Eric Schwarz co-found Citizen Schools in 1995 with a dream of reimagining the school day and challenging the standard approach to who, what, where, when, and how learning was happening. Citizen Schools’ flagship program allowed middle schoolers in Boston to participate in a 10-week apprenticeship with volunteers across different industries. These volunteers collaborated directly with teachers and AmeriCorps VISTA members to teach a particular skill set or subject matter over the course of a semester. 

Eric is also the co-founder and current CEO of the College for Social Innovation, which brings together higher education institutes and social sector organizations to create fully-credited hands-on learning experiences that are meaningful and accessible for college students. 

What does Experiential Learning (EL) mean to you, and why is it important? What would it look like to truly learn experientially?

I think most people learn best from experiences and relationships, yet schools are not built around that. I learned best at Montessori as a three-year-old, and then again in my career, [where I was ] inspired by mentors. I did an internship for a political campaign, and I probably learned more from that experience than all 32 of my college classes put together. [That experience] led me to develop a great sense of purpose that was relevant and tangible to the real-world. This is why traditional learning matters—because when you can relate learning to something you know, you come back more motivated to understand the theory. One of the things that stuck with me from an early Citizen Schools event was a Google-led design program in video game development. The students would use Pythagoras' Theorem in the construction of a video game. Most 12 or 13 year olds are consumers of video games, but these kids got to be the producers of games that their peers and siblings could also play. Students came out realizing they needed to know these mathematical concepts so that they might grow up to design video games like the Google engineer with tattoos and a cool office. So if you take the theoretical and connect it to the real world, you can learn more. 

What do you believe is the best first step towards advancing the future of learning? What is necessary to make it successful?

We need to start with getting young people to care about learning, and to care about what they're learning. That, I think, starts with relevance and real-world [influence]. There are a lot of students who don’t understand [how] what they’re supposed to be learning connects to anything that seems exciting out there. The more we can support teachers in engaging parents and tapping into the broader community, we can co-create a vision that’s more experiential, more hands-on, more real-world, [and can] turn students from [being] just recipients of knowledge to producers of knowledge. 

Field trips are one good starting point. I remember field trips from when I was in second or third grade, and they were incredibly impactful because it got you out of the norm. The more that students can go on field trips and [visit] a place of employment, and ideally they see people who look like them at a desk or in a factory or in a design role, that gives them a vision of what is possible for their future. They can then start to work backwards [and think] “what do I need in order to get there?”.

I also think of projects, whether they’re service-learning or apprenticeships. I think every eighth grader should be a published author, every high school graduate should have an internship, and every elementary and middle school student should have multiple chances to [participate in] apprenticeship-like projects. And it can’t just be a one-off [experience], because what privileged families provide to their kids is a lot of chances to build what I call the “muscle memory of success". You might introduce your kid to baseball, but it turns out they hate baseball. Then you might introduce them to theater, but it's [also] not their thing. Eventually, [it’s] the fifth or sixth thing that they like and are good at, so really what we need is an education system that offers every young person multiple chances to be successful and build that muscle memory of success. That’s not what we have now—we have a system that is causing young people to be more and more disengaged. I think [most] educators would probably agree that students aren’t even showing up, and that attendance has become a huge issue. We need to make learning more interesting to get them to show up, and then hopefully over time, we can convince educational communities that Experiential Learning is actually a better way to learn scientific concepts, learn about literature, build writing skills, and build mathematical skills.

Who is the most influential mentor you have had throughout your life? What qualities did they impart that you continue to embody in your work?

I’d say probably the first was my mom. She taught ninth grade English in East Harlem, New York [which] later became a whole series of schools, including a Citizen Schools site. Because I went to a private school and she taught in a public school, we had different vacation schedules. A lot of days I would be off and she would be teaching, so I would get to go see her teach. She was just really cool, she had the whole class working on different things. Some students were at a first or second grade level, some students were at an eleventh grade level, so she couldn’t really have them all working on the same thing. [Some] would be in pairs, or groups of three or four people, working on a project, writing essays, sometimes doing a photo slideshow as a way of communicating in a different dimension, and she’d kinda circulate around and work with them. That was such an inspiration to me. Years later when I was teaching a journalism apprenticeship at Citizen Schools, I [utilized] the same idea of maybe two [students] are walking around the school selling advertisements, and others are working on a cartoon. That allow[ed] me to circulate and spend a lot of one-on-one time, or one-on-two time, which I think is a hallmark of experiential learning—that one to one ratio. She was a huge mentor.

Then I would say Gary Hart and his campaign team. That was the internship that changed my life. I was taken seriously as a contributor to a United States senate re-election campaign as a 19-year-old who [had] never worked in politics, and then two years later, [was] being given big jobs on a presidential campaign. Having my first paid job after college be the national student director for a presidential campaign that almost won was an incredible experience. It really taught me that young people can do more than you think. A lot of times, grown ups are saying, “oh, they’re just young people'', [but] whether they’re AmeriCorps member age, college students, high school students, middle school students, or younger, young people bring a powerful naivete to the table. They are often asking new questions that are really great to learn from, and they have creative ideas.

Creativity has declined compared to the 1950’s and 60’s. There’s different theories to that—maybe it’s social media, maybe [it’s] school becoming more traditional, maybe it’s helicopter parents who don’t give young people enough time to do their own thing, be bored, and have to creatively come up with a way to entertain themselves. It’s pretty striking, and [the problem isn’t just that] as you get older you lose [creativity], but compared to 10 or 20 years ago, young people of the same age are less creative than they used to be, and that’s something that we as experiential educators need to take on.

What is the most successful and/or unique example of educators and mentors working together to create an impact on students that you have seen?

I do think that some of the schools that Citizen Schools was involved with around 2010 were pretty amazing, really because of the teamwork between teachers and mentors, with AmeriCorps members [serving] as a bridge. Orchard Gardens is a school that went from worst to first in Boston. It was the lowest performing middle school in the state, [but] became the highest performing in terms of growth over a four to five year period on the [state standardized tests]. That was just an incredible experience, and the teachers and the principal were such a big part of it. They recognized they couldn’t do it all alone and they needed help, [particularly] around relevance and real-world experiences. They tapped into Citizen Schools to bring in professionals from Fidelity, Google, Bank of America, as well as artists and architects and lawyers, [so that] every middle schooler had a couple of experiences each year with a mentor where they got to produce something. It might have been a mock trial to argue in front of a federal judge, or maybe coming up with a financial plan for a local business, but in every case, the student was producing and using real-world skills, and they got exposure to cool offices around the city. This really gave teachers a new window into the skills of their students. Oftentimes, a student, maybe a special needs student that a teacher had given up on and just saw as a behavioral problem, all of the sudden, they see that student thriving in a different environment, and they have new belief in that student. It was so inspirational and I hope that some of the schools of the future that Citizen Schools supports will get teachers excited and provide [access] through an AmeriCorps [service member]. Mentors give teachers the sense of “I don’t have to do this alone”. If you think about where education works well, which tends to be upper middle class and wealthy communities, teachers are important, but it’s teachers + parents + community organizations. This includes camps, afterschool programs, and jobs, once students get into high school. This is a three-legged stool, and that stool cannot be stable with just one leg, the teacher. 

What is an initiative you have seen that has successfully disrupted a flaw in the education system? How can we best position students to be changemakers?

I’d love to talk about College for Social Innovation (CFSI) as another example of experiential learning coming to life. CFSI is really dedicated to the idea that college students will learn more if they can be immersed in intensive experiences where they are adding value for a nonprofit or social change organization. In this approach, they’re producing value rather than just sitting in a chair listening to a professor. We’ve worked with almost 600 students from 17 different colleges and universities to offer our centerpiece program, which is a semester-long, 400-hour internship, with full academic credit. They are assigned a mentor and a special project [where] they’re working for [places like] New England’s largest homeless shelter, or an environmental group working towards more tree coverage in low-income neighborhoods, or an initiative helping new Haitian immigrants access healthcare. What’s really cool about it is that these are students who over the course of a semester are adding significant value for a cutting edge nonprofit or social mission business. 

The magic of what CFSI has done is that we have turned what colleges would usually make extracurricular, meaning it happens in the summer or afterschool, and we’ve made it curricular. Students will get eight or nine academic credits from the internship, [and then] two additional classes that are four credits each so that you end up getting a full semester towards your degree. The reason that’s so important is [because] when learning is extracurricular, it is accessed by privileged young people, but not by everyone. I had access to that internship with Gary Hart because my father knew him—it was an unpaid internship with no credit, [but] my parents were able to subsidize me. Young people of privilege get this extra learning before, during, and after their college years, [which] propels them ahead of other students who are from underrepresented backgrounds.