Socratic Spotlight: Exclusive Interview with Michael Strong

This week on Socratic Spotlight, we sit down with Michael Strong, author of The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Practice to Socratic Seminars, and founder of several innovative schools across the country spanning a 35-year career as an education entrepreneur. So Michael, I wanted to start today, I wanted to ask you, you've touched on in the past that school worked well for you. I think you went to a traditional public school growing up and you were able to memorize and forget, get good grades, kind of jump through the hoops. But at some point along your career trajectory, you realized that school did not work for maybe 75% of students, that it was either actively harmful or at best kind of just going through the motions. Certainly not preparing them, helping them develop the ideal version of themselves. So I wanted to ask you when that realization took place, what led you to that belief, and how did we get to the Socratic Experience?

Sure, no, thank you, Alex. Great to be here. So really, it took place in two phases. As a high school junior, I had a class where it was basically Socratic. We read and discussed Plato, Nietzsche, Buber, and I loved it. Although I was very good at memorize and forget tests, you know, put in the data in the head, get the A, walk out the door, forget it. This was the first time that my mind was really engaged in school. And so I absolutely loved that. I had discovered St. John's College, a Great Books Socratic seminar college, and was going to drop out of high school to go there. But I only had a couple of credits left, so I decided to stay my senior year. I had good test scores, so I went to Harvard. And there again, I was bored by people being lecturing, lecturing at me, even though they're famous people lecturing at me, it was boring. And so I left Harvard to go to St. John's, loved it. Afterwards in graduate school, I went into Chicago public schools leading Socratic seminars for kids. They loved it. I felt like I was liberating prisoners. And gradually I started creating my own Socratic schools. And one of the things that I discovered after I started creating schools was that often we attracted kids who had been miserable in regular school, public or private. I've, I've known hundreds of kids who were anxious, depressed, suicidal. They came to warm, positive, nurturing environment where they're given voice and they are respected as human beings, and within a few weeks or months they're happy, well, joyful learning. Uh, you know, I had one student who was getting D's and F's. He came to one of my schools. He was taking AP classes as middle schooler. So just dramatic differences. And it was after seeing what a difference it made for children to be in a respectful, personalized environment where they're given agency that I began looking at all of the data on adolescent mental health issues. And this was even before smartphones. So there's a lot of media right now on the role of social media in causing adolescent mental health issues. I certainly believe they're exacerbating adolescent mental health issues, but the problem existed before then. There's been a 300% increase in adolescent suicides from 1950 to 2000, well before the more recent additional increase of 30-40% in teen suicides. So there was a catastrophe in adolescent well-being that goes back many decades. Relative to previous centuries in much of the world. And as I looked into it, I'd been in public schools and I saw how disengaged and unhappy kids were. Later I saw evidence from Yale— this is just a couple years ago— that 75% of high school students are unhappy in school. That completely resonated with my experience being in large public high schools, and then two-thirds of students are not engaged in learning in large public high schools. And so if they're unhappy because they're stressed, they don't get enough sleep, they're being bullied, they're bored, and then you put them in an environment and they're not learning because they're not engaged, and then you put them in an environment where we're asking them questions, we're getting them to think, they're talking to their peers, their minds are active, they have agency, they're being respected as human beings, I see a dramatic improvement not only in their intellectual performance, but also in their well-being. So now I am writing and speaking on connection, community, meaning, and purpose as the solution to the adolescent well-being crisis. And I recently joined the University of Austin to create, as the executive director, the Adolescent Flourishing Cultures Initiative there, because not enough people are talking about the role of connection, community, meaning, and purpose, uh, as a way to address adolescent mental health.

So if we go back to first principles, what do you think is the purpose of school? What do you think should be the purpose of school? How is the Socratic Experience different, uh, in that approach to traditional schools or the traditional public school model?

That's a great question. I absolutely believe the purpose of schooling should be lifelong happiness and well-being for the child. So as a faculty at the Socratic Experience, we think and talk deeply about how to ensure that we are setting each child up for lifelong happiness and well-being. And of course, professional life is an important part of that. And so I would say high-level academic skills— reading, writing, math skills— are an important part of that, but initiative, confidence, connection, community, meaning, and purpose, all of these other things are also really important for adolescent well-being and lifelong happiness and well-being. I think the problem is school started— Thomas Jefferson is known as the person who argued for the importance of education in a democracy. Back when he was arguing, For such an education, he was talking about universal literacy. And so certainly literacy is really important, but that took 2 or 3 years. And gradually over the centuries now, school has gone from let's teach basically reading, writing, and math, um, to a much larger, larger experience. And even 100 years ago in the one-room schoolhouses, things were very personalized and flexible. So one of the famous one of the greatest entrepreneurs of the 20th century, hadn't gone to school until he was 17, showed up at a one-room schoolhouse, showed that he had capable academic skills. They gave him a high school diploma. Done. Now that's unimaginable. You can't go into a public high school today and demonstrate that you were capable. They force you to take certain credits and get certain grades in order to get a diploma. It's gradually become a heavily bureaucratic process where basically the needs of the state in identifying that your child has done something. Uh, basically all public school people at this point are responsible to state mandates for accountability. And for kids for whom those state mandates are unproblematic, it's not a big deal. Again, I did memorize and forget schooling really well and easily. But a lot of kids are not happy, they're not flourishing, they're not on a positive learning path. So at the Socratic Experience, we talk about being a school for creative, entrepreneurial, and intellectual kids. And I select those 3 categories. There are many more categories of students who are not being served by regular schools. But just to start with the intellectual, many people think academic and intellectual are the same, but for me they're very different. I think of intellectual as loving ideas, loving the search for the true, the good, and the beautiful, thinking about ideas. And most of school, in my experience, was not that. There were, you know, some places, and especially some upper-level advanced courses where that started to happen, but that was at best 5% of my high school experience. And so those students who are, you know, deep readers, thinkers, philosophically oriented, I want to support them thinking, talking, discussing serious ideas as early as possible. Certainly by middle school, we've got students deeply invested in the world of ideas. And students who are like this absolutely love our program. It's an oasis in the desert. Similarly, entrepreneurial students, you know, a lot of great entrepreneurs famously dropped out of college or in some cases high school. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Michael Dell, John McAfee are a few of the many famous entrepreneurs who dropped out of college. Richard Branson dropped out of high school. I've got a business partner, Michael Thorup, who's an entrepreneur, makes 6 figures a year, 7 figures a year, and he dropped out of middle school. So to be an entrepreneur doesn't require the standard schooling. You do need, you know, again, high-level reading, writing, math skills. You know, in some cases, Michael is dyslexic, so he listens to audiobooks rather than read. That's totally legitimate. And you need up through high school, maybe up through middle school arithmetic, and then some, a little bit of finance. But standard high school math courses are not relevant to most entrepreneurs. You know, certainly the ones who are MIT engineers have a ton of math, but there are a lot of entrepreneurs who are very successful with little more than middle school math plus a little bit of finance. And so as a consequence, we offer that path for our entrepreneurial students in high school. They can do entrepreneurial finance as their math program instead of standard standard algebra, geometry, Algebra 2, calc. So that's the intellectuals and the entrepreneurs. Uh, and also the entrepreneurs are very grateful. Our program gives them a lot of space. I spoke to an amazing entrepreneur yesterday, a kid, 16-year-old, who is going to come to our school in part so that he'll have a lot more time to focus on his businesses in a supportive environment with other kids and a faculty who support this way of life. Um, so great place for entrepreneurial students. Then finally, the creatives. Probably 40% of our students are creative professionals or creatives. They don't yet identify as creative professionals. A lot of creatives, you know, know they— what do I— I always ask students, what do you love? What do you do in your spare time? And very often, you know, I love to draw, I love video, you know, sometimes I love textiles, you know, they, they say sewing or making things. Yeah, sometimes it's more a matter of working with wood or metal. There are lots of different ways of being creative, but one of the things that many creatives have in common is that standards schooling doesn't speak to them. Again, just jumping through hoops that don't mean anything when we can support them in, you know, developing creative projects and getting on a path towards being a creative professional. You know, in our electives, we often have digital skills topics such as audio engineering, software development, video production, photography. These skills that now are worth serious— or a path to serious income in the digital world. And then the creatives also love the intellectual dialogue. They want to think, and they want to be free to think how they— their own ideas and explore their own ideas. So I think the way we do Socratic is amenable to our creatives. And then our projects and digital skills support them in what they really love. And it's a really great fit. So again, a lot of creatives would say this is the best program they've ever been in. So in sum, in a regular school, everybody's been marched through a curriculum that must meet the needs of the state. Teachers are required to teach, you know, 8th grade science and 10th grade history and yada yada yada. And as a consequence, the teachers don't have a lot of freedom to really dig down into the interests of intellectual, creative, and entrepreneurial students. And so in my view, we've got 75% of students are unhappy, two-thirds not engaged in learning. You could think of this intellectual, creative, and entrepreneurial as a tiny sliver of 2%, 5%. I think most students on their own are interested in ideas, intellectual. They may not identify that way. They are entrepreneurial a lot, not all, but a lot of students are very interested in making money. How do you make money? How do you do things? How do you start projects? And then creative. A lot of students, a lot of students love to create, and that creative capacity is being squelched. You know, Steve Jobs is among the many people have noted that School kills creativity. Sir Ted Robinson, uh, most famous TED Talk for a long time: schools kill creativity. So we're an oasis for intellectually inclined, entrepreneurial, or creative students.