Learning OS in a Nutshell

We created a new educational system.

For more than twenty years, we have been developing and testing it in real classrooms. So far, five student cohorts have completed the full four-year cycle from grades 1 through 4 with Learning OS, while the system has been continuously refined.

The central idea is easiest to understand through the difference between a computer’s operating system and the applications that run on it. The human brain and mind are organized in a similar way.

The neuroscience of Marcus Raichle and Olaf Sporns provides important inspiration and brain-level parallels for our work. The BOS–TES model is our own contribution to understanding and developing the mind.

• Base Operating System (Mind OS): the mind’s general-purpose foundational operating system.
• Task Execution Systems (TES): task-specific systems built on the Mind OS and organized to carry out particular tasks.

Neither traditional nor progressive education develops this foundational system as a whole. It usually develops only incidentally, even though all subject learning and all task performance rest on this foundation.

Learning OS develops this foundational system as a whole. It does so both as a dedicated foundational subject and through integration across the curriculum.

Children can therefore experience their own minds as whole, internally ordered systems that can be organized and reorganized, and that they can use with growing awareness in learning and in life’s changing situations.

What does this give children? How do we do it? What results does it produce?