The short version: I’m creating a new kind of government degree for adults in NYC, and if you want to help, have experience teaching or researching, or know someone who might be interested, let me know (daniel@maximumnewyork.com, or DM me on Twitter)!

I’m currently developing a complete educational program that I currently call the “citizens law degree.” It takes less than a year to fully complete, teaches students about the city/state government foremost (although they’ll learn about the federal level too), and gives them a comprehensive model of how their government and law work. This will also be mixed with practical doing and interacting with the political system; it’s not just a classroom and theory, although those both have their place.

It will be offered as affordably as possible, and through a non-profit structure.^[1]

The goals of this new program:

Bring more minds online to think and act productively about our government, and keep them networked together. Far fewer people than you expect have a working model of “the government” or “the law” in their heads. This state of things has the same consequence as an advanced industrial society running out of people who can do math.
Create a course of study and practice that allows students to acquire political capital, and act productively for the public good.
Teach 1,000 New Yorkers in about the next year and half, and 10,000 in the next few years.^[2] Radically alter New York’s political ecology and state capacity as a result, with powerful norm shifts in favor of concreteness and understanding how things actually work.
Achieve Abundance: abundant housing, abundant clean energy, abundant education, abundant work, abundant transport, and so much more. NYC’s annual expense budget tops $100 billion these days,^[3] and we should be getting far more for our money than what our current system can deliver. The answer is not to rage or despair: but to create a new political culture capable of getting our money’s worth and more.

Four primary pedagogical considerations:

I believe there is a proper order in which to teach “government,” and that most college undergraduate degrees (and even law school in a different way) do the opposite of this, instead preferring an à la carte approach with mostly unhelpful prerequisites. We would never do this for math, but we do for the subject that studies the fundamental ma

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Education