from Hacker News

How to start a school with your friends

by geverett on 5/8/25, 7:34 PM with 74 comments

  • by jbellis on 5/8/25, 11:39 PM

    Love to see it!

    Wonder how to reconcile the description of almost-negligible admin overhead with this description of a similar effort that warns, "We wanted to keep costs extremely low, so we had parent volunteers do all admin for the school. It's going really well, but it's an insane amount of work."

    From my experience both teaching kids and organizing things, that seems like a much more likely outcome.

    https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1917287461027459239

  • by maxverse on 5/8/25, 9:43 PM

    The Recurse Center[1] folks (also YC) started an un-school with friends!

    [1] http://recurse.com/

  • by yupitsme123 on 5/9/25, 12:50 AM

    I always wondered why no one creates new universities in the US. It seems like in the 1800s every rich guy started their own university, many with unique missions.

    The existing university model in the US seems like it's ripe for disruption so I'm surprised no one has tried to create their own.

  • by ChrisMarshallNY on 5/8/25, 11:31 PM

    That looks very cool.

    As someone that has given a number of classes and seminars, it gets fairly discouraging, how few folks want to learn.

    I think that establishing a learning-focused community (like this) would probably really get a lot of people engaged.

    Geeks like learning. Many others don't. It's always fairly demoralizing, when I encounter it.

  • by geverett on 5/8/25, 7:34 PM

    A coliving house in NYC started a 'university' that has taught thousands of students in the last two years.

  • by vianarafael on 5/9/25, 12:46 AM

    This is such a refreshing inversion of the ‘edtech’ trend—rather than trying to scale education through software, FractalU scales motivation through community. Makes me wonder: instead of designing better UIs for MOOCs or LLM tutors, maybe the real unlock is designing better social containers for learning.

  • by rahimnathwani on 5/9/25, 12:16 AM

    I love these sort of 'high agency', 'you can just do stuff' posts.

  • by godsinhisheaven on 5/12/25, 12:52 PM

    I do find it a bit funny how all of these "democratized" and "decentralized" things always seem to come out the most centralized places, mostly New York. Of course, that's where the people are, so you know, it makes sense. Just funny.

  • by sirodoht on 5/9/25, 8:08 AM

    I've been very inspired by FractalU. We've started something similar in London, UK, called Shoshin College [1]

    [1] https://shoshincollege.org/

  • by flawn on 5/9/25, 11:21 PM

    Ever heard of https://code.berlin?

  • by aspenmayer on 5/8/25, 11:02 PM

  • by pcthrowaway on 5/9/25, 12:28 AM

    I read "How to Live Near your Friends"[1] article linked from this article, and I can't help but be amused by the author's attitude of "my friends should all move near me because that's the way we can all live near friends"

    I mean they're not wrong, but also they could have made friends with their neighbours like the Stoop Coffee[2] author, or moved to be nearer to a friend group also. It's nice to see them really embracing their main character bias though (in this case, in a way that seemed to have successfully built a geographically aligned community)

    [1]: https://prigoose.substack.com/p/how-to-live-near-your-friend...

    [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43473618

  • by sakesun on 5/9/25, 1:30 AM

    Something to do while AI take care of other chores.

  • by fitsumbelay on 5/8/25, 10:29 PM

    D O P E !