Networks
In the long term, lila.school is to become a network of small learning centers. The individual centers will remain connected by common purpose, but should stay as autonomous and agile as possible and therefore have a maximum size of about 80 students and 8 learning guides.
In conjunction with this, with the help of our digital learning platform, we also want the course system to become a larger network far beyond the realm of the school. Our aim is to facilitate lifelong learning and teaching for the widest possible audience and to contribute to the decentralization of education. In this way, a new structural base will be created, from which different existing projects and communities will be supported, new ones will be made possible, and all of them will be connected in a large, common network. A commercial model for the use of the platform will also provide a way to cross-finance the learning centers in the long term.
These networks, in turn, are themselves part of a global movement of self-directed education.
Liberate learning
Internationally, many initiatives are already on the path of self-directed learning. In Austria, there are hardly any such offers, especially for students of high school age. With lila.school, a learning center is now being created in Vienna that lives and develops this idea and thus also shows that school education can be adapted to the further development and current state of society.
We see the liberation of learning as an essential key to changing consciousness and society. If we humans want to develop our full potential, we must be able to shape our learning individually and freely.
Check out our approach to find out what ideas we’re aligned with. In the learning formats, you will find out how we implement these ideas.
Need for change
Many people feel that the existing education system is no longer adequate. There are many reasons for this.
School education focuses predominantly on academic knowledge transfer and job-related qualification, neglecting other aspects of being human. Due to a lack of openness to the outside, i.e. the lack of involvement of external actors in the educational process, there is little connection to “real life”. The low relevance of the content to the actual interests and questions of the students leads to a perceived lack of meaning. Fear, frustration and a lack of motivation on the part of the students (and teachers) are the result; the lack of motivation to learn is compensated for by pressure. The dominant standard is performance orientation, not the development of individual potential.
A high degree of bureaucratization and standardization, accompanied by rigid hierarchies and power structures, makes deep change almost impossible, and also entails the separation of all participants (students, teachers, parents, providers, authorities). Despite the large financial investment, educational standards are declining.
Ideas and scientific backing for new ways have been around for a long time, but the changes needed are too profound and the existing structures too rigid to be solved by attempts at reform. More and more people therefore want alternatives to public sector services. We want to create such an alternative with lila.school.