About the school
School is unusually good at problems with known answers and unusually quiet about everything else. We are building the other half: thirteen years of practice at recognising ambiguity, staying in it without panic, and finding a way through.
Adults spend their working lives on questions nobody has framed yet: what a community needs, what a job actually is, what to do when the instructions run out. Almost none of that resembles the tasks children are given to practise on.
The Puzzle School starts from the other end. Every day opens with something unresolved, and the ordinary subjects are taught in the course of working on it.
Not a jigsaw, and not a riddle with a trick. A puzzle here is any situation where the shape of the answer is unknown and progress has to be made anyway, with enough structure around it that a ten-year-old can get purchase.
Some are mathematical. Most are not: how to divide something that will not divide fairly, why a rule nobody can explain is still followed, what a neighbourhood is missing.
We do not yet have any opening date. Please contact us if you are interested in learning more about the effort.
“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.”
F. Scott Fitzgerald