Education Nation: Rural Arkansas Town Rethinks High School

Thanks to Matt for passing this along. It reminds me of something Mohnish Pabrai talked about at the Pabrai Funds Annual Meeting this past weekend. He mentioned that studies show that the brain is developing quickly between the ages of 12 and 19, and that this is a time when kids should be beginning to specialize in something and really start pursing their interests, and yet our education system is rarely set up this way. He mentioned Warren Buffett (among others) as an example of someone who had gotten an early start on his passion around those ages and went on to become successful as he learned valuable lessons and got that spark during those important times. In Buffett’s case, he was doing things like renting out pinball machines and a Rolls Royce, among other ventures.

A group of students in a high school gym hovers over a remote controlled robot while it shoots basketballs from the free throw line with better precision than Dwight Howard. They built and programmed the robot themselves, and it won first prize in a global robotics competition.

In a classroom nearby, other students are studying leeches recently used in microsurgery to reattach a severed hand.

And down the hall, a third group of students is working on a team building exercise—competing against each other to build the tallest tower using nothing more than marshmallows and toothpicks. "We need to break these right here," says one student, as the exercise tests their communication skills and math.

You might think you've landed in a high-priced private high school, prepping teenagers for America's top colleges. Instead, this is a public high school in a small town in Northern Arkansas.