just so it's nothing like what "school" has come to mean.)
Walt Disney didn't just build another amusement park like those we all knew, except fancier. What he gave back was something much bolder and riskier, something that hadn't existed for his family or any other, ever in history. He created it! And the world quickly followed because it was so obviously progress. Think of everything else that has changed in our culture and economy concurrently (and how it spread to Japan and France, etc.)
Oprah all by herself (I think) could pull off that kind of reimagination of learning and developing young talent, something not schooling at all. Maybe instead of Walt Disney, she could do more of an MLK "I have a dream" charge to our third-millennium conscience, about what the world will be like when our little children aren't judged by the content of their standardized test score booklets. She could reimagine learning and education systems and traditions so radically different than the social traps we can't seem to break free of, that she really could change the world.
The point wouldn't be to make a few more girls into relative winners in the existing systems, but rather to help every family believe their dreams can come true by creating a better future for all learning.
If anyone can get completely outside the learning and thinking box for personal growth and development of whole new minds a la Daniel Pink, it would be Oprah. She can afford it and anyone in the WORLD would help her if she asked. What an opportunity!
Or she could just build another school and make herself headmistress.
Unschooling
Submitted by JJ Ross on 18 January 2007 - 2:56pm.
I visited your blog and notice you dislike what you know of homeschooling, but have a lively interest in unschooling? Most of my blog essays are about that (often in peculiar forms, I'll grant you!) which you can read by title here. Also I now blog with Nance, another radical unschooler who's around here someplace, as Thinking Parents at Cocking a Snook . . .
APOLOGIES TO HOUSEWIFE!!!
Submitted by liza on 11 April 2007 - 5:31pm.
In cleaning the comments of spam I accidentally deleted Pissed Off Housewive's comment.
Nope, I think homeschooling can be a great thing.
I think that many homeschool parents are woefully unprepared to educate their children.
The groups I know of in my area are fundamentalist X-tians who use home school as a bible study to the exclusion of science and fact.
Also, in reading many home school blogs I find the "educators" to not have the broad range of knowledge required for upper elementary and certainly moving into Junior High and High School years I cannot imagine their being competent instructors.
I understand the need for home school in some instances but I've not yet observed a home school setting that inspires faith or awe.
Perhaps someone in the Los Angeles area would like to invite me over?
I'm willing to be impressed, I'm open to it, I just haven't seen it yet.
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Liza is the founder and publisher of http://culturekitchen.com. You can find her personal rants and raves over at http://lizasabater.com
Reading...
The Carnegie Library endowments made quite an impact in communities all across the country.
Reading is fundamental.
http://andrewcarnegie.tripod.com/cfl.html