Alternative Education, Socratic Environments, and Creating Thriving Subcultures - Michael Strong

No, and that's the thing. Anybody who succeeds in real life, nobody goes back and looks at the report card. It doesn't matter. So yeah, all of that, that's the system demanding something. Uh, for me, at the end of the day, you know, I like the— I'm an intellectual. There's part of me that would like to force everybody to study that things that I think they should study. The fact is, if somebody is a healthy, happy, successful, good person, I don't care what they study.

Hello and welcome to the Hannah Frankman Podcast. I'm your host, and on today's episode, I'm talking to Michael Strong, who is perhaps the most experienced veteran of the alternative education movement. Michael has been working in alternative education for the past 3 and a half decades. He's done everything from building Socratic programs within public schools to launching charter schools, launching private schools, and most recently building an online Socratic school called The Socratic Experience. In this episode, Michael and I talk about the value of Socratic education and how to deliver a Socratic dialogue with your children. We talk about why public education is actually a public health crisis. We talk about building intentional subcultures and how creating subcultures is actually the answer to how to build educations for our children that will set them up to be happy and healthy and thriving. I've been so excited to have Michael on the podcast. I knew we were going to have a fantastic conversation, and we did. And I really hope you enjoy listening. Without any further ado, Michael Strong. So before we hit record, we already were going deep down a rabbit hole, and this, this needs to go on the podcast officially too. So we're talking about subcultures and the idea of subcultures in education, and I brought up that as a homeschooler, I feel like I sort of was part of a subculture. I am part of a subculture, but I don't even realize how separate from the normal paradigms of thinking and being and just pop culture at large that I don't realize how separated from it I am because it's just normal to me. And I've started documenting. Go ahead.

So one of the, you know, when I started leading Socratic seminars in public schools, initially they were all over the place. Some were good, some were bad. One of the first things that, uh, I had some colleagues in Alaska and we discovered there were 3 prerequisites. One was Students need to be able to interpret text, so there's textual analysis. The other was healthy social dynamic. But the third one, which I think is most immediately relevant to you, is taking ideas seriously. And I think you take ideas seriously so naturally. You know, when I say taking ideas seriously is part of a subculture, I think for you, what, doesn't everybody take ideas seriously? But it's actually weirdo subculture. And I think a lot of, you know, intellectuals by definition take ideas seriously. Fact is, most kids in most schools, and I would argue most people, don't really take ideas seriously. You know, they— there's, you know, in school there's, you know, what are my grades, there's what's going on at lunch, what's the party tonight, what's so-and-so wearing. You know, there's a lot of things they take seriously. Ideas, not so much. So simply taking ideas seriously, caring about what is true in some sense, is a bizarre subculture by the standards of American— standard American K-12.

Also taking curiosity seriously. I was thinking about this, this weekend. This is a very specific story that, that triggered this train of thought, but I was paddleboarding on, uh, Lady Bird Lake here in Austin on Saturday morning. And there's, you know, there's the main lake and then there's Barton Creek that you can paddleboard up and there's— it's, it's a little bit nicer. You can swim there. It's a little bit quieter. And as I was paddling, I noticed that there's all of these weeds under the water. I don't know what the proper term for lake weeds are, but there were all of these weeds and they were blooming and the flowers were underwater. And I was just marveling at this as I was paddleboarding, because I was thinking that I've never seen underwater flowers before. They're these little tiny white flowers. They were so beautiful against the green of the plants and the blue of the water. And afterwards I was thinking about it because I was marveling at it again after I put my paddleboard away and I was driving home. And I was thinking that I experienced such a sense of wonder around this because I added this new data point into my perception of how the world works and also the ecosystem of, of Central Texas at large. I didn't know this was a thing we had here. And it just occurred to me that I was paddleboarding with friends who were not homeschooled. And they were just kinda like, "Yeah, those are cool." And I was like, "No, you don't understand. This is amazing." And I realized that there's, you know, had I not been in a social setting, I probably would've sat there and just studied them for 20 or 30 minutes because I thought they were really interesting. And I feel like one of the things that happens when you're in school is you learn that curiosity is sort of a a phase to be completed and graduated from in the same way that— because you learn that learning is a thing to be completed. It's a checklist. It's a thing you learn all this data about how the world works, and then you're prepared and you're ready to go into the real world, and you're done learning about the real world because you're in it now. It's like you prepare for it and then you go enter it. And it didn't even occur to me until this weekend, and this is maybe not that big of an epiphany to an outside observer, but I feel like to me it set off this whole cascade of other realizations about the implications of what homeschooling did to my brain. That most people think that curiosity is sort of this childlike thing that you, you get so curious about all the things around you in the world and you're fascinated by how they work, and then you kind of have learned enough to operate in the world. And then once you know how to operate in the world, you don't have to be curious anymore because you understand enough to get by, so it's no longer a utilitarian thing to do, which is so sad to me because it's so infinitely useful to learn more about the world, but it's also fun.

So absolutely. And I want to add some nuance.

Yeah.

So just listening to you and knowing you, I expect your parents were curious people.

Very much so.

House full of books, right? And so part of this is where I get into subculture, including homes as a subculture. So I think one of the challenges of our movement we both care about, uh, homeschooling, unschooling, alternative ed, all of this, is that we need to do a better job of specifying where the value comes from. Because there are homeschooling families where probably the parents are killing the kids' curiosity.

Yes.

And so this is why I like to describe subcultures, distinctive subcultures, where curiosity is valued, taking ideas seriously is valued. You know, when you think about it, I, I would love to have a lot more anthropologists looking at different kinds of education because Right. I think there's kind of a normal curve of curiosity and school systematically squelches it such that as kids go up the grade in a standard schooling environment, their curiosity is systematically killed. And yet, you know, so homes, there's also, you know, I don't even know, probably not a normal curve. There are different homes, some homes and some families where curiosity is on fire. So my whole thought is as we have more of a market in education, Those who care about curiosity will be on steroids and will be able to send their kids. And this is very much what I'm doing in my school, Socratic Experience. You can send your kid to a school where, wow, curiosity is really validated. But there may also be parents and families who, you know, there's a religious dogma or a military discipline approach. And again, I think one of the things we need to think about is just so many different people. I used to joke that You know, Imelda Marcos had 4,000 pairs of shoes. You know, how can you need 4,000 pairs of shoes? But we need 4,000 different kinds of education. So, you know, you and I would send our kids, uh, to the curiosity place, and, uh, yeah, some people won't, and that's okay, you know.

What do you think— this is a very big question— when you think about education, to what extent do you think about absolutes or universal truths versus tailored specificities for an individual?

That's a really great question. So first, I think lifelong happiness and well-being, or more formally, eudaimonia. So for me, it's all about, uh, we have an obligation as parents and educators to help every child experience lifelong happiness and well-being. Of course, what's tricky is it's different for different people, and it's about that particular child, the cultural milieu in which they are, the job market they're going to face, you know, what skills are needed, what their niche might be. Um, you know, it's a super complex problem. I think what I can say with confidence is one-size-fits-all is a disaster. Just to speak to some students, probably 40% of our students at the Socratic Experience are creatives. Maybe 20% are entrepreneurs. And the entrepreneurs and creatives are really miserable and their needs are not served. And yet they're fabulous creative and entrepreneurial careers. So we're taking some of the most important talent in our society and not nurturing it in standard K-12 and university. So that's just one example. Actually, sales is another distinct thing. Sales is one of the most important things. When you think about jobs that AI will destroy, actually sales is probably going to stay for a long time. People love people. People love human-to-human interaction, and people are brilliant at making human connection. Wow. You know, how important is that? You know, yeah, the sales bots and so forth, but you know, I want to talk to a human. So I think we need to break it open and have lots of experiments. And what percentage in 30 years will still have, you know, 10th grade biology and, you know, 11th grade, you know, U.S. history? 5%? I don't know. But it's all irrelevant. Basically, when I think of it, I think there's so many different paths to happiness and well-being. I try to personalize education for every child and For 35 years, when you try to personalize, there's just no one right way. Such extremes. There's some kids that should do no math for 5 years, maybe no math ever, you know, maybe that's an exaggeration, or maybe minimal. But, you know, yeah, high school chemistry— what percentage really need high school chemistry? You know, maybe some STEM majors. So when you think about it, it's just like, yeah, radical variety.

Can you talk a little bit more about the point you just made about some kids not— like, should not do math. It's not that even that they don't necessarily need it, it's that they shouldn't do math for 5 years, or perhaps at all, because that's a very controversial take.

I know. So personally, I love math. For math kids, I want to do as much math as possible. 2 years, 2 years a year, 4 years of math. I want some kids doing, you know, differential equations in high school. So for the mathy kids, let's rock it. Conversely, I would deal with a lot of, um, say, creatives with learning differences, where their experience of math is they struggled as young as 3rd or 4th grade, and then it starts in regular schools, public and most private, it's remedial. So they have to grind through 3rd and 4th grade math again and again and again. I've met a number of them who are literally suicidal, and this is with fancy schools specializing on learning disabilities. I've met teachers who are, you know, PhDs in learning differences, and they're, I would say, painfully humiliating this kid by going over third grade math again in seventh grade. And I'm like, no, you know, you're brilliant at video production or animation. Let's just leave the math alone and let's help, help you make absolutely amazing videos or animations, whatever. And the kid— and I've again, multiple kids— went from suicidal to happy and well within a few months when they no longer were beat up for not doing math. And you know, with those creatives, once they are developing their genius, then at that point, might they need a little bit of math for finance? Fine. But if they're motivated, if they are a rockstar creator and by the way they want to, you know, manage their business, I am fully confident they'll learn the math they need to run a spreadsheet, which is pretty trivial, frankly. So right, the notion that every student needs math every year, I think kills a certain number of kids every year. And the ones it doesn't kill, it leaves them depressed and brutalized, emotionally damaged. So for me, the right thing to do is for each child, with some kids for whatever reason, or take a different reason, maybe their mother died. Maybe when your mother dies, you maybe shouldn't be trying to do math that year. You know, there are all sorts of things where once we take off the teacher lens, the, oh, we have to be responsible educators lens, then all of a sudden, you barbarians, you're killing kids. Why are you killing kids like this? Well, the state told us to. You know, I'm going— but you know, you get it.

Yeah, I find it very interesting to get sort of a societal temperature check via Twitter because I talk about a lot of this, these things on Twitter. And you and I are very aligned on this point. I very much agree that you shouldn't force kids to learn something until they're ready for it and they need it. And if they're 30 years old and they're starting a business for the first time and now they have to learn how to do, like you said, spreadsheet math, they're probably going to learn it better in a couple of afternoons figuring out how to manage the finances of a business that they care very much about than they would have learned as a 13-year-old in a classroom bored out of their minds with no sense at all of how this is ever going to be relevant to them. But I get a lot of flak on the internet for saying these things. And I find it very interesting that a lot of parents also look at education through the teacher lens, not the parent lens, which feels very backwards to me because parents are the— like, they're supposed to be the ones looking at their child as an individual and defending their child's individuality and individual needs the teachers are the system, like the bad cop that they're going up against. They need to be the advocate for their child. And yet so many parents just sort of defer to the teacher paradigm of what their child should be learning, which is very standardized, very formulaic. And they default to that because I think, because they've somehow been convinced that they don't have enough expertise to trust their own eyes and ears and intuitions, but even something as simple as, as basic and as irrefutable as your eyes about where your child is and what they need. Parents, I don't think, trust themselves to go against the state-decreed standards that a child is supposed to be doing regardless of any circumstance whatsoever.

So big time. So one of my big, uh, I would say major roles when I talk to homeschool moms or moms in general is validating their sense. Is my child flourishing or not? You're exactly right. For me, the number one thing is my child flourishing. Not, you know, when the, they start, the light goes out of their eyes and so forth. Um, alarm bells and every, and I, you know, dads too, of course, but moms are like on the front lines of all of this. And I'm like, every mom should be, is my child flourishing? If not, we've got an issue. And Sadly, most moms feel as if, no, they— I've got to send them to school regardless. They've got to try and get good grades regardless. I have to force them to do homework regardless. And, you know, one, one metric in high school, Monday is during— I believe it's October, November, and January. The teen suicide rate is about double what it is in July. And so I see school as public health catastrophe. I think some of these suicides are due to bullying, but a lot of them are due to humiliation, feeling stupid, feeling like a failure. I've known kids like that. And you know, one of my examples is Mothers Against Drunk Driving. Once it became widely known that drunk driving killed kids, uh, Mothers Against Drunk Drive— drunk driving came out. I would like to see Mothers Against Brutalizing Schools, and I don't know what the name is, we can brand it. But yeah, moms should be like, no, it's unacceptable. One quick thing, a campaign I'm working on— Immersion Neuro is technology that measures, uh, psychological safety and emotional engagement and experiences via a wearable like a Fitbit or Apple Watch. Paul Zak, great neuroscientist, he created this. I'm working on a campaign so that parents measure their child's well-being, their psychological safety, and emotional engagement all day, every day in school. The way I think of it is right now it's a thing to, you know, have a video in your child's crib. You know, you don't want your child to die and suffocate in the crib. So, hey, maybe we have a video, see what's going on. Super common. But I want to have a wearable so when your kid is in the bathroom having the crap beat out of them, or when your kid is tuned out day after day after day, you know it, and all the alarm bells go off. And frankly, I think this will get the kind of education you and I want to win, win big time, because I think most education will be— will have physiological evidence it's destroying kids' lives. And then physiological evidence, agency-based warm communities are, you know, incredibly healthy. And just a data point on the depression, Zach has done research with elderly people where they can predict depression 2 days in advance because it starts with emotional withdrawal. So when people start emotionally withdrawing from human interactions, then they— that manifests as depression. And so you can imagine a kid at school, uh, did you ever— you do you ever go to school at all, public school?

I duly enrolled for one semester in high school, and I took one class because I wanted to know what it was like. It was terrible.

There we go. Yeah, imagine, imagine the kids doing this day after day. And right, parents— I, my kids went through all sorts of things. They Montessori, homeschool, in-school charter, my schools, all kinds of things. But right, we tried one great, allegedly great public school, and the kids were complaining about it. And after a few weeks, we went and saw the lunchroom, and yep, this is horrible. Pulled them out. And I think for a certain kind of sensitivity for parents or education, goes back to culture. If you have a culture where your child's flourishing matters, and it sounds bizarre to say it has to be a subculture where your child's flourishing matters, shouldn't that be every culture? But it shows how sick we are as a society. So I wanna create subcultures where a child's flourishing matters. And from that perspective, most school is offensive, damaging crap. And when we have physiological evidence of that and greater social norms, really a tipping point where all decent parents absolutely demand an environment where the child is happy and well all day.

It's also very strange to me that we've gotten to a place culturally where the societal norms override the deeply ingrained parenting instincts to say something is wrong with my child. This is not okay. Like, part of the reason that school, the school system has such a strong grip on us is because it's such an emotionally laden topic. Your, your children, the education of your children, the well-being of your children. You don't want to get that wrong. So of course you're going to default to the thing that is the safe path because it appears at first glance to be, to have the, the least risk of getting it wrong. But at the same time, the fact that we can be in a world where our kids are struggling so painfully and it's overriding the instinct of something's— my child isn't happy, something is wrong here, is kind of shocking to me that we're, we've gone so deep that parents are ignoring the fact that their children, and not on purpose, not intentionally, this isn't, I wouldn't, I'm not branding this as neglect by any means. I know my language might sound that way, but I have great empathy for the individuals enmeshed in this. But it's so strange to me that this is a thing that people aren't running away from. It seems so counterintuitive to me.

Well, there's a— I forget the source, it's— I've got it, um, somewhere. But there's one of the books on school choice cites a 19th century Dutch father saying when compulsory public education was being introduced to Holland that, you know, take my money, take my home, take anything, but don't take my children. And you can imagine, you know, and at the time it was considered a violation, a ripping of children away from the home, and people were horrified. And yeah, that sort of sense of the horrors. Again, if you want to send your children away, fine, but I, going back to I think there used to be a sense of family and intimacy and, you know, this is what we— who we are, what we stand for, what we care about. And yeah, we've had now 150 years of the state doing this, and people now take it for granted as normal. And, uh, and even some people feel an obligation to send their kids to state schools, um, you know. And going back, I, I think there is an analogy with Soviet Union, you know. A lot of people after the fall of Soviet Union had a very hard time, and there was nostalgia for, especially among older people, for the structure of the Soviet Union. And so I think freedom is difficult, and especially when you've been trained not to have freedom. Uh, so we're, we're in a cultural moment. I see all of this as, again, um, the Liberation of Education conference, the work you do, the work I do, all these networks of alternative educators, all these people saying there's a different world out there. We need a lot of people thinking, talking, normalizing different ways of thinking about education. Again, at some point, tipping point, and nobody looks back.

And that's another thing to go back to the homeschooling point. That's another thing that is a, a just such a fundamental difference in the, the foundational bedrock of my paradigm compared to that, that it's taken me a while to fully realize that. When I look at the public education system, it seems— it's like The Matrix. It's like once, once you've taken the red pill and you see— this is such an overused internet meme, but it's overused for a reason. It's a good analogy. You, you see things for what they are, and it's just so strange to you that no one else can see it. Like, to me, the public education system is just such a strange, antiquated, arguably detrimental at best, arguably outright evil at times institution. And it's so strange to me that people don't see that.

No, totally. And a couple of things. One is, um, you know, first of all, I think the system survives because there are some people who like public education.

Totally.

And I think there's a self-selection mechanism where The people who go on into education policy, into teachers and ed professors, it's self-selected group for people, of people for whom school worked. And their experience was, oh, I went to this fun, interesting class and I had these fun, interesting friends and I had sports and it was this fun, exciting. And that is the experience. That is the experience for a lot of people. It might be a third, it might be a quarter. So it's something like that. We'll call it a quarter. And those people then, you know, establish the norms. And then the people who— first of all, a lot of the people for whom it did not work, some of them die, some of them go to prison, some of them are anxious, depressed, suicidal, some of them, you know, lots of things. Some of them go on to be creators and entrepreneurs and never look back, hate it, but never look back. And so there's not kind of an aggregated place for people who reject the system. There's, there are these different social realities. The other thing is, um, I always encourage people who think it's okay to imagine sitting through it as an adult. And, you know, I, I'm one of these people who, when I work, first of all, I work from home. I lie down on the couch when I work. I have 50 tabs open. You know, I get up and go for a walk whenever I want. The thought of sitting in a classroom for 6 hours a day absolutely drives me crazy. They— I'm sure I would be you know, described as ADHD, given lots of medication and so forth. I'm very sympathetic to the kids who were disruptive, uh, you know, obsessive, you know, all sorts of things. And so I think a lot of this is those of us who rejected it are not united in the ways that those— the establishment— and it is, that's a locked-in establishment. It's, you know, all the K-12 teachers, most families have a teacher in their family, You know, in many rural districts, the school— public school is the largest employer. Then, yeah, education professors— all education departments in the U.S. are pro-public school. There's a tiny unit at the University of Arkansas that's pro-school choice. They're a little bit isolated from the rest of their peers. So there's this huge apparatus that is pro-public school. And even right-left, most people on the right— it's changing now, but for a long time, people on the right were Standards, you know, they're public school plus standards or whatever, and they endorse the structure of schooling. So the people that are questioning the fundamental structure is really tiny up until recently.

Can you— before we get deeper into this conversation, can you talk a little bit about your background? Because there are many reasons why you in particular were someone I was very excited to have this conversation with, um, and you alluded to the fact that you've been working in alternative schools for 35 years, which is amazing. Um, can you talk a little bit about, just very briefly, the schools that you've built, the different programs that you've been a part of, what you're doing now, to give a little bit of context? And then we'll talk about some of the schooling models that you've run. I have a bunch of questions for you about that, but I want to give a little bit of context first to the work that you've done.

Sure. And again, I've been doing this so long, I always forget people still take school seriously. I haven't taken school seriously for decades. So, um, I went to good public schools in Bagley, Minnesota, and, uh, Aspen, Colorado. Uh, there in Aspen, I had a class where we just read and discussed philosophy. So Plato, Nietzsche, Buber. I absolutely loved it. For me, it was like going from black and white to color in terms of wow. Um, from there, I discovered St. John's College, where for 4 years everything's Socratic, great books. Um, I had good test scores, so I went to Harvard instead. But after a year at Harvard, I left and went to St. John's because Harvard's just famous people talking at you, same old crap. And but St. John's, I loved thinking and talking about ideas. So then after St. John's, I went to graduate school at the University of Chicago. While there, I began working in Mortimer Adler's Paideia Project, leading Socratic seminars with inner-city public school kids. It felt like I was liberating prisoners. They were so excited to talk. Kids love to talk. Um, and so that led to a full-time job training teachers to lead Socratic seminars in Alaska. Where I was going in and doing demonstrations in classrooms and liberating prisoners. Ultimately, we were on soft money, grant money, and when we ran out of money, some parents asked me to create a private school, became the Athenaeum School of Anchorage. So I became an accidental education entrepreneur. I'd been in the classroom. This is with no teacher training at all, no education courses. So I created a private school. I then went to San Antonio where I Socratized the Judson Montessori School. And was working on the idea of a Montessori high school at the time. That didn't happen. I went then created the Winston Academy, uh, in South Florida. It was for highly gifted students. We had 6th, 7th, and 8th grade students taking and passing AP exams, an amazing math program, deep Socratic texts. Um, after that, I created Montessori middle schools in the Palo Alto area for a largest Montessori organization there at the time. Then I created a charter high school in Angel Fire, New Mexico. It was ranked the 36th best public high school in the US after 3 years. I then met John Mackey, and he and I created FLOW, Freedom Lights Our World, for entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. So kind of took a detour out of education. And then I got back in about a decade ago and created CoSchool in Austin, which then was the model for Higher Ground's Academy of Thought and Industry, the high school model for what's really the largest Montessori chain in the US. And then during COVID uh, and went virtual. Virtual dialogue went well, went, goes well. So I created the Socratic Experience, my own virtual grades 3 through 12 education project. Um, so that's mine. And yeah, along the way I've helped dozens of other people create schools. So, uh, I know the world of alternative education.

You're about as boots on the ground as anyone I've met. Um, I feel like you've, you have so many different experiences to draw from to add experiential weight to the insights that a lot of us have about what's broken in the system. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by Socratizing a school in San Antonio?

Sure. So, you know, Socrates would ask questions. So there's obviously the asking questions. A little bit more esoterically, I see ultimately Socratic dialogue is the mutual expectation of consistency and coherence. This actually, I see it as a cultural thing as well. So as an intellectual, I don't know how you like to describe yourself, but the norms of dialogue you participate in is if there's— and it gets into objectivism a little bit— but if people are inconsistent or incoherent, uh, excuse me, Hannah, I don't understand how you can believe X and Y. That is, there's an expectation of rational coherence, and that is a social expectation. So many people think of Socratic as simply asking questions, but for me it's not about the asking questions per se. I'm most interested in a situation where the students— it's normalized for the students to ask each other questions and gradually pursue the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful by rational Socratic dialogue as a social norm within a school. So that's a quick version.

And so you're currently running a cool— a school called the Socratic Experience that is entirely built around this model of Socratic questioning. Can you talk a little bit about your school too?

Sure. So yeah, exactly, it's kind of the purest version. So virtual school, grades 3 through 12, kind of a quasi-Montessori virtual, which is interesting, younger grades. For the older, for secondary, 6th grade on, we have two 2-hour blocks, 10 to noon Central and 1 to 3 Central, and one of those is Socratic. Everything's 15 to 1 Zoom. And so we go through personal growth, how to become a better version of yourself as a dialogue, and then we do a text, typically classic texts from around the world, trying to understand them. They're difficult. Um, then in the afternoon, it's more of a Socratic math problem solving, science problem solving. So we argue about how to solve difficult math problems. We also have a self-paced linear math program using adaptive math software, so students can go as fast as they want. We have students Yeah, again, doing 2 years of math one year, 4 years of math one year, half a year of math one year if it's right for that kid. Then we have electives on Wednesdays, which are mostly digital. So we have audio engineering, video production, software development, digital marketing, you know, entrepreneurship. So kids— and, and most of our kids do creative and entrepreneurial projects digitally. So, um, for some people it's a little strange to have, hey, isn't Socratic classical reading classic texts old-fashioned? Hey, isn't digital kind of future-oriented. I say they work perfectly together. The Socratic gets people to think for themselves. Anybody who wants to win in the 21st century economy needs to think for themselves better than an LLC, so LLM. So, you know, we want kids to think for themselves and they love it. I would say it's a very warm and intellectual place. Our kids ask for Socratics over the summer for fun. So we do Monday Socratics all summer. For fun for the kids. And some days we'll have 5 or 10, some days 15 or 20, uh, just whatever they want to do, uh, Socratic for fun over the summer. So yeah, we're a culture of learning.

Can you also talk more about how the digital maps with the old? Because this is something, again, I get into this a lot on Twitter. I have a lot of conversations with people because, and this is something we've written about too, a lot at Rebel Educator. Because there's, in, to your point, they look very separate, but the foundation, if you want to, I have a couple of thoughts on this and I want to hear, I want to hear your take too, but I feel like the faster we move into the future, the more important the old is because you need deep roots in order to be able to grow long branches. But just because we live in a world where lots of technological things are evolving very quickly does not mean that the old ways of doing things, the old knowledge, the old fabric and foundation of both cultural commentary, commentary and understanding who we are as humans, but also the sort of foundational process that we've developed over the course of centuries and the using the work of many great minds to understand what does it mean to become a rational, fully functioning human. It doesn't make that obsolete, but I think the connection between the two is is often perhaps intuitively it makes sense to people, but it's hard to, to logically pin down and articulate why these two things go so well together. And I'd love to hear— I'm sure you've, you've articulated this extensively, and I'd love to hear how you explain it.

Sure. So first I'll do, um, a purely conceptual version without kind of the deep wisdom thing. So just conceptually, One of the things that most people don't realize is the extent to which conceptual sophistication is a prerequisite to digital success. Um, to give you one way to think about it, I have a friend, Kyle Griffin, who is one of the leading software trainers for the corporate world in the United States, and he says about 50% of, uh, software training is actually teaching them the software skill and 50% is communication. And one of the reasons, for instance, that a lot of outsourcing doesn't work very well and US people can still be paid highly for many tasks is the communication. And communication, I think, is far too shallow a word. It really is about understanding other minds and how to communicate with other minds. And so I think, you know, a communication degree that's just techniques is not getting at the fact that until and unless we understand another mind, and diverse other minds, we're not going to be very effective. So to get into that a little bit more, in a Socratic dialogue where, you know, you and I and 13 other people are sitting around a table reading, you know, Plato or whatever, we have to understand to the best of our ability what Plato's saying. I have to understand what I think about Plato. You understand what you think about Plato. And then pretty soon we have to also have a mental model and I have to have a mental model of what Hannah's thinking about Plato to match mine, compare it to the text and 13 other minds. And so ultimately sometimes I get super smart kids who think they're too good for this and I say, wait, to do a good job of this, you have to have a mental model of all 15 minds in the room, the text, how your ideas and all of those ideas interact, and you need to find ways to reconcile all that on behalf of the truth, which, you know, you can just think it's a huge explosion in terms of combinatorial possibility. In addition, you should be monitoring the social-emotional environment. So it's not just the ideas, but yeah, is Hannah comfortable or not? Is she in conflict? You know, and all other 15 people. So if you start to see it as we're developing the habit of creating sophisticated cognitive and emotional, social-emotional models of 15 other human beings in real time, Wow, that's a very sophisticated sort of thing. Going back to digital work, I know somebody who does UX/UI design for corporations, gets $500 an hour. I asked him why is his job just not outsourced to people in India for $2 an hour? And he said he knows better than the customer what the customer wants. I've been really fascinated with that as an educator because, you know, imagine what is the curriculum? How to teach kids to know better than the customer what the customer wants. It implies that you have a sense for the cultural landscape, uh, that the product is in, what the customers of that product, their kind of cultural expectations, um, what the company can produce. You know, you're optimizing a really sophisticated product, and it's no longer a matter of do they know this piece of software or not. So I see success, and again, I think Understanding other human minds and beings, including the social-emotional, is really complex and something that I don't think AI is going to get good at too quickly. That I think I'm a big believer in technology. Technology should optimize for what technology is for. You know, we use ChatGPT, we have a generative AI course at our school, you know, all in on that. And I think human beings are better at being human beings and they're all gonna be better at being human beings for a while. But standard school is a complete waste of time. Relative to optimizing for how to interact with others cognitively, socially, emotionally, and multiple others in real time, making strategic decisions about that. So I'll pause. Does all that make sense?

Oh, absolutely. And I have, I have lots of spinoff questions that we'll, we'll explore here. Um, so talk to me a little bit about the difference between a Socratic approach versus a classical education, because classical education is another concept, another movement that's, you know, making a resurgence in popularity. People have become very interested in it, I think, especially as a reaction against a lot of what's happening in our public schools and in culture at large over the past decade or so. Um, but I don't think it's obvious to the external observer the difference between the two, and I'd love to hear your definition of that.

That's a great question. Certainly some overlap, and I'll go back to St. John's. St. John's, in one sense, is the ultimate in classical education. We read the classic texts of Western civilization, you know, starting with Homer and coming up to Einstein and beyond and so forth. So in one sense, it is the exemplar of classical education. On the other hand, um, there are no lectures at St. John's. There's a Friday night lecture that's optional, most students don't go, but all of the classes are Socratic. And one of the other things that's really interesting there is that all tutors, they're called, are required to teach all subjects. So a tutor at St. John's is required— they come in with PhD in physics to teach Greek, and one who comes in with PhD in Greek has to teach music and physics and so forth and so on. So the result is that you've got a radical, I would say, respect for figuring things out. One of my tutors there said the ideal St. John's language exam is one where You don't know what the test is on on Friday. Maybe it's Swahili or maybe it's Polish or maybe it's Mandarin. Whatever it is, you'll be presented with a passage to translate, a grammar and a lexicon, and you figure it out. And for me, that's what I took away from St. John's more than the kind of classical side is figure it out. We're going to use our minds to understand things. And so I'm very interested, interested in Socratic metacognition, Socratic consistency and coherency for the pursuit of the truth. So for me, in many ways, you know, Alfred North Whitehead, the mathematician philosopher, said that all of Western civilization— he said all Western philosophy can be seen as a series of footnotes to Plato. I would say all of Western civilization can be seen as a sequence of Socratic questions. And so for me, and as a consequence, all of the innovation that Western civilization spectacularly did is a result of this kind of rational inquiry that's endless. So in a way, I would say there's a lot of overlap, but classical education tends to look backwards emphasizing the texts more, whereas the Socratic education is very much— uh, somebody described St. John's as having your most sacred beliefs ripped to shreds for 4 years. I think— I'm not sure all classical education people would like that. So it's, um, they're cousins, but one very forward-looking, focused on the rational methodology, one perhaps a little bit more backward-looking, focused on the texts.

And why is the Socratic method the version of that that interests you so much more than the other?

I'm very forward-looking. I'm very much futurist visionary. You know, I have respect for the past, but for me, the heroic story of Western civilization is, you know, Socrates being put— not that he was put to death, but Socrates standing up for inquiry, Galileo standing up for inquiry, you know, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, John Stuart Mill on liberty. For me, it's exploration that we've— the reason we're no longer poor, the reason we have this incredible life. I'm very grateful that we live where we live, you know, with all the luxuries. Everybody should be grateful. So I'm all about the future. I'm all about a better life for the future. I'm going to create a world where 8, 9 billion people wake up all day, every day, creating a better life for each other by means of voluntary exchange. And so, you know, it's funny because there's all this pessimism out there. People who are addicted to news are all pessimistic. Like, wow, we've created such an incredible world. Let's keep creating it. Incredible world. So yeah, I'm a futurist, excited about optimistic scenarios. And yeah, there was once an article written about St. John's that said, well, 2 years at St. John's, 2 years at Brown, because at St. John's you'll be crushed by the marble fingers of the ancients. There are people that come out of the program that are so backward-looking that, again, I love the antiquarians, but for me, the antiquarian is there and a place to visit, Uh, let's go to the ruins, but I'm, yeah, off to the skies.

That's a phenomenal answer. If that doesn't get people fired up about this modality of education, I don't know what will. Um, can you talk a little bit about the approach of facilitating a Socratic dialogue either with a classroom of children or perhaps in an individual context? Because I imagine that, like, if I were listening to this as a parent, I would be quite sold on this by now, and I would want to go try this out with my child, but it's not necessarily apparent where to begin. I don't know how easy of a question that is to answer in the context of a podcast interview, but if it is something that you can describe in this context, how can parents facilitate a Socratic conversation with their child?

Oh, absolutely. Um, so first, a differentiation— there are— is a sort of aggressive style of Socratic let's beat up the other person. You know, Paper Chase is a 1970s movie about law school Socratic, and it's kind of like the professor is humiliating the students. So that exists, and that's not how I do it. I compare kind of hard-style martial arts, you know, karate, with soft-style martial arts, you know, tai chi, and I'm much more on the soft style. And part of this is, you know, if you're with confident people with whom you want to be aggressive and, you know, Mixed martial arts, let's rip their ideas to shreds. Okay. But that's not the best way to educate most kids. So I'm very gentle and, uh, but very curious about how they think. So just to reference here, uh, I have a series, I have a YouTube channel called Socratic Michael Strong. I began with, uh, the daughter of a friend, Alana, when she was 4 years old. She's now turning 11 this month. So there's almost 7 years of content showing how I developed mine. I call it at some points loving your child's mind because a lot of this is curious. I want to know what you think, and you can be a 4-year-old, and I often want to know how they're constructing the world. How do they see different things in the world? Which sounds strange, but I think the first thing to do is get rid of the educator hat. Many people go into, I've got to teach my child X. In the classroom, often teachers when they ask credit questions, they're really asking a didactic question. Did you get the right answer? Did you not get the right answer? So for me, it's key is not having, oh, you're smart, you got the right answer. Oh, you're stupid, you got the wrong answer. And that's a subtext to the way a lot of people ask questions. Whereas if, you know, I ask you why— give you an example. So with young children, sometimes I ask, I put 4 sentences on board. My name is myself. My body is myself. My mind is myself. My soul is myself. I just ask which is true. And some of them, no, I'm my name. I'm Max. Oh, okay. And what's interesting in a group of kids is somebody else will say, no, no, I could change my name and I'd still be myself. My body is myself. And then sometimes there are a few kids that know it's what I think is myself. And then my role is not to, you know, you idiots, your name is not yourself. No, no, just, hmm, and how can you tell? How would you tell if your name is yourself? Or what does it mean if your name is yourself versus your body? And get them to kind of compare different propositions. So the way I think of it is our beliefs are a set of propositions. We probably each have thousands and thousands of beliefs that could be stated as propositions about the world. And I want people to construct reality, and I ask them how do they reconcile. So you can't say your body is yourself and your name is yourself. Which is more true? And whatever reasons they ask, I listen, okay, that's interesting, and then go to the next question. So whatever they say, and you know, I used to, when my kids were driving in the car on the way to the soccer game, I'd have conversations like this. How do you understand this versus that? Another example with young children, Birds fly, airplanes fly, what's the difference between a bird and an airplane? Well, birds have feathers, so if we put feathers on an airplane, is that a bird? Well, no. You know, and just again, I'm not trying to trick them, but I'm trying to get them to explain how they construct their theory of reality. And so ultimately, going back to, I think when people are faced with how to put things together, and the expectation is that it will be rational. Even young children are very rational. They know that they don't want to contradict themselves. It's really kind of incredible. Most 4-year-olds, you know, if you can get them to focus— a lot of this is gradually extending focus. There's some kids where at 4, a 5-minute conversation is a victory. If you can get a 4-year-old to do a 10 or 15-minute, wow. So a lot of this is training focus. But if you can get them to stay focused, a lot of times they do have a sense of Things need to be consistent. I can't contradict myself. So just endless conversations of unpacking how they understand the world and why, coming from a place of love, curiosity, and empathy, and relentless questions.

That's fascinating.

You know, it's fun. Actually, the other thing is this is really fun. So, you know, right now most teachers are miserable because teaching sucks. Most learning is miserable because school sucks. There's a lot of conflict between parents and their children. In part associated with school or even parents' anxiety about their child learning. What they don't realize, and this is one of the reasons I've been filming these conversations with Alana since she was 4, is, and happened with my kids, is simply having intellectual conversations, and intellectual is too heavy, conversations where you're curious about what your ideas, what your child thinks. So I love Your Child's Mind. Go on a quick side thing. A lot of people are concerned about, say, young women being overly focused on body image. I, I won't pretend to solve all of that problem, but if your daughter knows that you love and care about her mind and what she thinks and why she thinks, and she's embedded in a social situation where other people are really interested in her ideas, she'll have a source of strength separate from body image, you know. And whether— same thing with boy, I think Loving your child's mind, caring about what your child thinks is one of the most powerful ways to make them into a thinker. You know, I often describe my education as the conscious development of personal identity, which is a mouthful, sort of modern way of Socrates' know thyself. But I think especially in a world where due to social media, so many people are so passive, you know, the algorithms are trying to train us to be addicted to stuff. To dopamine hits all day, every day. I see what I'm doing in terms of— and what all of us engaged in this are doing— is we're expanding the self, strengthening the self, making the self more powerful, more confident, more intentional, more aware. And for parents just to realize it's as simple as loving your child's mind, being curious about what they're thinking, being joyful about, wow, that's interesting, you think this and you think that. And that kind of relationship— again, this is my endless optimism— if we get parents to have a blast developing their child's mind, kids having a blast thinking, social networks where kids think with each other for fun, as they do at my school. And gradually, these adults who are confident, happy, um, no longer emotionally needy because they've had these warm intellectual relationships, and they're independent thinkers with a rational perspective on reality. What's not to like?

You're getting at the idea of critical thinking, which is another big buzzword on the internet in the conversation around education. And it's something that a lot of people have very strong opinions about, but it's also often loosely defined. Um, basically, if I understand you correctly, and correct this summation if this isn't fair, but it sounds to me like by asking children a lot of questions and helping them hammer out their own thought processes. And tell— instead of telling them the right answer, you put the 4 questions on the board and then you tell them which one is right. Um, you're asking them questions to help them expand on their thought, help them find the gaps, help them correct things that are illogical. And you're also giving them the space to feel emotionally validated by someone, an adult, wanting to hear what they have to think, which is also important. By the action of doing that, you're teaching them how to formulate independent thoughts, opinions, ideas, perceptions, uh, conclusions, syntheses about how the world works and what they think about it. And so it sounds to me like what you're, what you're basically the core essence of your entire curriculum is teaching kids how to think. And everything else is sort of just like dressing on top.

Fair enough. And just add some nuance to that. I would say one thing, one thing that is necessary is you need an adult who is modeling thinking rationally. And so when I used to do this in public schools, sadly, you probably know most education majors have the lowest average SAT of any major. And, um, yeah, I think a lot of teachers are not really capable of doing this well. So you need people who have sharp minds and can think rationally because otherwise it's just gibberish. This actually goes back to subcultures. We have subcultures of high-quality rationality, then it's magic. If we are just saying, ask questions, if the person asking the questions is not capable of maintaining rational, coherent arguments, then it's meaningless garbage. And that's one of the reasons I quit doing this in public schools is absolutely no quality control. And there is a lot of evidence that certain kinds of explor— inquiry learning and stuff have been a failure in public school. Absolutely, it's been a failure because doing this is a very sensitive matter and requires good minds with a certain structure. Going into the structure a little bit, one of the reasons we use text is text is a fairly constrained environment. You take a paragraph of Plato or Aristotle or Toni Morrison or James Baldwin, it doesn't matter, but I do like— my favorite text is so difficult, no one student can understand it on their own. Ideally, it's difficult not because of vocabulary, but because of conceptual sophistication. That's not a kind of reading most people think about. But I like to be puzzle-solving because sometimes kids will start by saying, "Oh, it means whatever you want it to mean." So they're relativists. A lot of kids have been taught everybody's opinion is equal, yada, yada, yada. They're relativists. And I'll ask something like, "Well, is this a recipe for chicken soup?" "Well, it's not a recipe for chicken soup." You know, and so they force them to realize the words do constrain meaning somehow. And we might not be able to be completely coherent around a specific meaning, but by means of close analytical attention to the words on the text, sometimes the grammar— why is this a semicolon rather than a colon?— you know, we work towards constrained accurate meaning by looking very closely at the textual details. Give you a different kind of example. At one point I did a Socratic discussion where I had a written passage in 3 languages: French, Spanish, and German. None of the kids knew any of those languages, but there are enough cognates in each of those languages. It was like a crossword puzzle. Okay, this French and this Spanish word probably mean this in English. This German word, this German word probably mean this in German. They're in different places. And it really was a fun puzzle. And eventually the kids were able to, in essence, translate even though they knew none of the three languages by means of puzzle solving. I would say in many ways that's similar to looking at a hard philosophical text. So very much want to practice rationality with high-quality rational questioners and a constrained text so they can make progress. Because I am concerned either with dogmatism on the one hand or relativism on the other. Rational thought requires using reason and evidence to come to a closer to the truth perspective. And we have to believe we can come to a closer truth perspective. One other pet peeve, and then I'll let you respond, but I've hired people with PhD in English literature who did all deconstruction all the time. If they don't believe there's a meaning in text, they are a terrible Socratic leader. You know, if they believe it's all power and agenda, they're hopeless. And so the actual kind of relativism of certain kinds of postmodern thinkers is actively damaging to the task of using reason and evidence to come to conclusions.

What are the qualities of a good Socratic leader, or how can someone cultivate that in themselves to be good at doing this with their children or with their classroom at large?

So I would combine the kind of rational asking questions, being open-ended, but still using reason and evidence to constrain. I actually have seen teachers say that they become a better thinker by means of doing this, because if you're doing this all the time in real time, you have to, um, you know, whatever answer you have— wow, okay, they said if mind is different but body— what was my next question? So gradually you need to become very good at thinking rationally down sequences of logic in real time. People who are naturally good at that, it's much easier. You know, I can come up with 100 questions, you know, endlessly. A specific exercise I have to train teachers, students, and parents is take a paragraph and try to come up with 3 discussable questions, 5 discussable questions, 20 discussable questions. A discussable question is one that cannot be Googled. You could say it's not fact, you know, it's not vocabulary or something like that. And over time you learn that texts are exploding with meaning. You can ask about any concept. You can ask about any sequence of sentences. What is the intention behind the author? So that kind of deep rational understanding of how knowledge is constructed, and it may sound strange, but once you get into it and you really start looking at Mortimer Adler's "How to Read a Book" is a good background text for this, you know, The way Adler looks at it is when you're reading a text, you should be arguing the author, that stupid jerk, you know, you're thinking and talking and arguing about everything. You know, quick side note, you know, first date with my wife Magat, I was asking her questions all evening and she said this, I'm getting a headache, this is terrible, didn't go well. And now she and I talk about ideas all the time. So it's a certain norm of, yeah, our job is to think and talk about ideas and have this reason and evidence be the social norm between us. The other piece is warm, because without the warmth, it can simply be brutal. And once there's warmth and trust, and also kind of lightness and fun, uh, I, I think it's easy for those of us who are serious about the intellectual side to be too serious, too heavy. And so it is nice to kind of, uh, have a fun and game. And sometimes we've done improv in our classes. And so I think this sort of balance between warmth of various how things— again, with kids, one of the reasons they hate school is it's such a cold, sterile place. People, people are human. So combine warmth with intellectuality, have fun with it, develop communities with a practice. It is a social activity. I think it's really hard to do alone. But if you have adults who are already having intellectual dialogues with other adults, it's how do you take that and adapt it to kids? And it's breaking it down. Now, one of the things that I do is just be grateful for any tiny increment of rational thought in a child. So, you know, they may talk about, "Well, I think my body is myself," then talk about their dog for 5 minutes. Okay, skip the part about the dog. Now tell me more about why body and not mind, you know, and just keep sustaining the directionality. One of my goals is to get kids to the point where they can follow longer and longer chains of reasoning. And literally, with a 4-year-old, random stuff happens all the time. And so it's kind of, thank you, that's cool. And what about— I mean, people say I'm endlessly patient, and a lot of this is, yep, endlessly patient. Always come back to it.

What other alternative models of schooling are you excited about beyond the ones that you're building? Because you're also intimately familiar with a lot of the projects other people are working on, and you've worked on quite a range of things, obviously charter schools, public schools. Private schools, online schools, Montessori schools. What other models do you find particularly interesting?

That's a great question. Well, broadly, I think agency models that give students lots of agency are the future. I, I think, you know, everybody who has a great life is an agent. You know, people who are passive jump through the hoops— that model is dying. And all the cool jobs are where people take initiative. So I see actually Montessori and Acton and Self-Directed Education, PRINDA. I see all of these as bearing a family resemblance. You know, often they're exclusive. You know, Montessorians believe they're right, and Acton believes they're right, and Self-Directed Education believes they're right. And for me, it's all about, um, how can we give a child more agency? And, you know, within Montessori, there's some that are more follow the child, some that are more structured. Within Acton, there's some that are more structured, some are more no self-directed education. And for me, I don't have a dogma about this at all. I have seen wonderful education in all of these models, and I think a lot of it is the positive culture. So I would say more than the model is it's— if it's agency-based education, are there warm, positive relationships that are leading to excellence, to individual excellence? And I think a lot of the structures are actually kind of arbitrary. I think we need to create— I'll give actually an unusual example. Years ago, I read a book called Lessons from Extraordinary Educators. It was by somebody who had looked at a school where the cheerleading team made national championship all the time and the state debate team made state championship all the time and that kind of thing. He said, you know, clearly not in the water. There's something going on with these coaches. And mostly it was coaches and not actual academic education. But he found a couple of things. He found on the one hand, the kids felt cared about, so they knew that the coach cared about them. On the other, the coach set very high standards, expectations. No, we are going to go to state, we are going to go to nationals. And the coach then knew how to coach them to that, knew how to— whether it's debate or cheerleading or football or math competitions, whatever it is, they had the expertise to coach them. But for me, this combination of warm caring on the one hand and very high expectations, that's a general recipe. And I think the agency, one of the reasons I think it was all extracurriculars is it's opt-in, chosen, students have a sense of agency as opposed to coercive K-12. But I think as we have coaches and mentors who are brilliant at caring and high expectations and then can coach them to those high expectations, I don't care if it happens in Montessori, ACT, and self-directed education. Or something completely different.

What about models that you don't like or that you're not excited about?

Well, of course, one-size-fits-all standard education. And just to talk a little bit more about that, just in math. So a great math teacher in a public school, 30 students, can kind of do a good job either with the top third, the middle third, or the bottom third. But it's no way— no way that they can do a really great job with the whole range because kids are across such a huge range. And again, math is the most linear of subjects. There's some kids who can fly through math. I once met a New Jersey state math champion who said he was a behavior problem until in 7th grade his teacher just put a huge stack of math textbooks on his desk in the back of this classroom and he just went through like 6 years of math on his own in the back of the classroom. Of course, the wrong thing to do would be to force him. You know, when I was in school, I remember, you know, wanting to do so much more math and teachers constantly slowing me down. And so one size fits all is, especially for math, it's just a terrible thing. You know, people talk about tutoring being so great, and of course tutoring is great. Why is tutoring so great? Because regular school is so horrible. So for me, the one size fits all education is a crime. Students' minds, interests are so diverse. You know, part of the reason the agency-based is, yeah, if Hannah wants to study history for 6 years, go for it. If she wants to do, you know, 10 years of math in 3 years, go for it. Whatever it is, once we let kids have more agency, autonomy with respect to learning goals, and they're in an environment where excellence is expected, the outcomes are so much better. But anytime we have— and it's the system, the requirements system, say, grammar of schooling, Stanford scholars call it. This is 3rd grade math, this is 4th grade science, this is 7th grade history. That grammar of schooling structure that has one expectation for all students I think is a crime against children.

How do you think about the difference between a standard of— and a culture of excellence versus having subject matter standards? Because you're talking about two things that might appear diametrically opposed to the untrained eye.

Well, first of all, again, I, I think we— I want to do what's right for that child in front of me, happiness and well-being for that child. And, you know, just in terms of subject matter standards, so it's a wonderful piece by a man named Henrik Carlsson on how MrBeast learns. MrBeast at 12 hated school, and he started focusing on optimizing YouTube videos. MrBeast now has 170 million followers. The New York Times only has 9 million. You know, I think his company's worth a billion dollars or more. And I think his mom forced him to stay in school, but I think he would say he got nothing out of school. It was all about optimizing his YouTube. So In terms of excellence, MrBeast clearly, clearly was pursuing excellence with respect to YouTube videos and both the content and the algorithms, all that. Clearly he knows so much more than I know. But did he pursue excellence in history or language or what? No. You know, who knows what grades, you know, the notion, what grade did MrBeast get in 6th grade? Who cares? You know, and that's the thing. Anybody who succeeds in real life, Nobody goes back and looks at the report card. It doesn't matter. So yeah, all of that, that's the system demanding something. For me, at the end of the day, you know, I like the— I'm an intellectual. There's part of me that would like to force everybody to study the things that I think they should study. The fact is, if somebody is a healthy, happy, successful, good person, I don't care what they studied.

How do you feel about unschooling?

So I'm very sympathetic. I'd say it's an agency-based thing. Again, I emphasize the subculture. So I've known, you know, I described Laura Deming as an unschooler, got into MIT at 14. So I think, but her dad is an incredibly curious entrepreneurial, interesting human being. So I think that that's why, again, for me, it's not the structure, it's not the, all of, for me, it's almost like noise. All of these debates, for me, almost all education debates are just noise. Is it Montessori? Is it this or is it that? It's like, okay, do you have a situation where you're pursuing excellence? Because, you know, pursuing things you love and becoming great at them. And that can be total unschooling, could be no requirements from parents at all. And I expect when we look into it, that's again, just knowing you, I never met your parents, but I would not, I can get a sense for the kinds of conversations your parents had with you and with each other. And that's what I mean by a subculture where it's certain kinds of ambient, you know, cultural stuff, absolutely unschool. I unschooled my kids for a year. You know, in some ways 2 years, you know, you know, it's just, of course, they grew up in an intellectual household, uh, any kind of teaching is an absolute waste of time, gets in their way, none of it. Um, on the other hand, I've seen unschooled kids who were addicted to video games and played nothing but video games for 12 years and had terrible outcomes. So again, I, I think people get too attached to the apparatus of schooling, not enough to— is this human being developing in a healthy way. And beyond that, the structures are arbitrary.

I think this is a thing— the subcultures point is very interesting to me because I think there's a thing we don't talk about enough in, honestly, a lot of different cultural commentary issues, but especially education since that's the one that's most interesting to the two of us. Um, because I do think there's a— people have such a tendency to start speaking in absolutes very quickly because we've sort of historically been trained to think of education as an absolute. It's a thing that applies to everyone. It's like the government. It's a thing that, well, you're all born here, so it all, it applies to all of us equally. And I think we don't, we don't have living memory of it not being the vast majority of the population not being a part of this very, uh, overarching and universal thing. But I think people lose a lot of the nuance of subcultures when they're thinking about this, because everybody has the anecdote of, yeah, well, my neighbor's kid did horribly as an unschooler. They're the most unruly and uncivilized child I've ever met, and they just like can't read and they just play video games all day. And then there's the other story of the unschooler who, like the Laura Demings of the world, who've gone on to do amazing things at a very young age and have been wildly successful because they were unschooled. And so you start to get this weird dichotomy where this child over here is struggling because they were unschooled and this child over here is thriving because they were unschooled. And so people just sort of start yelling at each other on the internet about, well, no, kids are failing because of unschooling, but, but no, kids are succeeding because of unschooling. And. We forget to talk about the nuance of it because we don't think of education as a thing that is nuanced. We think of it as a thing that's pretty universally sized. And so we have to construct the thing that fits everyone. But I think this is such an important part of the conversation because some of its nature too, some of its personality, some of its aptitude, like not every child is going to be a Laura Deming, even if they're in the exact same environment she was. And not every child should either. It's not a, a good life path, probably for most people, but there can be a similar level of excellence in the specific things that that child is well adapted to become and to thrive at. And the difference between that child and the child that is, um, you know, not, not thriving, not succeeding at all. Is largely environment. And again, it gets really nuanced because you'll even have a family of unschoolers. This is the— everybody's favorite gotcha is like, well, my kid, I had— or like, my, my cousins have two kids and one of them, they unschooled both of them and one of them thrives and is doing amazingly and the other one's like, can barely read. It's like, well, the, the subculture wasn't a good fit for both child— for both children. It gets, it gets very nuanced. But I still think it comes down to a subculture conversation.

I mean, kind of backing up a little bit, James Scott wrote a book called Seeing Like a State, and he talks about, um, what the state wants things to be legible. That is, the state wants to understand what's going on in control. Only the state is about control. And so most of education is currently, uh, this is how the state— you know, this is the curriculum, these are the assessments, these are the credits. Education has been dominated by the state for so long that that is regarded what education is by most people. A lot of the unschoolers are rejecting it, self-directed education. They're rebelling against it and saying, you know, to hell with that. Good for them. But then it's either— it's a dichotomy. Either it's this state grammar school structure or it's nothing at all. And, you know, I would say my campaign is to get people— I can imagine with 10 different kids, they should have 10 different educational paths. It's so different. A lot of it is getting parents back to what, what counts, what's best for this child. And in a funny way, it's having parents see their children, see this individual. I think people have tremendous capacity to understand each other. It sounds strange, but my campaign is for people to understand themselves, understand their children, not listen to the experts, qua experts. What is the best flourishing path? And there are some kids who need a ton of structure. And that's okay. You know, all of us need a ton of structure sometimes. You know, we all need to have, you know, go to the gym class or whatever, the— whatever it is. We all need some structure sometimes, and we all need freedom other times. And part of, you know, healthy choices is, yeah, again, knowing who we are, what the choices are, and what's best for us now. Um, you know, a different kind of analogy: I think education should be like food. And you say, what's right food? What other people want to dictate a strict diet, but There are restaurants. We can grow our own garden. We can go to the vegan place. We can go to the paleo place. We can eat garbage at the convenience store. So many options, and there's better and worse, but I don't want anybody telling me, "You're not allowed to stop at convenience stores." Maybe I want to sometimes. So I think we need to get away from seeing like a state, this is what education is, to I want parents to be having rich conversations with each other about, hey, I've got this really entrepreneurial kid, not excited about school. How do I get him plugged in with other entrepreneurs? Hey, I've got this really mechanical kid. He loves to build things, taking apart the lawnmower. How can I get a great experience for him? And so many just acknowledging kids are different. What's this one? You know, I've got this kid who needs structure. Where do I find the structure? And often people, one of the things I hate is the educational establishment is so condescending to low-income parents. They basically say, and you'll see this on Twitter, uh, oh well, elite parents can make good choices, but those stupid parents can't make good choices. They don't quite say it, but they're basically saying it. It offends me to know—

victimize poor parents.

Yeah, they'll, they'll be, you know, like, no, you know, they will be having, as they get more choices, and it is happening now, they'll be having vibrant conversations about this versus that, and my kid this and my kid that. Moms want to talk about their kids and what's good for their kids. And so I see, um, one-size-fits-all government tells us what to do schooling as destroying one of the most important human, and I'll say maternal instincts, in terms of how do I figure out what's best for my kids. So yeah, my dream is all these moms all the time, you know, talking about what's best for my kid and discovering, exploring, and creating so many new options.

What else? Obviously subcultures have to be uniquely created, custom, custom designed. There is not a— you can't go buy one at Target. Like, it's not— that defeats the entire purpose. You're just getting back to standardized, what size, one size fits all. But there also are elements of a good subculture, um, or elements that tend to be generally universal goods. Um, and there's something that like Montessori does very well. They have a whole theory around what designing a good environment to encourage learning and growth within a child. You've obviously designed a multitude of different schools and learning environments. You've done it with your own kids. You've done it with schools you've worked for, schools you've built yourself. What are some of the elements that you think are generally net positives to have in both both an environment you're constructing for your kid, both physically and more intangibly, but also the subculture that you're creating within which your child can learn and grow and thrive?

Oh, great question. So first, I do think both Montessori and Waldorf are examples of deliberately created subcultures. I would acknowledge that, you know, a lot of religious schools, you know, Jewish schools are coming off of great Jewish subculture, Catholic schools Catholic, you know, Protestant, you know, different religions have And even within them, there are a lot of different variations. But I think, although I'm a secular atheist, I think a lot of religious subcultures are much better for kids than the default public school culture. So I'm fully supportive of choice that includes religious schools because I think it's a lot of good outcomes for a lot of kids. But yeah, Montessori and Waldorf. Waldorf, the Rudolf Steiner kind of early 19th century, early 20th century Christian mystic, Created an interesting school system where I would say the kids get a lot of right-brain activity, a lot of creative, not necessarily great math and science, but very wholesome and positive. Yeah, Montessori, real agency-based culture with beauty as an important thing. But going to the abstract, I'm a big fan of Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue. Alasdair MacIntyre, a late 20th century philosopher. And he pointed out that prior to modernity, say in the last 18th, 19th, 20th century, all cultures were virtue cultures. And whether it was Greek or Navajo or wherever it is, there was a certain structure to culture. And then modernity kind of gradually erased that. And there are a lot of interesting things. The liberatory effects of modernity are wonderful, At the same time, he talks about 3 elements of a virtue culture. One is a lifelong conception of human— what's at stake in humans, so that if you think this is what I'm going to do in my life, this is what I want to achieve, and you're in a culture that cares about what you're going to achieve over your life, that's very different from a moment-to-moment time horizon or even which party am I going to this weekend. I think one of the reasons I'm critical of mainstream adolescent culture is that nobody is giving them a sense of lifelong purpose and well-being. You know, what is— how does your life matter? Wait But Why is a wonderful blog that has a Your Life in Weeks. And so it has, you know, how many weeks we have to live, and it turns out not that many in a visual diagram. You waste a week, wow, you just lost a big chunk of your life. So I want kids to have this sense of lifelong, well, what their, what their goal and purpose is. What are you going to achieve? I have students write an autobiography from the age of 100 every year. Um, and when they're young, when they're middle school, they're silly. I'm going to be a rock star and brain surgeon, Nobel laureate, and so forth. That's cool. But gradually, as they mature, they really think through what do they want to achieve in their life. Again, it's not binding, but I think this sense of direction and our lives having meaning really important. So that's number one of Alasdair MacIntyre's points of a virtue culture. Another is a common set of norms, ideals, heroes, you know, kind of a moral tradition. What counts as the sacred, what counts as, you know, jokes, what you can make fun of, what you can't make fun of. And I do think some sense of the heroic is absolutely essential. You know, I think again, there— Gallup has done polls where Most high school students have no heroes. A few have a celebrity or athlete or a politician, but very few. Most, if they have a hero at all, it's their parent, and that's wonderful. But I think we do need exemplary models of human life to look up to and know what counts as human excellence. And so they need to have this sense that this is human excellence and that something else is beyond the pale. You know, if you do that, that really is a violation of who we are as a culture. And you can't do that. And so whatever it is, and again, Waldorf is different from Montessori, which is different from Catholic, different from Jewish, whatever. I do think teens need some moral template, uh, and we believe in intellectual exploration. But yeah, uh, you— I think people who claim they're going to do— having no integrity, I would say, is something that is kind of a violation on our side. You can, you can believe in the Catholic the Jewish, the secular, the whatever, you know, but having no integrity, that's the problem. Wait, you don't mean what you say and you don't say what you mean at all? How can we have a real conversation relationship if I can't trust anything you say or mean? And then finally, practices. So, you know, we need to actually practice. Again, I'm very interested in anthropology, sociology. What does life look like day in, day out? You know, So if we're pursuing physical excellence, we ought to be out there doing it. We're pursuing intellectual excellence, we're doing it. If we're treating people well, we're doing it. You know, kids, uh, you know, Aristotle, uh, excellence is, uh, not an act but a habit. The day-to-day habits, what we're— I often talked about, I'm not too worried about kids being exposed to this or that, but what they're pickled in day to day matters a lot. And so yeah, you want to— that structure of day to day to something that's consistent with the virtues and excellence that they're striving for. So yeah, kind of an abstract template, but makes sense?

No, that absolutely makes sense. There's no— I wasn't fishing for a particular answer. I was just curious what your answer would be. I love that I got an answer with the word pickled in it. That's amazing.

Well, just to rant on that a little bit, a lot of parents are like, my kids saw this. Like, okay, your kids saw that, but you know, right, what are they doing day in, day out? That's what really matters.

I want to pivot a little bit and talk about your experience running an online school, because this is also highly relevant right now, especially post-COVID, when, you know, everybody's— or a lot of people have experienced online school in some capacity. A lot of people were very underwhelmed by it. Obviously, Zoom school sucked when it wasn't intended to be on Zoom. But you're intentionally running a deliberately designed Zoom school, which is a very different beast. Why did you build a virtual school after doing in-person for so many decades?

Oh, great questions. First, I love in-person, um, and so I was resistant for a long time. It was very much COVID, you know, COVID, everybody was going online out of necessity. It turns out Socratic dialogue works pretty well. I mean, lectures online— lectures are horrible anyway. Lectures online are really horrible. And so that's why Zoom school was a disaster. But dialogue It's great to be in a room with you, and we could have done this virtually. You know, conversation worked pretty well on Zoom. So it's this piece that works really well virtually. And then there are other reasons why I think there are a portion of people who continue to love virtual. I love working from home, and so, you know, I have conversations, professional conversations, with literally hundreds of people from around the world, and that's cool. We've got families who maybe spend 6 months here, 6 months there. We've got a family who is sailing the Caribbean and the daughter tunes into school while they're on the ship in the Caribbean, on the boat sailing across the ocean. And flexibility is a marvelous thing. We also have kids in the middle of rural areas, nowhere, you know, there are no intellectual experiences. We pipe in high-quality intellectual experiences in the middle of, you know, Eastern Colorado or whatever. So for people who want this kind of rich intellectual experience, it's great to be able to do it virtually. We also have a very international community. So we have students from Iraq, Pakistan, Mexico, Senegal, Guatemala, Canada, US. We had somebody from Taiwan. The time zone didn't work after a while, but we are— we have a community where kids can really be international. And I do think American kids tend to be very parochial. And even just all the things we worry about in the US, when you have somebody from other countries who may be dealing with really serious issues, Most of the things in the US are small potatoes compared to what somebody in developing nation is dealing with. So I think there are a lot of benefits to it. You know, right now the Zoom is okay. Ultimately, I would like to go total tech, and I've looked at AR/VR experiences where, you know, it could simulate being in the same room together. I think in 5 years that could be a reality. So yeah, at some point we can be walking around, uh, getting fresh air while having conversations and learning anywhere.

I also think, to the point that you brought up about having students all over the world, I think I'm excited to see what happens with the concept of world schooling. Um, the idea of having, you know, students interacting with each other on a global scale because it adds so many layers of dynamism to the education experience that a child is able to have. It also allows for a much deeper level of customization because you can be learning about this very niche topic that most people in the world aren't interested in, but you can find two dozen kids globally who are super excited about it, who've all found their way into the same program, and they can all be learning together. But there's this added dynamism of you're not just learning about another culture in a classroom during that culture's week or whatever that you're, you know, you're doing Hungary week or whatever. You can actually be in school with a kid in Hungary, hearing about their life experiences and what they did that morning before they logged on and what they're doing later and that weekend and what they're having for dinner and like all these different things that are very expansive to a child's perception of the world that they're living in. But there's also, you know, there are drawbacks too. I'm very bullish on online education. I think it's great. A lot of my high school experience was spent not in real time with people on the internet. I wasn't in on Zoom calls or anything, but I was watching watching recorded lectures and I was interacting with resources on the internet and my best friends were all people who lived far away from me and we had like virtual email-based writing clubs and Skype calls and stuff like that. So it was very— I very much took advantage of the internet. I very much am a product of the internet generation, but there are drawbacks too in running a school. And I'm curious what, especially as someone who has, again, decades of boots on the ground, experience running in-person schools, what some of the biggest things you feel like are lost by doing the virtual version?

Certainly real, real-world activity is important. So we are having a partnership— we're having a couple of partnerships where, um, we're working with micro schools and we're piping in part of it. And we're actually setting one up in an eco-village in Panama where we're— and I say piping in because part of it is things like physical activities, art activities, building things, models, All the great real-world stuff obviously is not as good virtually. I would say things like math instruction, that can be done pretty well virtually. It's Socratic dialogue. One of the advantages of the virtual is cost. In these hybrid models we're looking at, somebody else is running a microschool and doing cool experience. They're affordable. But just to focus in on the math, to have one math teacher who can handle kids at across 7 grades of math in a microschool of 20, that's just hard. Whereas, you know, we can have math tutors specializing in different areas and so forth. And so I see the future as, yeah, and if people can afford the full in-person experience, that's fabulous. But, uh, for smaller microschools, a hybrid of, you know, our material piped in, they doing the cool real-world experience, they do the pottery class, the art class, They go on the hike, they have the football team, and then they come and get highly personalized math. It would be hard to supply, you know, in an in-person situation.

What about— how do you feel about electronics for kids in general? You're running an online school, which means kids are in front of screens all the time for school, but how do you feel about electronic usage and internet access for kids more broadly?

So for me, the big distinction is, are they a creator or are they a passive recipient? And so just a couple of super positive Minecraft stories. I mean, in general, I like— there are first-person shooters that's all dopamine all the time versus sandbox games like Minecraft, creativity possible. So I had one student who, as a 10th grader, he was a self-taught coder on Minecraft. As a 10th grader, he was working for a startup in San Francisco and managing teams of Ivy League CS graduates. So he had you know, CS graduates from Cornell and Columbia that were reporting to him as a self-taught 10th grader. I had another student who started coding at 8 or 9, Minecraft, and got $1.2 million in venture capital as a 16-year-old for his Minecraft mod company. So, you know, digital world can be spectacular, but those were often both very creative. On the other hand, I have seen kids are totally addicted. And so I think, and this goes back to creating a strong self. If you have a self who's creative, who's generative, who is eager to grab the world and do something amazing with it, then electronics are a tool. But insofar as for many kids, you know, the electronic was a babysitter, the parents were not engaged, and the student was just dopamine hits all day long, that can be extremely destructive. So, you know, I I was over the weekend, I was visiting a family with a 3-year-old and they were watching videos of rocket ships together and super exciting. And I was encouraging after, and the kid was just totally into watching it, which is fine. But then also I was encouraging them to pause and kind of have conversation about it. Wow, what did you like about that? What was going on there? There was a space flight thing too where the water bubbles were floating. Why was the water floating? Does water float like that when you put it into your tooth? You know, and get them pausing to think. And it's both getting the child to think, maintaining the human interaction. And a lot of this is, it was in one way completely innocent. On the other hand, if starting at 3, this kid did nothing but YouTube videos for 8, 10 hours a day and the parents didn't interact, that would be a disaster. So again, it's all about we want to be in charge. We want to be intentional and capable of driving our lives. We want our children to drive their lives. Um, whereas if you just give them unlimited access to electronics, I compared it— you want to put heroin on the table for your kids to have? So, you know, a lot of these are in some ways, uh, obvious once you think about it, but parents are either tech or no tech. I'm like, no, make sure you don't get the addictive thing going, but as long as it's a creative tool, celebrate it.

How do you help parents find that line when you're talking to them and they're, they're, you know, say they have a— the sake of example, they've got like an 8-year-old and they have some computer access and it's hard to block them off from computer access altogether because all their friends are on the computer or on a computer— may even be an antiquated term at this point for what kids are doing. It's probably like they're on the iPad or the iPhone or whatever and their friends are all doing it, their friends are playing games, so the parents feel some pressure around not wanting to be that parent that's not letting their kids do the thing that all their friends want to talk about. Like, I don't want my kid to not have friends, but at the same time, it's very hard to police what your kid's doing on the iPad or the iPhone, and you don't really want to be that parent either. And you're trying to figure out what the right balance is, and obviously you can set like some parental controls and stuff. That's a pretty minimal level of of control or environment construction on an iPad. You, you have the internet. It's, you have a browser. It's harder to con— control an environment where you can then set your kid loose to go have fun in the same way you can set up your house and your yard full of things that you want your child to play with. And it's like, go be free and do whatever you want with the space we've made for you. How do you guide parents in figuring out how to draw those lines?

You know, it's a really, really good question. And so I would say first I do like to delay it as much as possible. One way to think about it is strengthen the human as much as possible because the stronger the human is, both the human internal within the child but also the relationships. And so if the norm in the household, I actually have a Twitter fight going on where I have shared the thing about fights worth having with your kid. And one of them is eating meals together, going outside, reading. I think it is important to develop habits where the child is reading. Is going outside, is eating meals together. There are a few others, but the idea is the more, you know, I'm a big fan of baking. Families can sing together. I think a lot of old-fashioned interhuman things, as long as those are strong, happy, healthy things, then some, uh, as, and, and again, delaying with just with my kids, um, when my children, well, actually when my son was being nursed, I would read out loud to their mom in rocking chairs, and so his experience from the earliest stage was being read to and books being a normal part. And we did, you know, after the kid went to bed, we secretly watched movies. But, you know, until my kids were 6 or 8, their experience of every evening was family reading time, and mom and dad had been reading since before they could remember. And, you know, my son, when my daughter, 4 years younger, was born, he would sit there and page through books even though he couldn't read. Because that's what we did every evening. Reading was normalized. And so by the time, you know, eventually they got to electronics, reading was super much a habit, doing things, going outside. So you want to kind of make this part as strong as possible, as long as possible, delay as much as possible. And then again, when they are engaging, then ideally you have these conversations, intellectual conversations. Hey, what are you doing? Oh, that's cool. You know, he's advising this parent as well, you know, Maybe they should get a flight simulator because flight simulators are cool. But ideally, dad and the kid do the flight simulator together. They talk about the experience, then they eventually start building model planes. And, you know, so there's this continuity from the electronic experience to cool real-world experience, and the kid experiences cool real-world stuff as cool real-world stuff. You know, my, my real concern with kind of AI and addictive technology— and it is going to go insane, I There are a lot of hysterical articles, and I get the hysterical articles, and the solution is to build the human relentlessly. And then as long as you've got that, there was, you know, parents are the ultimate anti-drug. I think that sentiment is right. I don't know if billboards are helpful or not, but I think something as simple as, you know, and ultimately the dating market as well, we need human relationships. People need relationships. That's not going to change. And I think electronics are threatening us. And if you, if you fight your kid, if your kid hates all the real-world experiences and you make them go cold turkey on the electronics, that's going to be a huge family battle. But if they love spending time with you, have loved spending time with you, love all these other things, and electronics are part of that, and you talk about it and you do things— ultimately with my kids, when we did start watching movies together, right, we watch movies as a family and we talk about the movie He's a family. So it's, um, the human is normalized as part of the electronic, as opposed to there's this fun addictive sphere out there and then there's boring yucky family life over there. I'm not saying it's simple, but I think that's directionally absolutely the way to go.

Well, you're talking about— have you ever read Venkatesh Rao's Breaking Smart?

Have not. I know Venkatesh, but I have not read that.

I think you'd like it. Um, it's an essay series on the implications of software on human society and the fact that it's a technology that sort of infuses everything else and that we've barely scratched the surface of what software will do. It's a, this is a quick sum of, or like a very, uh, you know, I'm missing a lot in the paraphrase here, but basically the idea is that we've had only a handful of other technologies that have been so overarching, uh, um, what's the right word to describe this? We've had very few technologies that have had such an overarching impact on our entire fabric of reality at large, like written language, money. Like, there aren't many that have changed everything. But he talks about the difference between people who grew up without smartphones and people who grew up with them. So our, our, you know, my generation and the generations that come after. And he talks about how kids who grew up without smartphones and they have them, they've got them as adults. You have your car and then the smartphone is just an accessory in your car. But for people who grew up with things like Uber and their car is synced with their phone and they can you know, adjust settings in their car right from their phone before they ever get in their car. The car is a smartphone accessory. And so there's this complete inversion of how we perceive the relationship between technology and the real world for kids who are growing up with smartphone, smartphone access from infancy, really, that I think it's very easy to underestimate if we don't rationally grapple with the implications of, well, if I had a smartphone from when I was a small child, how would I think about the relationship between the phone and how I interface with the world and interfacing with the world without the phone? Um, like there are, there are layers of understanding how we interact with the reality, with reality that are being lost that I think are also important. Like what you're talking about reminds me very much of this, and it's an important thing to think about too, the implications of this as you're thinking about drawing this connecting line between child is curious about something, we dip into the, the technological world or the internet universe to answer questions, but then we come back up again and we, we translate what we've learned into physical reality, and then we dip back in again for another question. I think. Parents have to be more deliberate about drawing that through line than may even be intuitive. Right. Because I don't think— like, it changes the way your brain interfaces with the world so much. I think it's easy to underestimate. I feel like I— I was 14, I think, when I got my first handheld device, and I was on the older side of my peers, most of my friends already had them, which is part of why I was lobbying my parents to be allowed to have like at least an iPod Touch that I could text my friends with when I had internet access. And I was old enough, I feel like I got really lucky because I was old enough that I was able to be conscious of what was occurring, but I was still young enough that my brain really was actively developing so I could see the implications of being young and having technology and it, it completely changed the way my brain works. I'm certain of it. The way I perceive reality, very different because I have technology. And it's not just because I've gotten older and the way I perceive the world at large has changed. Like, I'm certain technology had an impact, and not all of it was good. Um, but I think it's really easy to— if you haven't been very conscious of that experience in yourself, it's very easy to underestimate how much you have to draw these through lines. To maintain groundedness in the physical world and to not just sort of get lost in this weird murky sea of information all vying for your attention, but without any, like, real— like, the grounding points are your phone home screen or, like, the Google homepage, not— or, like, a social media profile. Like, it's not anything real. It's very strange.

Yeah, no, and again, smart people are doing everything they can to make it as addictive as possible. And, uh, yeah, I think really what I really want parents to do is to become much better at the art of human interaction and, um, identify, select, curate peers who are really great at positive human interaction. Because the other thing is, if the human beings you're around suck, of course the internet is way better, just way better. I think that's the reality for, well, sadly, a huge percentage of people. Um, and the only way the human— and I'm fighting for the human— the only way the human can win is It may sound strange, but we humans have to up our game. You know, we have to be more engaging, more interesting, more caring, more empathetic, uh, more in integrity with ourselves. I think high-quality human relationships, I think, are unambiguously better than the addictive internet. But low-quality interactions, you know, take me away from people. I know a lot of people basically talk about it like that. I actually knew a— had a student who was addicted to video games And he said it was escape from school. School was so miserable, uh, video games were the only place he had a social life. And it is, as you know, it's not just the game, it's the social life and peers and people he can interact with. But at school, he was not really interacting with any people. So this again creates urgency for me. If the schools are systematically destroying the selves of kids and the internet world is so stimulating, game over, we lost, you know, in the most paranoid, uh, futuristic scenarios are probably true. Uh, the, the hope is to re— re-engage healthy family life, healthy peer life, healthy subcultures at, uh, schools or peer communities or unschools. I don't care what we call them, but create islands where it's so wonderful to be with other human beings. We can go get what we need from the internet, but, um, we enjoy and are attracted to coming back to real face-to-face interaction. So as long as we can do that Um, I think we'll be okay, but most people are not doing that.

I'm gonna give you, uh, potentially a doozy of a question. This may be very easy for you to answer. I don't know, to close out our conversation here. For parents who are listening, who are somewhere on the journey of exiting the system, but perhaps aren't very far along, they may still be in the rationalization stage of the process where they see the problems that exist, they're wrapping their heads around what's wrong with the system, but they haven't fully, they haven't translated it to action yet. They haven't exited. If you were to sum up the most important things to make sure you're encouraging or creating or facilitating in your child's education, if you had to list off like a handful of bullet points or things to keep in mind. These can be action items. These can be just paradigms to build an experience around. Um, what are the most important things for parents to integrate in designing an education for their kid?

I'm going to cop out a little bit and say the first thing to do is follow Hannah Frankman, Michael Strong. Rebel Educator, Socratic Experience, Liberation of Education. No, but part of this is it's a long— and different people have different issues. For some parents, it's, oh, what about the math? What about getting into college? What about my grandparents? There's so many different dimensions. I have a YouTube series called When School's Not Working where we interview people with alternative experiences. I've seen so many kids with alternative experiences have great lives that I have zero concern. Again, for me, I don't even take school seriously, but most people live in this cocoon where school is taken seriously and it takes— you're either crazy or courageous to step outside of it. And there are lots of different legitimate issues. You know, what about learning differences? And, you know, what about, you know, what do I do if I don't do well at school? Or what do I do if I am doing well at school? Whatever it is, I think it's a matter of exploring, and you will find different voices. And seriously, I think you and I, our networks are fabulous for this. And engage and ask about your doubts. And it could be for your child, it's better to stay in a school. There are, you know, I'll say 25% where maybe it's better to stay in a regular school. Or the other thing I want is for parents to be much more assertive about their child's education. Usually public schools will say, you gotta go for the full day. But I've known parents who say, you know, I think I love that first half of the school day here. I don't like the last half. I'm pulling my kid out at noon. And initially the school will say, you can't do that, against rules. And often then they think, oh, we get to keep the, you know, full per pupil expenditure if they only come half a day. Okay, we'll let you go. You can't do this, we'll let you go. You know, again, flourish. Is your child thriving? Are they flourishing? The light in their eyes, you know, whatever it takes for your child Again, absolutely uncompromising mama bear. I wanted to create a movement, you know, Mama Bear, because be a mama bear. Just like, you know, if your child was bleeding in the emergency room and nobody was paying attention, if your child is unhappy at school, you should have that same sense of urgency. I guess that's one from Matt Barnes, who's also fabulous to follow. Yeah, if your child is not flourishing at school, regard that full-on as just much as an emergency if they're bleeding in the emergency room. Nobody seems to care about them because the adolescent mental health crisis is real. What people don't realize is school, a mismatch between the needs of children and school, is a big part of the mental health crisis. You know, going back to flip it around, yes, social media is part of the mental health crisis, but if school is boring and meaningless, of course the toxic addictive part of social media is going to be so much more. If they have a school experience that is rich, meaningful, engaging, healthy, connected human relationships with people who care about them, that's one of the best things you can do to push back against toxic social media. So absolutely uncompromising mama bear. If my child's not flourishing, I'm going on the warpath until I get that. That's the simple version.

If people enjoyed this conversation, and I imagine they did based on the feedback I've gotten on what topics people find interesting, um, Where would you send people next? Where would you like them to find you?

Um, socraticexperience.com is my website. Uh, Socratic Michael Strong, my YouTube channel. Um, Flow Idealism on Twitter. Uh, I'm also active on Facebook and LinkedIn. So yeah, follow me. And, uh, I am fairly vocal on all sorts of things. I also have Medium, Medium articles and a Substack. So Michael Strong, Socratic, follow me and I will drown you with content.

It's very good content. It's worth being drowned in. Thank you so much for taking the time for this, Michael. This has been a really fun conversation.

Thank you, Hannah. It's been a delight.

You've been listening to the Hannah Frankman Podcast. Thank you so much for being here. If you are listening on Apple or Spotify, please leave a rating. Please subscribe. If you're watching on YouTube, please like, subscribe, leave a comment, let me know what you think. That's it for this week. I'll see you next week, friends.