Potomac, Maryland, March 31, 2004—Glynn Willett left his position today as CEO of ATX to join his son Wade Willett in a new Web 2.0 startup called "Schools Without Limits." Glynn Willett said, "The timing is right. The new Web 2.0 technology makes it possible to make a major advance in education now."

The energy behind Schools Without Limits is expressed in the following manifesto:

The Future is Open

Schools Without Limits is what we all want for our children—no matter where you were born, no matter what language you speak, no matter how rich your parents are. Schools Without Limits creates opportunities for the poorest students that are outside the reach of even the richest schools.

Think of Schools Without Limits as a global brain with hundreds of thousands of ideas pouring into its center from all points of the globe.

Think of Schools Without Limits as an adventure that eliminates boredom from schools as children advance at their own rate and are no longer held back by classes or out-dated textbooks.

Think of Schools Without Limits as a vast laboratory that discovers the best of the best ways to teach.

School Without Limits is not a school but is open to all schools. Nor is Schools Without Limits a textbook but a curriculum that is infinitely diverse. Schools Without Limits is taught on the Internet but it is more than just e-learning because the sheer size of its community changes the very nature of learning.

The fuel that drives Schools Without Limits is collaborative work, also known as Open Source. Open Source is changing the face of software. More than 18 million people now use the Linux open source operating system. Apache, the open source web server, is used by 67% of the websites worldwide. There are now more than 65,000 collaborative software projects.

You can recognize collaborative work in the ideals of sharing scientific methods dating back to the Greeks and Newton. You can see today the same approach in the Human Genome Project. You can also find the roots of collaborative work in Amish barn raising or the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary by mail in the 19th-century. With the help of the Internet, over 85,000 click workers scoured Mars photographs for NASA to help them locate possible landing sites.

Through collaboration, a multitude of people can tackle a problem all at once. The collective intelligence of the network of people surpasses any single contributor. The result is speed—think of what NASA was able to accomplish with 85,000 click workers. But collaboration brings more than speed; collaboration brings the freedom to innovate. Can you imagine a world where a teacher in Spain can create a course on their famous local poet and a student in Caribou, Maine can enjoy that course as part of their Spanish class? When you have millions of people creating, you unleash innovation. You free imagination. You create freedom.

We are at a convergent moment of technology, economics, and social interaction. This convergence in Schools Without Limits will become the biggest collaborative project in history—a project that truly brings the world together. Schools Without Limits is for all children, in all countries, all receiving the best of the best education the world can offer.

Schools Without Limits represents the birth of an idea with far-reaching potential that mirrors what Frederick Douglas once said: "When a great truth once gets abroad in the world no power on earth can imprison it or prescribe its limits or suppress it."

Open for Success

Schools Without Limits is a cooking pot of innovative ideas, from around the world, that lets the best ideas percolate to the top. What is the best way to teach reading? Does the best method vary from student to student or from language to language? We can now learn the answers to these questions from Schools Without Limits. Our goal is to harness the energy of teachers across the world as they create new lessons each day, to discover the most effective ways to teach, and to slash learning time in half.

We can test if it is true that learning styles such as auditory, visual, kinesthetic are important. We can also determine if short attention spans deter learning or if it is our teaching that is deficient. Perhaps we may discover that children learn chemistry best when introduced visually, taught verbally, and reinforced kinesthetically. In the whirlwind of ideas being tested in Schools Without Limits, the world becomes an educational laboratory from which the best of the best emerge.

Convergence

The convergence of ideas and technology has made Schools Without Limits possible only now. Wireless new computers that cost only $100 are being developed; Linux is free; Internet browsers are free; Internet access for schools is free. A revolution in desktop publishing and HTML has freed the creation of content. Anyone can create content for students. And perhaps most importantly, the open source community has established the framework for collaborative work that harnesses the passion of teachers, educators, and parents from around the globe.

Advance without Failure

Schools Without Limits delivers the progressive educator’s most utopian dream: Children can advance at the their own pace without alienating themselves from their peer group. Textbooks, grade levels, classes all constrain learning. Schools Without Limits lets children learn without restraint and still have friends their own age. With each student advancing at his or her own rate AND being taught by the best of the best teaching methods, energized learning replaces boredom.

The revolution for teachers is just as great as it is for students. Teachers start working one-on-one with students instead of teaching classes. Teachers stop grading papers all evening long. Teaching a class with children daydreaming and staring out the window becomes touching students one at a time.

C-ware

Collaborative work is a new trend in our economy that is squeezing itself between the public sector of government and the private sector of corporations. In software, collaborative work is called Open Source. In Schools Without Limits, collaborative work is called C-ware for the alliteration of Current Collaborative Content, Courses, and Curriculum.

Learning Units are the building blocks in C-ware. Each Learning Unit is easily created with a word processor or a page layout program. Stored in the Schools Without Limits’ database along with graphics, sound, pictures, and video, Learning Units make everyone a published author and software creator. Teachers and educators build C-ware courses quickly by creating new Learning Units or selecting and modifying existing ones. Learning Units open the world of software creation to everyone in Schools Without Limits.

Before Henry Ford, cars were made individually by hand. His adaptation of the assembly line to produce cars cheaply has had tremendous effects on the world landscape from the birth of suburbs to drive-in movies. Since Learning Units are so easily created, producing content "cheaply" will have enormous effects in education from eliminating boredom to creating a new freedom. Learning Units are a creative springboard that spur a Darwinian survival competition to find the best of the best teaching methods.

Traditional publishers face a powerful competitor in the millions of passionate parents and educators creating open source content. But Schools Without Limits is not limited to open content. Textbook publishers and authors will want to and be able to publish their courses on SWL and still earn revenue similar to that generated by traditional paper textbooks. Creating, comparing, and improving will start a race between open and closed content to claim the title as the best of the best teaching methods.

Free Time

While studying for tests dominates our memories of school, book learning is obviously not the only way we learn. Like all classifications, dividing learning into three groups—informational, interpersonal, and experiential—is arbitrary but still useful.

Commonly known as "book learning", informational learning is the heart of Schools Without Limits. Book learning is not insignificant as informational learning provides the basis for problem solving and creative skills. When information is imparted in the most efficient method possible, time is now available for learning in other ways. Interpersonal learning nurtures young children, mentors older students, teaches ethical stories with play-acting, and improves the quality of our lives. Time now becomes possible to touch our children’s life with interpersonal learning. Learning skills from sports to shop require experience. No amount of reading, watching or talking can teach a child to land a solid kick on a ball; only practice will do so. To become healthy adults, our children need time for informational, interpersonal, and experiential learning. Schools Without Limits finds the time because informational knowledge takes only a fraction of the time currently spent on the books when the best of the best teaching methods are employed.

Learning the skills of nurturing, socialization, fitness, and having fun are important but there are additional benefits. Kids no longer have to work every evening doing homework. Teachers no longer have to spend nights grading papers. Parents will be able to see the quality of their child’s education compared to that of any school anywhere in the world.

Freedom of Education

Education is a pivotal factor in the quality of our lives and the quality of our world. Schools Without Limits opens the world to a new freedom that is achieved not by bullets but by education. The Freedom of Education is simply stated: "No person or government shall deny the right of access to education." Schools Without Limits’ unlimited access to knowledge makes this freedom a powerful new force in our world. In our age of information where education becomes the foundation of equal opportunity, the freedom of education is equally as important as the freedom of speech.

"Nothing in the world is so powerful as an idea whose time has come."

Victor Hugo.