Alternative Education and the Future of Learning | Michael Strong

It is a pleasure to be back at U of M. I don't know how many times I was here while Giancarlo Ebrighen was president, but many times. And it is wonderful to see old friends and to meet new friends here. UFM is certainly one of my favorite universities in the entire world. I brag about UFM all the time, all over the world, for lots of reasons. In addition to the Socratic dialogue, I'm very big on Austrian economics, and you are the most Austrian university in the world. You know, the GMU Econ Department is not bad, but you're the only university that really does it. So Kudos to you. I guess you have some cousins in Spain now that sort of kind of— well, I should be generous, but they're your progeny. But I'm going to go over first my own journey, which is very idiosyncratic. Then I will go into my current program, which is even more unique, I think. And then I'm going to connect this to the 21st century learning and in particular, the movement towards alternative education in the US. Alternative education is booming in the US and in particular in Austin, where I'm based. I think it's— legitimate and not even controversial to say that Austin is the world headquarters of alternative education with lots of cool things going on quite beyond whatever I'm doing. So with that, I know many people lecture, and so I'm lecturing. I always have a bad conscience when I'm lecturing. So I'm going to juxtapose lecturing with the kind of self-directed learning, Socratic dialogue, creative and entrepreneurial projects that I do. And part of it is because the dominant model around the world is still predominantly not only lecture, and there's a place for lectures. Again, I'm lecturing right here. But when I was in high school, I had basically a Socratic class where we read and discussed philosophy. It was maybe 10, 12 students. We read Plato, Nietzsche, Martin Buber, and I loved it. And for me, it was one of those experiences— sometimes you see a film where it goes from black and white to color. And for me, it was like going from black and white, being lectured at, to bright color where my mind is stimulated and active. I discovered at that point St. John's College, which has campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe. It's known as a great books college because we read and discuss the classics of Western civilization, starting with pre-Socratics and coming up through James Joyce and Watson and Crick, the DNA. So we stop kind of mid-20th century. But beyond the great books, it is a school, a university where all classes are Socratic all the time. So there are Friday night lectures that are optional, but every class we We read Plato, we read Euclid, we read— we listen to Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, look at the score, whatever it is we're studying— French, Greek, science, math— we read and discuss ideas. And I love it. I describe it as after my wife, the great love of my life. And as a consequence, the rest of my life, I've created Socratic schools over and over again, as well as consulted around the world. While after I graduated from St. John's, I went to the University of Chicago. It's a side detour, but I went to prove the Chicago economists wrong. I discovered I didn't know any economics and I became a free market libertarian at Chicago. Later learned the deeper Austrian truth, but the Chicago people got me partway there. But while in Chicago, I started leading Socratic seminars in Chicago public schools and I would go into an inner city classroom, we'd read a story, I'd ask a question And the kids were on fire. Not always, I got lucky, but the first time I did it, the kids were on fire, and that sort of got me attached to this methodology. Then later, I went to Alaska where I trained teachers in Socratic dialogue. That's where I wrote my book, The Habit of Thought. After that, I went to San Antonio where I worked for a Montessori school and Socratized the Montessori school. I then created a school for highly gifted children in South Florida where we had incredible high-level mathematics, college-level mathematics in middle high school, and we did Socratic humanities. I then created Montessori middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area based on Socratic dialogue. I then created a charter high school in northern New Mexico that was ranked the 36th best public high school based on AP scores, and that was all Socratic. I then met John Mackey, founder and CEO of Whole Foods Market. He and I were both libertarians who believed in entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. He created the grocery store, I created a bunch of schools. So then we created FLOW, which was Freedom Lights Our World, a project to promote entrepreneurial solutions Solutions to World Problems. Eventually, I got back into education in the early aughts— not in the early aughts, around 2013, 2014. And in Austin, I created a school at that point, not only Socratic dialogue, but with much more by way of entrepreneurial and creative projects after spending a decade basically promoting entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. And then Higher Ground Education, the largest Montessori network in the US, hired me to create the Montessori high school model based on the Socratic entrepreneurial school I'd created in Austin. We had campuses at one point in Austin, San Francisco, New York, and St. Louis. And then when COVID hit in 2020, everyone was talking about how bad online learning was. It turns out Socratic dialogue works reasonably well on Zoom. So I created the Socratic Experience with 3 students in fall of 2020, and now we're at about 130 students, mostly US, 80%, but 20 students from around the world. So that's kind of background of how I got to this place. Do a quick version of the present program. We're now K through 12. Kind of amazing that we're doing young children, but we found a way to get Montessori going even with young children. It involves creating a little Montessori classroom in your home where you have little Montessori materials and our guides supervise the kids through the internet. But as it gets older, they do more Socratic. By the time they're in middle school, we have 2 to 4 hours of Socratic dialogue every day. They say 2 to 4 4 hours because the humanities is pretty much entirely Socratic. The math and science, sometimes we're actually doing math problems and experiments and activities other than Socratic. But we even have quite a lot of Socratic in STEM classes. And then in addition to those core classes, we support students in doing entrepreneurial and creative projects. And I want to do a little detour as to— some people think Socratic over here, entrepreneurial over here. I see the common element is thinking for yourself. Entrepreneurs think for themselves. They've got to figure things out all day, every day. You know, in Socratic dialogue, I don't tell you what to think. I ask you questions and you've got to figure it out on your own. For me, that's a lot like entrepreneurship, though of course entrepreneurs need to be doers and some intellectuals are just thinkers. So there is some discrepancy, but there's also some compatibility. But we have the students thinking for themselves in a really serious way from a young age. On the entrepreneurial and creative projects, just because I think here at U of M that's really relevant, We have a number of electives that are designed to cultivate entrepreneurial and creative skills, or skills that could be used or deployed in creative and entrepreneurial projects. So to give you a sense, we have a course on entrepreneurship, how to start a business. We have a course on finance. We have a creative writing course, both video production and video editing, because a lot of our students want to do video projects, digital media projects. We have a music elective. An art elective where they learn anime cartoon style drawing. We also have a digital marketing elective. And just a quick spin there, a lot of people understand that teenagers can code, and there's been a long tradition, 25, 30 years, of kids in Silicon Valley and elsewhere learning to code as teens, making money, doing really well. I think people don't appreciate digital marketing enough. I've got a student who at the age of 18 is going to make about $500,000 as a digital marketer. And one way to think about that is, you know, I'm old. I don't know. I'm not going to optimize the Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. For me, it's just like I put stuff out there and people look at it or they don't. For young people, it's a game. They know how to optimize the algorithm on each of the platforms, how to create creative, how to kind of make sure the algorithm makes their content pop, and constantly pursuing that in every cycle of improvement. Then finally, selling your skills. What I tell all my digital marketing students is every website, every business, every nonprofit wants more eyeballs on its site. So If you can bring eyeballs to people, you are gold. And so I have just a quick pitch in terms of teenage entrepreneurship, digital marketing. One anecdote, probably many of you know who MrBeast is. MrBeast hated school. At the age of 12, he started optimizing algorithms on YouTube. He's now worth more than $1 billion and has something like 200 million followers. And for a point of comparison, I think the New York Times has something like 12 million subscribers. So MrBeast is more than an order of magnitude bigger than the New York Times. So everybody who follows debates in the New York Times, the action is over there with the influencers and the gamers and that kind of thing. And by the way, the way my student got to make so much money is he would go to influencers who might have a million followers or 5 million followers, and he'd say, look, I can help you get from 5 million to 20 million or 1 million to 5 million or whatever it is. And then once you get to big numbers, then you are advertising gold. And right now, a lot of people who are trying to get eyeballs on their content go to influencers because they have such big audiences. And so that's sort of the way to go is gaming, of course, has more viewers than Hollywood. Influencers have just these massive audiences. And by the way, I do think the influencers are banal. When I see these influencer content, I have no idea why anybody would watch this stuff. Obviously, I'm not their audience. But people are watching this stuff. That's kind of a quick side thing on teenage entrepreneurial and creative projects. We emphasize a lot of the entrepreneurial via digital skills. We do have coders. I had a teenager who raised $1.1 million in venture capital as a 16-year-old. He had started coding on Minecraft when he was 8 and created a Minecraft mod company. And the Minecraft mod company got traction. And anybody who has traction can raise capital. I mean, it's not quite that easy, almost. If you've got double-digit monthly growth rates, people want to invest in you. So teenage entrepreneurship, big thing. And one of the reasons I mentioned that as kind of part of our program, both because it's distinctive, but also that leads to my third thing, alternative education in the United States. So I've been at this for 35 years. So I've been thinking when I got into education late 1980s, it was about to change. Well, I was wrong because it didn't really change in the 1990s, didn't really change until the aughts, It didn't really change in 2010s, but I think it is about to change. And a couple of things happened. One is COVID. So COVID had, at least in the US, millions of parents looking through the web and seeing the banality of what the kids were getting at regular schools. So for instance, homeschooling is up an estimated 5x since COVID And I've seen estimates that homeschooling may grow another, another 5x by 2030. And by homeschooling, it doesn't mean mom in the kitchen with her blackboard board. Homeschooling now is this catch-all category that includes virtual schools such as ours. Probably a third of our families are homeschoolers. It includes micro schools. During COVID you had these learning pods where parents would get together. How do we educate our kids? 2 or 3, 4, 5, 6 families. And then you go from homeschooling to learning pods to all of a sudden micro schools where now there are a number of turnkey programs. You can have a micro school in your living room or kitchens. Lots of moms and lots of teachers are turning to Prinda is one, Primer is another, where they just start a microschool. The software makes it easy, relatively easy, and you've got the families. And so now we've got homeschool, learning pod, virtual school, hybrid school, and the microschools. And of course, in some ways, many Montessori schools have been microschools for a long time. More recently, Acton Academy, Jeff Sandefer. He has your Acton MBA program, is a legacy of Jeff Sandefer. But there are several hundred Acton Academies around the world. They're kind of one of the earliest microschool models. One of the Acton Academies in Austin then spun off into something called Alpha. Just to check, how many people here have heard of Alpha School? Wow. So this is interesting. And it's been getting a lot of media recently. So somebody, a man named Goetz created— Brian Goetz, Brian Hotz created Alpha School. And Jeff Sanderfer is not big into quantifying outcomes. But Brian said we should quantify. We've got all these apps, math apps, language arts apps. Let's go ahead and quantify the kids' learning. And then a man named Joe Lemont, who's a billionaire, an Austin tech billionaire, he made his money in the 1990s with online. He was kind of optimizing virtual workers, you know, kind of keystroke analysis of when virtual workers are being productive or not. So Joe Lemont And he's gotten a lot of media. You can look up Alpha School, many articles. But he said he's going to spend $1 billion to develop Alpha, and that's not enough. It'll be more than $1 billion. So finally, as for somebody who's been in this movement a long time, we've got somebody with really deep pockets, really committed to it. And one of the things they're famous for— and this is a digression, but a relevant digression— is 2-hour learning. They're now rebranding it as Time Back, where they claim And I'll— I have a little bit of nuance there, but that they claim that by learning for just 2 hours a day on these apps, the kids can place in the top 2% nationally. And of course, that's a pretty good sales pitch. And the rest of the day— that's the reason they call it Time Back— is the rest of the day they do personal skills, life skills. They've got a number of different variations of Alpha. They've got one that's a sports academy where the kids learn online for 2 hours on the apps and the rest of the day they're in athletics, sports, basketball, whatever. They've got another esports academy where they learn for 2 hours a day on the apps and then they do esports the rest of the day. They've got a gifted and talented program where they learn for 2 hours a day and then do high-level academics the rest of the day. They've got a Montessori school where instead of traditional Montessori materials, they learn using these apps for 2 hours a day and then Montessori the rest of the day. So their goal is to conquer the world with Joe Lamont's billion dollars and this claim that they in 2 hours can placed in the top 2% nationally. And I just say a little nuance there. I do think there's some self-selection. They have a pilot program working with Elon Musk's Brownsville campus in South Texas that includes low socioeconomic students. They're claiming pretty good results there, but I don't know that they can claim top 2%. But it's shaking up the education world because certainly government education in the US is so bad. The notion that you could have kids learning via 2 hours a day and out performing everybody else is sufficiently shocking. One of the things that's interesting, they talk about AI if you follow them on Instagram, and I would encourage you to follow Alpha School on Instagram, super active account. Again, with money you can produce lots of content. Is while they use AI, it's not so much as an AI tutor. Most of what they use AI for is to ensure engagement. Because for many of us who are educators, if kids are engaged, they're more likely to be learning than if they're not engaged. Hello, not pocket science. And yet, how do you keep kids engaged? Well, one of the pieces of software they use is Mathcademy. It's excellent math software. We use it as well, but it is hard for us to track, you know, 120 students in 100 different places. And Mathcademy kind of sort of tracks it, but their AI tracks exactly when and where the student's attention is going. And so their staff— they do have human staff— but the staff gets alert when kids are not not tracking adequately. And so they coach and mentor the kids to stay more focused in lots of different ways. And finally, the reason they call it time back is if the kids don't get their work done in 2 hours, then it might take 2 hours and 15 minutes, 3 hours, 3 and a half hours. Oh no. So if the rest of the kids are out there playing and having fun and you're still doing your math, maybe you want to learn to focus better to get your math done. And finally, perhaps most controversially, they use external incentives. So kids earn basically money that can be used for toys and snacks in order— when they do their— just math is the biggest leap they do that. At any rate, Alpha School is really interesting. So Austin is home to my work, Montessori schools, lots of different alternative schools, really rich homeschooling community, both with Christian homeschoolers and hippie homeschoolers and everybody interacting. Home of the Acton Academies with several campuses there, home of Alpha School, home of all these Alpha spinoffs. The reason I mention it too is I've been wondering again for decades why alternative education isn't winning. And a lot of it is in every society, most people follow elites. And so in most schools, most cities in the US, most elites would send their kids to the prestigious old private school. In Austin, there's something called St. Stephen's and it's the old Episcopal school. For generations, all the Austin elites would send their kids to St. Stephen's school. What's happening now is the tech elites in particular, the Austin entrepreneurs are no longer sending their kids to St. Stephen's or the old private schools. The tech elite in Austin, and we're talking the software developers, the entrepreneurs, the VCs, you know, the centimillionaires, the billionaires, almost all of them are doing homeschooling or microschooling or Alpha Academy or something, Acton Academies. They're basically— it's no longer cool among the tech elite to send your kids to the old prestigious private school. At this point in Austin, I know of 3 billionaires who are creating micro schools in their homes. And you think about it, you have all the money in the world and you want to give your kid a fantastic experience. Why send your kid to these schools? And especially both the public and the elite private are often woke. So you could give your kids the most amazing personalized education in your home with great teachers, where it's very self-paced, inquiry-based, independent thinking, independent learning, all the things I talk about, and doesn't have to be woke. What's not to like? So this is definitely a movement. And I would say in Austin at this point, almost everybody in the tech elite knows somebody else in the tech elite who's doing something different. So even if some of them are still at Westlake— is a wealthy, upscale suburban district in Austin— or some of them still send their kids to Westlake or to St. Stephen's. Everybody knows one of the people who's doing something. Elon famously did an alternative school for his kids a few years ago. Synthesis is a math software spinoff that came out of that. Elon is allegedly starting another alternative school near Austin, near his Tesla factory. So this is big time a movement. I'm going to do one more little piece of this. That involves me personally, and then I'm going to connect all of this to kind of AI and the future of education. And we go to Q&A is Socratic dialogue. About maybe 10 years ago, I had a friend who had been following my work, and he wanted me to work with his daughter doing Socratic dialogue. So I have a YouTube channel, Socratic Michael Strong. I've only got about 700 followers. Again, I'm not good at this game of optimizing algorithms. But I began recording Socratic dialogues almost weekly with Alana, is her name, starting at the age of 4. She just turned 13. Alana, at the age of 13, is taking Harvard CS50, Harvard's introduction to computer science. She is scoring in the top 1% on the verbal SAT nationally at the age of 13. She and I are reading The Odyssey together. In the Fitzpatrick translation and discussing it. And she's just as capable and confident as you will. To give proper credit, her dad also is a friend of Jocko Willink's and started taking her to a jiu-jitsu studio when she was about the same age. So she's also a national jiu-jitsu champion. So this little 13-year-old kid is absolutely amazing. But again, I think if you focus on developing initiative, strength, resilience, focus. I'm very big on focus. Then you can have extraordinary outcomes. As a consequence of these Socratic conversations with Lana, although my audience is small, I am working with the daughters of, or the children of several billionaires and centimillionaires because these people see, I want my kid to think for himself or herself. I want my kid to be active. And even if Alpha Academy can kind of optimized focus on gamified math. Beyond the optimized focus on gamified math, these people realize that especially in an age of AI, we want kids who are high agency. And I'll point to high agency in two ways. On the one hand, high agency in terms of take initiative, get things done. The people who feel empowered to do whatever are the people for whom AI is a superpower. If you are the kind of person who takes initiative, creates new projects, thinks of new projects, is talking with other people with new projects, and you know how to use AI, it can do amazing work for you very quickly. Quick side anecdote there. I also have a student who at the age of 13, his dad was into real estate. He'd buy tax delinquent properties and then fix them up and sell them. His son Emilio initially was helping his dad identify tax delinquent properties. Properties with a team of 12 virtual assistants. But last year, he fired his 12 virtual assistants and created an AI agent to go and identify these tax delinquent properties. So he's probably at the age of now 14, probably going to make about $200,000 because he gets part of the upside when his dad sells these properties. So again, you're highly agentic. AI is a superpower for you. On the other side of that, though, Well, let me do intellectual agency. So that's taking initiative. But also intellectual agency, the whole Socratic is, I want you to think for yourself. I want my students to think for themselves. I want them to be coming up with ideas. So if you're the kind of person who is both agentic in terms of doing things, but also agentic in terms of thinking for yourself, the world looks super bright for you. On the other hand, as I often tell people, tech companies are spending billions, probably trillions of dollars to get us addicted to screens. I had a conversation at my school with a a classroom of 9-year-olds and I ask them, how do you know when you're being manipulated? And at the age of 9, most of them realize all the time. Every time you go online, you're being manipulated. Not only every ad, every social media feed, but even the ad for the Nature Conservancy or the World Wildlife Fund, even if it's asking you to do something good, it's manipulative. And so everything online is trying to manipulate you somehow. So if you are the kind of person who is not agentic, if you don't take initiative, if you don't have a confident self, if you don't have a sense of purpose in life, if you don't chart your own direction, if you're not capable of thinking for yourself, then my concern is the algorithms and the money behind the algorithms are going to kind of eat your soul alive. So to go into the dystopia, we may have a future where there is one population of people who are just addicted to that technology, a little bit like The Matrix, kind of plugged in and the machines are sucking the spirit out of them. And we've got other people who are highly agentic, going out and doing things, making things happen, building relationships, being on teams, the kind of person you would recruit to your team, the kind of person who is interesting and fun to have around. And those people are going to have an amazing future. They have an amazing present right now. And for this reason, I'm very passionate about continuing to campaign for high-agency education. I would describe Acton Alpha, Montessori, The Socratic Experience, Primer, Prinda, all of these programs as high-agency personalized learning. But the high agency is essential. So since I get to lecture you, which I don't normally do, my moralizing message is support those and you love and hopefully everyone in society in getting a high-agency education and try to rescue as many as possible from becoming passive droids where the spirit is sucked out of them through technology. So with that, I'll pause and let you go for questions.

Hi, Michael. Thank you so much.

Welcome.

One of my questions— or my question is, what are some great exercises that you use for focus? You said that focus is very important. What are some very practical things that besides, you know, meditation, I think that's one, but something that's not isolated, maybe that's with other people, or what are some exercises that you would recommend?

No, a great question. Of course, meditation, yoga, that kind of thing for that kind of focus. But actually, I think one of the unexpected things for me is I use Socratic dialogue with young children to extend intellectual focus. And one way to think about it, you know, I love working with little children, but for those of you who either have or work with little children, sometimes their consciousness initially is a little bit like popcorn. Like, I had macaroni and cheese for breakfast and my dog is sick and my— you know, just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom all over the place. And I think in the absence and, you know, the internet, if they're just bouncing around on screens, that does not help focus. But one of the reasons I'm able to work with young children and again, starting at 4, occasionally 3, is I help them stay on one track. So give you one example of a conversation I had with a 4-year-old. I asked her, what's the difference between a plane and a bird? And well, a bird has feathers. OK, so if we put feathers on a plane, does that make it a new bird? And she has to pause and think, no. OK, why not? Well, it doesn't flap its wings. OK, so we make a plane, we put feathers on the wings and make it flap. No. 'No.' And what I'm doing is instead of— and occasionally she would kind of go off in a different direction and 'I had a bird once.' 'Great.' And then I return back to the question, but very gently and warmly. One metaphor I like is when you're going to build a bridge, often people who start to build a bridge start by just shooting an arrow with a tiny thread across the chasm and then slightly thicker thread and a slightly thicker thread and eventually get to rope and eventually a cable and eventually have cables that are strong enough to build a bridge on. And I look at developing focus and concentration that way with young child is I get them to focus for instead of 30 seconds, a minute, instead of a minute, 2 minutes, instead of 2 minutes, 4 minutes, 5 minutes. If I can get a 4-year-old to focus for 5 minutes, whoa, I'm going. But then that's how at the age of 13 she can do Harvard CS50, which requires incredible intellectual focus is because I get her up to 10, 15 minutes of intellectual focus at the age of 4 or 5. And then, yeah, now it's natural. I could probably have 2, 3, 4-hour conversation with her. So I— and going back to your thing of human to human, we're such social creatures. You know, I love the phrase that attention is love. And for a child, giving them attention— wow. One of the titles of my YouTube channel is I love your child's mind. The reason I talk about it that way is some parents give attention to their child's athleticism or personal appearance or manners, whatever. Lots of things you can give your child attention for, but I like to give attention to a child or an adult's mind and what they're thinking, how they're thinking. And children feel it. And so if you stay focused on their ideas, why they believe that, what the rationale is, again, in a warm, gentle, friendly way, that because they crave the attention, that allows them to extend the focus. And that's how I get young children having extremely long focus over a number of years. Great question. Thanks.

Thank you. And just expanding on that, and I have heard this from you and also from Barbara Oakley before, the role of silence. I mean, just these spaces of being silent, which are very important also to focus and to be go deeper because we sometimes are running so much that we push too much. And sometimes just being silent is part of the process.

Huge. Just briefly on that, Montessori has an independent work period baked into a Montessori program. And typically, even with young children, it's 2.5 to 3 hours where it's typically silent focus for 2.5 hours for young children. And conversely, there's a famous new educational program in Houston where the teachers are required to interrupt students every 4 minutes. And it has produced test score gains. But as a parent or as an educator, I would never want my child in a program where you had to interrupt their attention every 4 minutes. Long-term silent extended focus.

Yeah. Thank you so much. That's awesome. We remember you. There's a link. So we have a couple of questions here. I want to read the one from Luis Ayala. He's a graduate from U of M, and he has also worked with us in the past. And from some years he's been in school. Younger kids. What attributes do you think are valuable for an educator to foster agency?

A great question. So first, one of the tricky things is the traditional educators is often you're put in a role where you're supposed to be teaching. Again, I see this as a paradigm shift. So in traditional education, you're supposed to be controlling the child's attention all the You get up, you lecture, you give a test. In this Houston case, you have to check for understanding every 4 minutes. If their attention is always controlled, there's no opportunity for agency. And so I think with all these personalized high-agency programs, there's some freedom. And a certain— in a certain way, you need to allow the child the freedom to explore and think and to be wrong. And then you can still coach and mentor them. It doesn't mean that you need to just let them do whatever. But often I and Maria Montessori— Maria Montessori said the greatest sign of success as an educator is the child is acting as if I'm doing— is doing work as if I wasn't there. And so, you know, in a classroom, often I'll observe and maybe intervene if a child is somehow getting frustrated or goofing off or something like that and gently guide them back. But I want to build on their agency. I want to kind of coach and support their agency. Rather than controlling their attention from top down, because I see that as preventing agency.

That's amazing. So I keep reading some of these questions, but please, anyone that would like to— yeah, Adriana. You mentioned the mindset that a kid has while doing this education.

My question is, which might be the mindset of a parent, grandparent, aunt to actually create someone that is a great thinker? Well, great question. I think, first of all, believing in the ability of a child to do things. And, you know, there are a whole constellation of adjacent issues here, but I'm a big fan of the free-range children movement where you give kids freedom to go out and do things and skin their knees. And, you know, Lenore Skenazy is part of that. But I kind of for shock value, not that we would do this, but for shock value, I like to mention a pair of brothers Their name's escaping me. But in 1910, they rode on horseback alone at the age of 6 and age of 10 from Oklahoma to New York. I lost it. But anyway, you think about that. And now parents in the US are sometimes arrested when their kid goes down the corner to buy chewing gum or whatever. And so I think a lot of this is believing in the capacity of a child. There's another case where— There was a kid in Utah where his father was disabled and he was super high agency. So at the age of 5, he was buying rabbits and selling rabbits and making money. I think he bought his first car at the age of 8. He bought his first ranch at the age of 10 or 11. And so he's just extraordinarily high agency. And so back in the day, Ben Franklin, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, all these people started working professionally at the age of 12 or 13. I'm very big on how modernity, certainly in the US, infantilizes kids. Now you get kids in college and their parents call to negotiate the grades with the professors. It's insane. So I think very much have this vision of your child as a capable human being. In indigenous societies, kids would be helping, cooking and working, and they'd be play hunting at 4, 5, 6, 7. So think of them as young human beings. Where your job is to help them develop into capable young human beings. And just agency all the way in every possible way.

Thank you. Great, great answer. So we have here other very good questions. How do we have conversations outside of the bias of our own minds or ideas?

Really great question. So a lot of this is— you gave a talk last night on asking questions, and one of the things I I think about is just looking for juxtapositions of things that are not necessarily obvious. You want kids to be problem-solving. So an example is, you know, even with young children, they might look in a mirror and what's going on in the mirror? You know, dogs and other animals sometimes do that. Or, you know, a straw in a glass— why is the straw bent in a glass? So I think if in terms of our biases, if you're talking, say, moral political beliefs. Maybe you're going to be all your biases all the time. Maybe not, but some of us are. But I think for just— let's look for inconsistencies, incongruities, begin to notice things that, huh, how can that make sense? And one way I do it with young children is I'm just curious as to how they make sense of the world. How do they think a car works? Let's find out. How do they think friendship works? What do they think rules— what kind of rules are fair with their peers? What kind of punishments are fair? I want to get inside that kid's head and see what does the world look like from a 4-year-old or 5-year-old, 6-year-old. And as a consequence, because I'm honestly curious about how are they making sense of the world, I'm not injecting my opinions, just like, wow, that's interesting. I would have never thought of that. Strange little example. At one point, I had a Socratic reading for a first grade class with 4 sentences. One says, my name is myself. My body is myself, my mind is myself, and my soul is myself. And ask the kids, which is most true? And they're all over the place, mostly name, and then no body, and some mind, and some soul. And at one point I was getting stuck. They were all on body. And I said, what part of yourself— is there any part of yourself that might not be a body? And a girl said, my earring hole. I'd never thought of her earring hole as part of herself. That, you know, kids have their own thoughts.

Definitely. Anything? Yeah, okay, cool. I will alternate. Yeah. Oh, perfect. Good evening. I think one of the hardest things for educators to do sometimes in the classroom is to come up with these questions. Everywhere in America, here, over there, it's a big thing. And it sounds like what you're saying is that the foundation of Socratic and focus is questions. What advice would you give educators to use tomorrow to create the sort of higher-order thinking questions to pose to their students?

Great question. First, I'll do, um, the old-fashioned way you used to do it, and I'll do the modern way. So I used to, when I hold training, sometimes we would have— I can generate questions on the fly endlessly because I've been doing this for 35 years. So for instance, if I read any paragraph of dense text, often I'll give teachers I'm training a paragraph of Kant or Lincoln or Plato or whatever and say, generate 3 discussable questions on a paragraph. And then, okay, that's hard. Now 5. No, now 10. Now 20 discussable questions on one paragraph. And for most people, it's pretty hard. But then I realized this is actually something that AI is really good at. So I've tried GPT, come up with 20 discussable questions on this paragraph. Voilà. And maybe 2 of them were garbage, but 18 pretty good ones. Or going in a different direction, projects. I've been talking about creative projects for young kids. And so I was talking to one of the wealthy people I consult for and say, I started to come up with projects for 5-year-olds. I realized this is a job for GPT. So I have to come up with a cool competition every week for 6-year-olds. And again, maybe out of 20, 2 are garbage, but I would say this is— AI is really great at it. And I'm actually in the process of building an AI wrapper for all the Socratic and entrepreneurial work I do because this is something that AI should make easy for all of us. So stay tuned. If you want to work on it, if you want to test drive it, in 6 months I should have an AI wrapper for you.

There is a question that is interesting regarding homeschooling. It says, yes, I mean, homeschooling has all these great advantages, but how you give students community and sense of belonging?

Oh, great question. So some of this is critical mass. So, you know, I'll use examples from the US because I know US geography, but if you're in the middle of nowhere Nebraska, maybe it is a little bit lonely. On the other hand, this is where Austin has had a rich rich homeschooling community for 30 years. And in Austin, there are constantly social groups, and there's a math group and a tai chi group and all these things. And as you get a critical mass, this goes back to even learning pods where during COVID we'd have people get 4 or 5 neighbors on their blocks. And a learning pod is basically homeschooling with a bunch of neighbors and sometimes different mom's house every day. So moms share the And this sort of thing is booming in the US. I would say, depending on where you are, it might be lonely, but talk a couple of like-minded parents into it and it makes it much easier. And it used to be that starting a school was a big deal. Now I see a continuum between homeschooling all alone, homeschooling with your neighbor, creating learning pods, creating a microschool, and it often happens organically. I know literally a number of— and usually it's moms— a number of moms who started homeschooling And then their neighbor or aunt or cousin said, hey, would you please take my kid as well? And kind of spontaneously, it started to grow into these little schools. And there are turnkey software to make it happen now.

I have a couple regarding agency. So there are like two related questions. One that says, how do you improve agency? And what attributes do you think teachers may have or are valuable for educators to foster agency? Agency?

Great question. So I'm going to go kind of on the— I've talked a lot about agency in different ways. I'm going to go now to a well-known book, James Clear, um, The Atomic Habits. And the reason I mention it is, uh, with everything we do, any kind of self-improvement, really at bottom it's a matter of changing habits. So, you know, William James, 19th century author, talked about how really we're just this bundle of habits. You know, consciousness is very expensive cognitively. We only have a very limited amount of conscious thought any day. Most of what we do, I'll be mean, is almost robotic. Sometimes you find you went to the fridge to get something and you didn't even notice you went to the fridge to get it. Or you're driving, like, next thing you know you're there because you weren't even paying attention. We're just a bundle of habits. So with a very limited amount of consciousness you have, or energy to focus on new initiatives, Incentives. Think about where you want to build agency. If you're writing, do you need to give yourself a certain kind of environment in which to write? Do you need to have certain restrictions on distractions when you're writing? Whatever it is, part of what James Clear does really well is he makes— the reason he calls it Atomic Habits, in many ways it's these tiny steps kind of structuring your environment, your ecosystem, how you do things, incentives. so that you're not trying— in some ways it's almost saying effort and willpower won't get us very far. And so you want to orchestrate your life so you don't need so much effort or willpower to make a big difference over time. And one of the things he talks about is 1% change a day is an immense change over the course of a year. So just orchestrate your life, you just make a little bit more agency initiative on what you care about every day.

Any recommendations on the space? I mean, talking when you are trying to generate this Socratic dialogue, are there some specific characteristics that you need in the place you do this?

So just very basically, I love to have a room. You know, we've had great rooms here at U of M where room was, say, 10 to 15. I like groups of 10 to 15 and of course facing each other. Everybody should be facing each other. It should be quiet with no distractions. Hello, no phones, no phones on, ideally a pleasant space. So in some ways, focus and presence are such obvious preconditions, but everybody should be focused. It's not exactly a space thing, but eye contact. I make it clear when I'm working with students, excuse me, when we're talking to each other, we should have eye contact. No side conversations, one person speaks at a time. And so just think about the most basic preconditions for having a civilized conversation and make sure you have this clear environment. Everybody's focused, looking at each other, sitting upright, eye contact, one person at a time. Very basic.

Awesome. Great. Do we have someone else? Okay, please. Tracy Berry.

My mic is there.

If I see correctly, because I have a light in front of me, but yes. Tracy Berry. Hi, good afternoon. I was wondering if you could speak to your strategies for generating intrinsic motivation within this framework.

Really, really great question. First, there are these kind of pop books that are actually pretty good. So Dan Pink, maybe 25 years of years ago wrote a book called Drive, and he talks about the importance of autonomy, competency, and motivation as preconditions for intrinsic motivation. And so autonomy— you got to give kids, people space. If there's no freedom to make some kind of decision, they're probably not going to feel very motivated. Again, if you're— their time and attention is too completely controlled. Competence is important because is if we feel incompetent, you know, the zone of proximal development, if you feel incompetent, you're not motivated, or if it's too easy, you're not going to feel motivated. So ideally, and this is where things like in the math, self-paced math apps help because everybody can be in their zone of proximal development. Then he says purpose, you have to have a reason for doing things. So Alpha School has the external incentives, which is the opposite of what you're talking about. If you have a purpose of of you want to be healthy, then you go to the gym and work out and so forth. One place where I think he got it a little bit wrong is instead of— I love purpose, but okay, now as an educator, what do I do to give them purpose? Um, there's the literature on self-determination theory talks about relatedness, and the way I think about this is relationships are everything, you know, especially with young people, with adults too. We're humans, and so often if If you have a mentor and/or peers who are doing the thing, of course kids will do what their peers want to do. But as a mentor too, if I am engaged in a relationship with a kid and they know I care about them and they know I want what's best for them and they know I have some relevant expertise, often the relationship will carry the motivation. One thing about the Socratic dialogue I would say is because we're having conversations often about meaning and purpose, there is relationship baked into the activity. And so I would say the autonomy, relatively easy, but when things go wrong, it's often because you don't have either the purpose or relationship. Again, if purpose just happens, that's great, but I would look for ways to use relationships to leverage kind of the intrinsic desire for respect, approval, socialization. No, I'm sure some kids— I get kids motivated just because they want to hang out with me. And so the other part of it is, you know, be an interesting person so the kid wants to hang out with you. But if you have the right— I spend a lot of time looking for the right structure for relationships. So one other thing with that is peer culture. If I'm in a classroom, and especially in high schools where the cool kids don't like the activity, I know in order for this to work, I have to win over the cool kids. So just to do stereotypes, in the U.S., if the football player and the cheerleader are not on my side, I work to get the full ball player and the cheerleader on my side. And then once I get them on my side, then I can get everybody else going. So I'm not above, as it were, playing relationship and status games to move things in the right direction.

Really interesting. I have a couple of— one very specific one that is related with how would you use, in a very specific example, the Socratic method to motivate students be interested in reading or in reading a book, like a specific book?

Good question. So first, human, again, human relationships— I'm going to be a broken record— are the easiest things. And so one way that I use in the classroom, or even one-on-one, is once I've got a child engaged in intellectual dialogue, once we're having a conversation, they love the conversation, then I might, you know, even just to a quotation, hey, What do these words mean on this page? Machiavelli says it's better to be feared than to be loved. And even down, I can imagine a 10-year-old. Should you be feared or loved? Would you rather you feared me or loved me? All sorts of things like that. And then I'm constantly connecting the conversation, which they're spontaneously interested in, with the words on the page. And when I want to get them to read, say, a longer story or essay, initially they might take a famous author and think, This is boring. But we spend time with the first paragraph or two where I get them involved in justice or truth. I talk about humanistic universals— truth, love, justice, betrayal. Every human being cares about those sort of things. I can go into any classroom anywhere and say, do you care if your best friend betrays you? Everybody cares if their best friend betrays them. And then obviously, you've got a story where that's part of the scene. Hey, do you think it was okay that this dude You betrayed that person. You know, passion all over the place. So connect in conversation, connect it to universal human universals, and then get it deeper and deeper in it.

Interesting. I mean, I've heard a teacher that says, every time I start reading a new book, I show just the front page to everybody. And then we have a discussion. What do you think this book going to be about? And just that conversation engages lots of them to get into the reading. Interesting. Maybe it won't work for the college students because the front page is not that exciting as for little kids. Another great question is related of the combination between Socratic method and other methods. And I think you mentioned some of this yesterday, that there are some things that are not done or cannot be taught through Socratic method. And some of them need to be lectured. So what would you think would be good advice to know which is the balance or great combination?

This is a huge complex topic that I can't do justice to briefly, but I would say if there's something you want to transmit didactically, be didactic. Tell the kids the thing and don't try to manipulate them into thinking about the thing. And so one way to think about this is as you think of your curriculum, think, okay, what is the didactic part I cannot let go of, or they really need to know, or we can't even have a conversation. Versus, I think of Socratic teaching as ultimately conceptual, and so it's a form of concept teaching. Any kind of concept, the way I think of concept teaching is example, example, example, counterexample, and then cool edge cases. So table, table, table, not table, is this a table or not? Dog, dog, dog, not dog, is this a dog or not? Justice, justice, justice, injustice, is this justice or not? And so think of your curriculum as what are all the concepts that you would really love to have them intellectually engaged in? And then alongside of that, what is the didactic content you need to cover it? So to give an example, I worked with a teacher who'd been teaching the French Revolution for 17 years, and the kids are bored silly, they don't listen to it. And so I suggested spending a week talking about Rousseau and inequality. And after having conversations about inequality for Oh, wow. Now I see why these people are killing each other. It sort of motivated the thing so that then they got into, man, I can see why this is so ugly and bloody. So French Revolution can be interesting once you care about inequality and justice and things like that.

Thank you. Great. Well, another interesting thing is this relationship that you do between entrepreneurial thinking, to say it in a way, and Socratic dialogue. We know that in the world now we have a lot of presence of the relevance of entrepreneurial action, which I really believe it's very important. So how you make that easy connection that you very briefly explained it in the 30 minutes?

Yeah, so again, I think the difference, and I'll go to the connection, is, you know, the Socratic is thinking, the entrepreneurship is doing. But with any sort of project, there is a period of thinking, of brainstorming, of developing the idea. And then once you start to work with colleagues discussing the idea— in every business, often people do think of Socratic as this thing that intellectuals do at universities. But in every startup, well, I think we should do this strategy. No, no, this strategy. This is why this strategy. No, that strategy is terrible. There's people are thinking and talking about ideas all all over the place. And in order to get things done, we need to be really good at advocating for our ideas, listening to other people's ideas, coming up with good reasons for our ideas, listening to the other person's good reasons for their ideas, coming up with new ideas based on, you know, your ideas, my ideas, we disagree, oh, how about this set of ideas? So I'm very interested in dialogue as a way in which human beings naturally learn together, and learn together need not be scholarly. It could be, what's the best market strategy or go-to-market strategy, product-market fit or whatever, so that we can improve the thing.

It's like to learn how to build on the ideas of others. And that's part of the collaboration. Please. Thank you. Hi, I have a two-part question. The first one is just out of curiosity. So what are these children and these teenagers or their families who are choosing this type of education, what does the future look like for them? Like, do they want to get into college? Are they looking to get a career somewhere? Or, or what's to become of them? And then part 2 of the question is, because Guatemalan society is definitely not there yet, and people who, who study at private schools still expect to go to university, and you know, we, we're still part of that a very rigid system. So what would you suggest so that we can include Socratic discussion and make it look friendlier to the families who are believing still in our private school systems?

No, really, really good question. And I'll start with kind of the fun, easy part, and we can get to the harder Guatemala part. But first of all, with the fun, easy part, first, most of the parents that pick my school are themselves entrepreneurs or creative professionals, people who need to create value in their own lives. And they're not all fancy tech entrepreneurs. Some of them are, you know, real estate agents. You know, real estate agent needs to go out and hustle and sell and build relationships and get things done. You know, some of them have a creative ad agency, whatever. But I would say, certainly in the US, what I'm seeing is there is sort of an older system of jumping through hoops— what, how many credits, what's your credential, you know, get into college, all that. But there's a new generation generation that's just boom. And a lot of these super successful tech entrepreneurs frankly don't care if their kids get into university or not. They may. And even there, among some of the kids, I have a super bright kid. He transferred to our school from one of the best private schools in the US, very conventional achiever in that school. But then he said, no, I want to be an entrepreneur. So he came to our school at 16, and now his attitude is, I'm going to get into the best college I can. If my startup doesn't succeed as a then I'll go to the best college I can. And there, I'll keep working on my startup and basically use it as a mattress. So his idea is, yeah, if I have to, I'll get into Stanford and use it as a mattress. I've got another student, actually, the one who created the Minecraft mod company. He is at Stanford. I talked to him last year. And he said, they are terrible at coding there. And they're not very entrepreneurial. And he was considering dropping out of Stanford. You get these super high-agency kids and yeah, they're barely— even if they go to an elite university, they're barely with it. Kind of backing up a little bit to how we think of it. This US college admissions is probably different from here, although U of M might be a good candidate. In the US, my recipe for college admissions consists of great SAT scores. So the SAT does matter very much, but high-level reading on the verbal side. If we get them reading Plato and Aristotle, as teenagers, they're going to be great readers. Writing— I'm a big believer in writing. One thing I haven't talked about is the whole thing about Socratic dialogue. You generate ideas, you become a better writer, you're motivated to write, you know. So even in an age of AI— actually, because of AI, I believe real writing skills are going to become more valuable. So if our kids are thoughtful, articulate, score well on the SAT, write well, that's great for college admissions. In addition, I encourage them to do well on several college classes offer in our school Harvard CS50, Harvard's introduction to computer science. Yeah, I've had kids as young as 8th grade do that. And certainly, UFM would be happy to see your students passing a Harvard course as a teenager. And so there are ways to have this high agency thing and check the boxes on prestige. Then finally, with US universities, having impressive creative and entrepreneurial projects is itself a part of a strategy. So if you want to go to the University of California system, it's all grades and test scores. But any private university in the US cares about these other characteristics. And that's the way I align what we do as a school with what all the private universities want. They want achievers. Does Stanford want a kid who's already raised a million bucks as a teenager? Of course, they're looking for donors. It's not totally mercenary. No, really, they want donors. So let's get the kids who are going to be successful. As to Guatemala, again, I just mentioned UFM, Kajus. I know and love it. But my bet is if you create high-agency rock stars in school, UFM would love to have them. And I think that's why you're encouraging this. Yeah, because actually it is alignment. It is an alignment problem. If you guys feel as if you have to do very traditional to go to university, what are you going to do? But if you've got this fantastic university who wants high-agency kids, you guys should talk.

Definitely, we're open to talk all the time. We have one last question over here, and we will close with you. Thank you so much. It's— thank you so much. It's a great pleasure to be your audience, and I have a very short question. I'm a business teacher, and I'm wondering your recommendation to include or design business curriculum that depends on Socratic learning.

It's a great question. So again, huge range of possibilities on the business side. On one hand, there are things that are, um, you know, sometimes you need to do, you know, finance is probably the least Socratic part of business. You know, there are some kind of Socratic questions in this or that financial strategy, but finance, you need to make spreadsheets work and, you know, that kind of thing. On the other hand, the ideation phase of business, totally Socratic. There's a man named John Chisholm, I believe he's spoken at UFM. John Chisholm has book, Release Your Inner Company, and it's very much about the ideation phase of business. So I think it'd be fabulous to work through John Chisholm's book and discuss the ideas there. To go to an old classic, Peter Drucker's Innovation and Entrepreneurship. I've done that in, um, Socratically with students of all ages. Again, so much rich work there. A very different example, Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, an old classic. The language is very difficult for contemporary students, but when they get into it, wow, how inspiring. And so I would look more on the kind of ideation and attitude phase to really get students to go deep on that. They may have heard, oh, let me think of a business idea, or ChatGPT will give me a business idea. But I think you want to involve them in that. And then to go to the business model canvas, can also do some kind of, you know, you've got all those boxes in the business model canvas. How do we think about each of these? And so I would kind of go continuity from big ideation conversations to, you know, at the end of the day, execution. You got to do the thing, and that's probably the least democratic piece. Again, entrepreneurs have to do action. But in between the big ideation phase and say the business model canvas, let's think through each of these categories and let's play around with different ideas, and not just alone but in groups. What is the best go-to-market strategy? Let's think. And you need— the other thing is, like, you could use GPT as a lever. Maybe GPT GPT provides 5 go-to-market strategies. Again, I always think that we need a human layer with AI because AI still has partial garbage in it, and you want humans to make sure that you have the quality stuff and not the garbage piece. And what better way to do that than have an authentic dialogue with your friends about which of these ideas is good, which is stupid GPT garbage.

I would like to close with a couple of thoughts. One of the things you mentioned, these relevance of humanities and how the Socratic method, it's the best way to open up for discussion with our students. And I think sometimes we forget that in a world with a lot of new technologies and AI and everything, is more than important the capacity to understand, to think, to make good questions, to be analytic, and that is totally connected with humanities. And you said humanities Through Socratic method is the way. So I think there's a huge opportunity there. And just finishing with something I have heard before from you two, that is we have to be patient. As teachers, as educators, if we are going into the Socratic method, we have to be patient. Because maybe in the first 10 minutes you will cover these 10 topics that you have in your program, but they will take longer to discover them and to discuss them, and you want to go fast. So sometimes, I mean, the first change is to be patient and understand that this is gonna happen, but not maybe at the same time that if you just get up and explain all the words in front of them. And the question is, what are they going to remember more? Or how are they going to keep this in their soul and in their minds?