Which of these schools would you visit?

I am an education transformation nerd who believes that secondary school could have been 10 times better than it was and here are five of the high schools around the world that I'm desperate to visit. Anyone in the space will have heard of Alpha schools. They are as fascinating as they are controversial. Based in the US, can you believe this? They only have two hours of academics a day. The rest of the day is focused on kids following their curiosity, building projects of their interest, learning public speaking skills. What's really crazy is that those two hours of school aren't done by a human. They are done by an AI tutor with a human acting as a mentor, as a coach, as a guide. And as controversial as it sounds, it's really working. These kids are getting in the top one to two percent of national rankings for core academics and going to the top universities. So I am very intrigued to visit. Next up we have HTA, High Tech Academy in Almaty, Kazakhstan. I've been fascinated with the school for years because they combine two pedagogies which are really fascinating. The first is project-based learning through something called the Corda method. They believe that true learning comes from curiosity and from kids being presented with a challenge where they have to solve it. They have to learn. So alongside core academics, kids do three-to-four-week projects, sprints, solving a challenge for a real-world organization in their community. This could be creating a marketing plan for a local restaurant. This could be solving desertification in Kazakhstan by designing a water filter in your science class. I want to see how rigorous these projects are but I can really imagine kids being so much more engaged because they're getting to create projects that influence the real world and the school complements this with something called the Minerva Baccalaureate which is a way of learning academics through focusing on transferable skills. So you're not doing an exam based on content acquisition like you do in GCSEs or A levels. Instead it's super discussion-based, uses the Socratic method and has produced incredible orators. Camphill School in Aberdeen, Scotland. This is technically a special needs school but it's thought of as a therapeutic community. Similar to the Waldorf Steiner principles, they truly believe that no student is inherently broken. All students are whole as they are. Whether a young person has autism, Down Syndrome, learning difficulties, they're treated as a whole functioning human who has so much value to give this world. They focus on education through the hands so carving, weaving and they're really passionate about sustainability and growing their own food. Agora in the Netherlands. I first heard about this school from Rutger Bregman's book Utopia for Realists, amazing book. And it's famous for being the school with no rules, no classrooms, and no exams. It is so self-directed. Kids work on projects called challenges that are relevant to them. They learn maths, history, science through the project. And I'm very intrigued to see if this still produces academically rigorous results. The kids seem so happy. And in contrast to all of them, I want to visit Michaela, which is known as the strictest school in the world. It's in London. They prize rote memorization. They have completely silent corridors. Kids are forced to discuss academic topics even at lunchtime. But they get in the top 1% of exam results in the UK despite being a non-selective school. So I am really fascinated to go there and to witness the pedagogy, but also to see if there are any sacrifices in terms of well-being, mental health. We need more schools bravely innovating how school can be done because we have so much evidence to show that the current exam factory model isn't working.