Not every 16-year-old is still figuring out what they love. Some already know. For them, the IGSCE or A-Levels might be a good choice— the chance to go genuinely deep into 3–4 subjects. Breadth is a virtue. So is depth.
We’re not just designing a school. We’re asking: what does a 15-year-old need to become someone who can navigate a world that doesn’t exist yet? Parkhurst asked that in 1922. We’re still asking it a century later. When everything can be looked up, what core competencies are worth developing?
Dalton X in one sentence: take Parkhurst’s freedom and responsibility, layer on Minerva’s learning science, add A-Levels depth and global recognition, then head out into the world to learn, discover, explore, connect and build. That’s the plan.
Year 2 at Dalton X: students participate in four three-month rotations at hubs around Japan and across the globe. Mornings online. Afternoons solving real problems in real places. We are bringing the world to the classroom and the classroom to the world. Literally.
Dalton X High School opens April 2027. The “X” stands for the unknown — variables, possibility, the future unwritten. It also stands for a crossroads, a meeting across cultures and curriculums. The idea is to create a unique, hybrid model combining the best of traditional and cutting edge education.
Kawaijuku — the group behind Dalton X — partnered with the Dalton School New York in 1976 to open Dalton schools in Tokyo and Nagoya. Dalton X isn’t starting from zero. It’s the next chapter of a 50-year relationship. More on Dalton X in the next few posts. www.daltonx.ed.jp
The History of Dalton Schools
The Netherlands has over 400 Dalton schools — the highest density in the world. A century-old American idea found its most enduring home in Holland. More on the history of Dalton Schools and Dalton International can be found here: tinyurl.com/DaltonHis…
Freedom isn’t permission to do nothing. Dutch educator Hans Wenke reframed Parkhurst’s first principle: freedom is the earned outcome of responsibility. That distinction matters enormously in how you design a school. The balance between freedom and responsibility is a crucial one.
The Dalton Plan has three parts: the House (community), the Assignment (a contract between student and teacher), and the Lab (hands-on exploration). Built in 1922. Still the bones of what we’re building at Dalton X in 2027. I’ll write more about the Dalton Plan in subsequent posts.
Helen Parkhurst’s insight: give children real responsibility for their learning and they instinctively seek the best way to achieve it. Not a theory. Alongside her mentor, Maria Montessori, she actually watched it happen in her classroom over a century ago. No tests or exams, minimal discipline.
“Let us think of a school as a social laboratory where pupils themselves are the experimenters, not the victims of an intricate and crystallized system.” — Helen Parkhurst, 1922. The brand new Minerva Baccalaureate is one leg of the Dalton X curriculum, Parkhurst’s century-old Dalton Plan is another.
Ben Nelson: “We designed the curriculum, the pedagogy, the technology, the global orientation… to promote students' intellectual, social and emotional well-being, with only a single overarching goal in mind: the success of our students. Ultimately, this is the only metric that matters.”
Fully active learning works because it mirrors how understanding actually develops — through wrestling with ideas, making mistakes, getting feedback, and trying again. Minerva didn’t invent this. Cognitive science confirmed it. Minerva built a school around the science of learning. More on this in future posts.
The API feature of OpenAlex looks particularly interesting: developers.openalex.org
New Research Tool: OpenAlex
After years of development, this highly useful research tool has just been released: openalex.org It is completely free and open source. Just type in your topic and go. Searches can also be made by author, institution, sources and more.
I’ve outlined the basic components of each of the four core competencies. These are further broken down into 80+ “habits of mind” across subjects. The goal isn’t to know things. It’s to become someone who can figure things out. The tight integration of skills with content is key. More on this in future posts.
Most schools innovate by adding technology onto old pedagogy. Minerva went with first principles thinking and did the opposite: they rebuilt the pedagogy first, then designed technology to serve it. I’ll write more about how they did this when we start using the platform from next April.
Effective interaction, the fourth core competency, is how you negotiate, mediate, and persuade. Also knowing when and when not to lead. The competency most schools leave entirely to chance — assuming students will somehow absorb it, is integrated tightly throughout the entire Minerva curriculum.
The third Minerva core competency is effective communication. Learning to think and write clearly or speak confidently — understanding one’s audience, structuring one’s argument, and adapting one’s message to context. Using nonverbal communication also plays a role in how a message is received.
The second core competency in the Minerva curriculum is creative thinking. Creative thinking involves generating original ideas, reframing problems, and finding connections across disciplines. It can be taught. It can be practised. At Minerva it is integrated across all subjects from the outset.