Learner's autonomy Empower learners 对 Learning 非常有 Passion 疫情实现 exponential growth 两个岛 --> 不能停在岛上，要创造一个新的空间 成长 vulnerability 是 ego 放下 ego，去分享 (gaze shift) --- Personal Home: https://jimmyzhang.org (Photography, Essays, Builder) Opensource Knowledge Garden: https://jimmyzhang.space Building OpenLearn: https://learninginpublic.space Author of "The Education I Want": https://theeducationiwant.my --- 1.校门口小孩场景 转学后来到荷兰UWC，校门口拦截小学生问"你来学校干嘛？"被无视的荒诞场景 此部分核心问题："上课究竟是为了什么？学习的意义何在？" 细节支撑： “非必要不上课” “课表让上课变得理所当然” “小时候和老师讨论“为什么要有课桌椅、为什么要划分学科” “本来5分钟就搞定的事非要花50分钟” 2.疫情期间自我赋能 疫情期间获得自由时间，沉浸于知识管理、笔记系统、自主学习,自信获得指数级提升。自己理解的真正的学习是怎么样的，突出学习对自己的重要性。 细节参考： “以超高带宽访问世界知识”，以及那种“无人之境”的专注感 “学习是生命的原始条件”的理解，和“活着就要学习”的生命观。(当然要突出学学习对自己的重要性) 在疫情期间如何“系统搭建知识体系”，以及“真正高效的累”的快乐 3.哈巴雪山反思 知识价值和存在意义 FP毕业后独自爬山、高反发烧、躺在农家木床上的孤独反思 细节支撑： “那一夜，我盯着哈巴村农家木床上的天花板，第一次认真思考：如果我的存在对别人没有价值，那就应该被遗忘。写作、学习、炫耀，不过是自我安慰。” “Newsletter 首先是我的空间。在这里没有人指手画脚，没有人评头论足，没有人对我实施任何有形的无形的压力。我在地上画了一个圈 -- 闲人免进，里面是我的。 但这也仅仅是一个圈，而没有围墙。因为 newsletter 对我的第二个意义恰恰是我撕开了一个自我的窗口，这样外人也能往里看几眼。以前自命清高，不愿也不善分享，觉得别人不配理解，只为维护自己智力上的那点优越感。宁可让别人不知道我在想什么，保护那点自命不凡虚荣心。总觉得自己有多高深，但从不敢去挖，因为害怕挖了见底了，那个自我的形象也就破碎了。” 4.开始赋能(I build)。（这块没有空间展开就稍微提下，具体的放在小文书写） 行动：开始写newsletter、校报电子化、社群搭建等赋能他人的项目 "从读者的角度思考，这篇能给读者带来什么" "写作是我向外扩展融入世界的方式，也是不断向内挖掘自我的途径...但我知道，这个过程远未结束" --- ## v0 Among the first 17 years of my life, I spent 12 years of them at school, receiving something we call education. I don't quite remember how it all started. My parents didn't ask for my consent -- not really. It's not their fault, because it was a legal obligation any way. And in the blink of an eye, here I am -- almost reaching the other end of the 12 years of education. Yet I struggle to answer the question of I have I really learned from these 12 important years of my life. --- I love learning. That's for sure. I am a knowledge mangement nerd -- I open-sourced my notes of more than 500, 000 words on https://jimmyzhang.space. I would spent a whole day researching and taking notes, just to figure out how can I re-invent electricity f I was teleported back to the late 1700s (link), or trying to reconstructs our universe from first principles (link). I love thinking in first principles -- in fact, I cannot not think in first principle. For those who are not familiar with the term, first-principle thinking means thinking from the very start, rejecting any pre-conceived notion or assumptions -- finding the logical and ontological starting point of it all, and going from there on. And that's exactly why most of my education has been extremely challenging for me -- whenver I try to apply first principle thinking to education and to explain my own experience, very few things made sense. I struggle to understand why we have a curriculum, a timetable (link), or even teachers. I struggle to comprehend the meaning of writing an English essay on an advertisement that i doubt no one would pay attention to if put on the street, the point of doing a Physics experiement to demonstrate something we already know, or the meaning of remembering economic theories that perpetuate harmful practices to our ecosystem (link). Education just feels too justified. ==I grabbed a kid entering the school gate in the morning and asked, “What are you doing here today?” He replied, “To go to school. What’s wrong with you?” and then ran off.== We go to school every day -- whether we truly learn is irrlevant, showing up is righteous. Teachers naively believe that what they are teaching will have a positive influence on the stuents' future lives, that reading off the powerpoint or giving tests is called education, and that education is the most important of humanity. At the end of the day, it bewilders me more than it frustrates me -- why are we doing this, and why is no one thinking about it the way I do. As a result, I compressed all my thoughts and questions into an easily readable, poet-format book called "The Education I Want" (https://theeducationiwant.my, where you can read at https://read.theeducationiwant.my) --- Several years ago, I'm probably this nerdy child who doesn't talk much, works on his own, and thinks that the world is made up of people who are less smarter than him. Ironically, Covid 19 proves to be a 福音 for me, as I have the chance to not to go to school and learn on my own at home. Every day I would put up a virtual background of me learning for the sake of online classes, cover the camera, and go straight off to my own work -- building plugins for Obsidian (a note-taking app) (link), designing my personal website (link), and building my AI Agent workflow (link). ==I would never forgot what it felt like to be able to access the world’s knowledge with ultra-high bandwidth within the flow state. Focus is such a luxury at school, when my attention is constantly being bombarded with teacher's instructions and the bells between classes. == However, after Covid was over, it dawned on me that relentlessly working alone is not the way to go, especially as I learned more about philosophies such as "working with the garage door open" and "learning in public" (link). I desperately lacked the connection with real world -- the opportunity to listen to what others think and experience, to share my insights with others, and to build solutions or even products to help those who experience similar struggles at formal educaiton with me. --- ==After having had a bad fever and lying in a rural cabin under the Haba Snow Mountain for three days, startinga the a strange ceiling, I thought over a lot of things. ==Starting from the summer of 2023, I began intentionally connecting with the world. I started writing my personal newsletters (link) or my firends and people I care about every week -- I wrote about my weekly musings, random inspirations, and daily struggles. Up to today, there are already more than 75 letters written for about 50 readers. I also started networking with real people in the field and in similar interest with me. Cold emailing the organizer, I volunteered to help out and organized a workshop at PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) Summit 2025 in Utrecht, Netherlands (link). There I met in person a lot of the influencers in this field that I have only listend to their voices on Youtube, and get to learn about how PKM is actually applied across various disciplines and areas in real life. It made me realize that knowledge management should not be personal; instead it's increasingly important as a collective practice -- how a team manages a proejct, how an organization manages its knowledge, how big multi-discipline projects that organized and achieved. Inspired by these ideas, I began pondering on the possibility of creating a collective knowledge interface for humanity -- I call the project Nex (link). I also used my weekends to visit schools in the Netherlands. I visted the only Sudbury school in the Netherlands -- Sudbury School Amersfoort, and get to know in person how alternative education models such as the Sudbury Model works in real life (link). I also conneted online with several teachers, parents, and mentor in China, learning about their experience in providing alternative education to those who see its value. ==Regarding my efforts in my own UWC Community -- At UWC Changshu China, I served as the shadow chairman of the College Council, and initiated the UWC TV project -- gathering a bunch of passionate students to film, interview, and produce a weekly episode of major events on campus. After moving to the Netherlands, I moved the project idea to UWC Maastricht with a friend of mine. Meanwhile, after I took over the role of the chief editor of the school newspaper, I pushed for the its digitalization. We built an online platform from scratch, where every can make posts, like, and comments. On hindsight, I wished I put more effort into spreading this model to other UWC campuses worldwide, so that all UWC campuses can be truly united through a common platform, and we can better 协调 to achieve our mission. I did all these because I deeply believe in the power of media in shaping people's perceptions and uniting communities. == Finally but more importantly, I talked to my friends and people around me. Those conversations made me realize that a lot of the time, learnig requires a space to happen -- it's not that they don't want to learn, but rather, the school institution taking up the bulk of their time and mental space and that it feels inappropriate and frightening to learn on their own in some unknown space. As a result, I established a private learning community with the core philosophy of "learning in public" and "decentralized education" (link). Within the commnuity, I started a challenge in which every one must share their daily learning continuously for 100 days in order to get their earnest money they paid at the beginning back. Currenlty we have a close-knit community of about 30 members. --- Ultimately, I realized that the ego that I used to hold is the biggest hinder of my life -- what's been stopping me from really connecting with people and achieving impact. Just like, like what Steve Jobs said, I still believe that the world is made up of people that are less smarter than me -- but now from a different perspective. Now I think: how wonderful is that, because I have this vast opportunity to show people the better way to do things and how things orignally should be. And at least for the near future of my life, I'd like to achieve this through empowering more learners to direct their own learning and pushing for the decentralization of the education of humanity. Along with other great new things that I'm so excited about.