The American public school system can be considered a well-rounded education in many ways. However, there are ways that traditional public education can fall short. While education experts agree that students learn best by doing, schools still fail to put a curriculum into place that allows students to do just that. Instead, lecture and rote memorization are still standard, leaving gaps between what is taught and what is necessary for students to learn in order to succeed.
Ivy Xu, founder, and CEO of Prequel, believes strongly in allowing students to learn critical skills that schools are simply not diving into. “When the pandemic hit in 2020, I did what a lot of young professionals did and moved back home with my parents to wait it out,” Xu told Medium.com. “That move allowed me to reconnect with my sister, who is 11 years younger than me. It was really the first time I had interacted with her since she became a teenager. She was in her sophomore year of high school and stressed out about figuring out the next season of her life, including what she would study in college.”
Xu realized that her younger sister wasn’t learning the necessary skills to thrive in the real world. Instead, the curriculum she studied in her public school still covered the same subjects their grandparents had studied. “The more I interacted with her, the more I realized that just like me when I was her age, she knew nothing about the real world,” explains Xu.
The interaction led Xu to craft the idea for Prequel, a series of boot camps that teach ambitious teens a series of real-world skills like entrepreneurship, managing personal finances, and growing an audience on social media. The teens enrolled in the Prequel bootcamps learn by doing, increasing their understanding of the subject matter.
The standardization of education
Our modern education system was built for an industrialized world. Variation in skill-building or interest was explored in college, but this structure left little room for the exploration of passion or skills in high school. As the world has changed and technology has evolved, a different set of skills is necessary to succeed as an adult. The issue arises when standardized educational systems fail to keep up with innovation.
Through Prequel, Xu and her team are accelerating the time when students are exposed to critical life skills for a modern world, expanding their horizons for burgeoning careers. The goal is a transformational experience that gets to the root of what children should be learning to live productive lives.
The “how” of learning
How children learn best has been a subject of debate among experts for decades. Much of what leads the typical public school institution to fall short lies in who is teaching and how they are teaching. “In a typical high school setting, you learn about business from someone that has never started a business, or even worked in one,” says Xu. “When it comes to career counseling, you are getting guidance from someone who has not personally explored different careers. They are learning from brochures as they guide you.”
While building the idea for Prequel, Xu and her team knew they had to have experts on hand with real-world experience to guide the cohort students through the various bootcamps. “Our program brings in the best of the best, people who are actually working at the forefront of innovation, to teach the subjects that they are exceptionally good at,” explains Xu.
By having experts on hand, children in the program can learn by doing, which studies have shown is a superior route to actual retention of lessons. With real-world exposure to lessons relevant to modern life, students retain more knowledge and adapt better to necessary skill sets.
Alternative education options
Xu is disrupting a long-staid industry that is in major need of an overhaul. Still, she is not under any assumption that traditional educational approaches will come to an end. “I don’t think that more alternative education programs will immediately shut down traditional schools,” says Xu. “It might challenge traditional schools to take on some of the best ideas. With each disruption, there are new ideas that come out and the popular or common ideas at that time can take elements of the disruption and incorporate them.”
It is Xu’s hope, and the hope of other proponents of the “learn by doing” model of education, that the public education system will begin to pivot and adapt to the way kids learn best to better prepare them for real-world challenges and success.
“As education becomes more distributed,” Xu says, “with micro-schools or charter schools or homeschooling, I would love to be able to help with developing the content that is woven into the standard education curriculum to make sure kids have the best, most fun, and most impactful content to inspire their learning.”
