re: Ben Nelson is starting up the Minerva Project without a real business plan

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I hope most with kids are turning their attention to getting whatever they can get right now and bailing to some nice tropical isle to live out the next 100 years.

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Ha! Believe me, I've thought about this, and have considered things like how feasible it would be to open up a quant finance / banking school somewhere like the Caymans, or whether or not a prep academy might be opened in some crazy place like Ghana or Botswana or Zimbabwe. Ideally, however, I think the Gulf Coast is the place I want to be.

As for the order of all this stuff, the best I can imagine, it has to go like this:

#1. work on elite prize competitions first and foremost--things like the AMC. that's the only way to distinguish a school from the rest of the crowd these days.

#2. wait until a modularized system of MOOCs is up and running, which will take some time. this is where industry certification standards and collegiate accreditation organizations will come into play. you just have to wait for all this painfully slow regulatory change to take place, for all the people to fill in the gaps with these massive online courses & tutorials, and then you just fill in the niche with little schools where students preparing for these types of massive online tests can congregate.

#3. integrate schooling across grades K-12, so you can weave in a coherent cultural/historical perspective that you're trying to teach. that's where schools can become more like hillsdale and grove city in sticking to particular principles and virtues that they would like to teach alongside the more objective MOOCs--but it would have to be an almost separate side-by-side curriculum, because cultural inculcation can't be graded. it has to be socially ingrained through pass/fail activities.

#4. then you might be able to scale the model to something bigger than just a school, like starting a new Caribbean microstate or something crazy like that... but that's where it all gets hazy.