The Socratic Experience, A Purpose-Driven Online School with Michael Strong (LiberatED #74)

My guest today is Michael Strong, a longtime education entrepreneur and innovator, and now founder of Socratic Experience, a virtual school that emphasizes personalized and purpose-driven education, which I highly recommend. Michael is the author of the 2009 book Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems. Which includes a foreword by John Mackey, the co-founder and CEO, former CEO of Whole Foods Market, and with whom Michael has collaborated on initiatives related to conscious capitalism and entrepreneurship. Michael is also the author of The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice. And we'll hear more about what that looks like in his new online school focused on Socratic principles. Michael Strong, welcome to the Liberated Podcast.

Great to see you, Carrie, as always, and great to be here on the podcast.

Well, it's great to have you here. We spoke briefly on the podcast last spring ahead of a conference that you were co-hosting called the Liberation of Education Conference, which really just featured all kinds of different options and educational philosophies and approaches for families. And it was an online program and you're offering it again later this spring. So I encourage other families to look into that when that comes out in May. But it's great to have you back on the podcast today to talk specifically about your role in developing the Socratic Experience, how you came to feel that now was the moment to launch a virtual school, what you hope to get out of that. And then we'll talk about pedagogy and policy and all kinds of kind of social issues on the podcast today. So I'm thrilled to have you here. And so let's start with kind of your journey to education entrepreneurship specifically. How did you decide to become interested in various kinds of schooling alternatives and specifically launch Socratic Experience?

Thank you. So I'll do a short version of a long story, but it starts with me as a learner. I had a class in high school where we simply read and discussed philosophy. We read Plato and Nietzsche and Buber. And it was so much fun. And I'd been a straight-A student. I was good at what I call memorize and forget tests. So I'd go into every class, load it in my short-term memory, get the A and walk out. It was meaningless. But I found this and I loved thinking and talking about ideas. So St. John's College is known as a great books college. But what people don't know is it's all Socratic. So for 4 years, just think and talk about ideas. No lectures, no tests, none of the traditional apparatus of schooling. And I'd actually gone to Harvard because I had good grades, but I left Harvard to go to St. John's because I loved thinking and talking about ideas. So while I was in graduate school in Chicago at the University of Chicago, I began leading training sessions and demonstration sessions on Socratic seminars for public school teachers in Chicago with no education background myself. Through Mortimer Adler's Paideia Project. That led to a full-time job training teachers in Alaska on Socratic seminars. We were on grant money. After a couple years, we ran out of grant money, and some parents loved our program so much in the public schools, they asked me to start a private school. So I was completely an accidental education entrepreneur. This was back in '93, I believe, and I didn't know how teachers got paid, so I had to figure out a business plan and a business model and all that. And from there I got into creating schools. I then joined a Montessori school in San Antonio where I Socraticized the program and was designing a high school model, then created a school for highly gifted children in South Florida, then created Montessori middle schools for the largest Montessori organization at this time. It was in Palo Alto. Then I went to Angel Fire, New Mexico, and created a Paideia Socratic charter high school. My one charter program. I then met John Mackey, as you mentioned, and he and I created Flow, which was devoted to entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. After that whole wonderful detour, I got back into education here in Austin, and then I worked with Higher Ground Education, the largest Montessori organization now, over 100 schools, and I created a high school model for them. When COVID hit, most people were complaining about online education, how horrible it was. But it turns out conversation like you and I are having works okay over Zoom. I love being in person, but it works pretty well over Zoom. And so we had very high engagement. And so fall of 2020, I created, um, the Socratic Experience. I had 3 students that fall. Now we're about 160 students from Taiwan, Pakistan, Iraq, Mexico, Panama, teachers from Turkey, Guatemala, all over the place. So we're a thriving international virtual community. And it's fun.

Amazing. What an incredible story and great to see so much success with the Socratic Experience in such a short period of time. Can you tell us a little bit more, Michael, about what Socratic Experience is like for the students that participate? If I have listeners interested in pursuing a schooling alternative and maybe thinking about an interactive, self-directed virtual school option, you know, what is it about Socratic Experience that's so special? How does it work?

Great question. And actually, I'm glad you mentioned the self-directed. So we are kind of on— we provide more structure than most self-directed, but we provide considerable, much more opportunity for self-direction than a traditional school. So we're kind of right at the boundary, and that's intentional. Actually, just to get there, at our high school level, we actually have an accredited high school program and a non-accredited high school program. And the reason for that is in the accredited program, students are required to take standard credit distribution requirements, math and science and history and all of that. The reason we have— and they're required to get letter grades— the reason we have the non-accredited path is for high school students who want to pursue things they love without that imposed structure. And I actually encourage families to take the non-accredited. I'd say about 80 to 90% take the accredited because most families feel safer there. But, you know, as you and I know, you don't need an accredited high school diploma to have a great life, get into whatever college you want, yada yada yada. So going back to their structure, you know, I find that most kids love conversation. Human beings were made to talk. We love to talk. And so we have 4 hours a day, Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday of conversation. 2 hours is devoted to humanities. Part of that is personal growth. The teacher's guide is only to ask questions or primarily to ask questions. And we ask questions in personal growth about how do you set goals, how do you learn from your mistakes, how do you deal with anger, all kinds of things. And, you know, over time, once trust is built up, then the kids really enjoy and appreciate that. And then we also read challenging texts, often philosophical texts from around the world, various world wisdom traditions and literature and so forth. And we think and talk about ideas while learning to read difficult texts. So in that, to that extent, it's a common experience, unlike pure self-directed education. But because it's conversation mostly about things kids care about, it's engaging and fun, and they love to be together talking about ideas. We have a STEM program which combines projects as well as a Socratic science, and that again most kids like because it has that opportunity to think and talk about ideas. We do have a self-paced math program using adaptive math where students set their own math goals. And so we have students doing 2 years of math in 1 year, and we also have students doing half a year of math in 1 year. So that's highly individualized. We work with students to set math goals that work for them. And then finally, on Wednesdays, we have electives where it's a combination of academic courses like history and Spanish and so forth, finance, with 21st century digital skills, video production, software development, generative AI, cool, fun things. The kids love digital courses because that's the world they live in. Um, and then every student has a mentor who works with them one-on-one, 30 minutes every 2 weeks, to help figure out— our big goal is for students to own their own education. So whether they choose the accredited program, the non-accredited program, whatever they choose, we want them to feel a sense of ownership. And that, of course, creates for a much more positive culture than is the case at the vast majority of schools, public and private. You know, teachers, I get inbound requests from teachers to teach for us several times a week without advertising because it's really fun to work with kids to get them to own their own education and where they're doing what they love and loving what they do.

Ah, just great, Michael. Yeah, I highly recommend my listeners look into Socratic Experience, such a wonderful high-quality program. You know, you and I have been critics of the conventional schooling system for a long time for many reasons, including the fact that it doesn't allow for that personal agency and ownership over learning. You talked about your experience in school of memorizing and forgetting. That was very much my experience in K-12 public schools. And I think the experience today for so many students, especially as much conventional schooling becomes even more standardized and test-driven— I wonder if you can talk about, you know, where— what you see as some of the trends over the past couple of decades, in particular in conventional schools, that you find so troubling and that may have really led to kind of your inspiration for creating some of these alternatives?

You know, that's a great question. So first, when I got into this 30 years ago, I thought that education was about to have a renaissance of, you know, liberation of education in terms of diverse options. It's been a very slow boat. Finally, since COVID I have seen an explosion, certainly in terms of programs, openness to alternatives, and of course school choice, which we'll get into. But when I, when I started in the late '90s, in the early '90s, teachers still had considerable classroom autonomy. We could spend a lot of time in Socratic dialogue in classrooms. In the '80s, the standards movement really got going, and by the '90s it was getting real traction. And so there was a growing emphasis on standards. Of course, No Child Left Behind in the early aughts was a low point. And now there has been an increasing minimization of teacher autonomy. I'm sure you've been watching the headlines about many teachers want to leave and I think a big reason they want to leave is because they no longer can take the time to connect and be creative. It has become a test prep machine. People, teachers are expected to mechanically teach to the test. You know, I know there's a famous book, How to Teach Like a Champion, which I can't stand, you know, and it's, it's well-intentioned and for the traditional classroom, they're great rules. But as a learner and as a parent and as an educator, I would never— as a learner, I would never be in a classroom like that. And as a parent, I would never send my kid. And as an educator, I couldn't stand to do that to children. Again, I feel badly because it's very well-intentioned and it works within the limited parameters of standard schooling. But the whole— it's a 100% content transmission model. And, you know, it's interesting, most of my parents are entrepreneurs or creative professionals. I think people who are creating value in the world have no patience for jumping through hoops. And sadly, what I see is the public schools are becoming an obstacle to social mobility because people in the digital economy who have dynamic, interesting, fun jobs creating things increasingly escape from the system and the people in the system increasingly have a bureaucratized, test-driven, you know, I would say humiliating nightmare. For many kids, it's a humiliating nightmare to go to school.

That's such an interesting perspective, Michael, that the conventional system could actually be limiting mobility in more profound ways now, given our changing economy than even in the past. And you talked about teachers wanting to leave, teachers feeling that lack of creative expression in many conventional classrooms. But of course, we've spent a lot of time writing about and talking about the, the impact on students, on learners, and particularly on their mental health. This was an alarm that you and I had sounded in various articles prior to 2020, and of course since the, the COVID shutdowns and remote learning, youth mental health has deteriorated even further. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that. That's something that, that's a theme that runs through a lot of your writing and speaking, and I'd love to hear more of your thoughts.

No, absolutely. Thank you. So first, just on an experiential basis, I got into this because I love intellectual dialogue, and for me it was all about the intellectual activity. But as I created small personalized schools, and all of my schools were very small, my largest brick-and-mortar school, maybe 150 students, but in every case we would see children who would come from traditional schools and sometimes expensive elite private schools. This is not just public, but conventional schools where the content transmission was the only paradigm and one's identity was based on the grades one got in one's courses and so forth. And I would see kids who had been anxious, depressed, suicidal, learning differences, medication, sometimes substance abuse, all kinds of issues, often with an alternative school, you do get all kinds of kids. And within weeks, sometimes months, I would see them go from miserable to thriving. So, you know, just on a personal basis, when one sees this wonderful human being in front of you, and I, you know, the faces of young boys and girls who are just so alive— after a while they come and shut down, but then you realize all it takes to improve their lives is to give them love and attention, agency, purpose, positive peer environment, and they're transformed. Meanwhile, again, some of these families had lots of money and they would give their kids, you know, therapy and medication and psychiatrists and retreats and, you know, all of these things the best money could provide. But even with the best money could provide, these kids were miserable. But you put them in a different environment and they're happy and well. So for me, it's become an issue of great moral urgency, having seen for many years. Of course, you and I are both fans of Peter Gray. Peter Gray talks about how, you know, in Indigenous cultures, the kids learn by play, you know, and they're thriving. The whole, the whole issue of mental illness is a modern phenomenon at the scale it is. You know, there were occasional mental illness in the past, but anxiety, depression, and suicide like we're seeing today among adolescents, never before in history, never at such a scale. And so I think it's certainly social media is part of it, but school in itself has insofar as schooling is not a place of primarily of meaning and relationship and purpose. I think the short version for mental health is community and purpose. We have healthy, positive relationships and a sense of purpose. Doesn't solve everything, but it solves a lot. But we put kids in a place where there is no meaning for most kids. It's absolutely meaningless. There's a lot of bullying. One's identity is based either on the grades one got in school or the social hierarchy of school, or today in you know, one's Instagram account. That is, there's no real sense of, I would say, warmth. I love living in warm community with people who care. The CDC has data where simply if an adult cares about a child at school, the rates of all— most of these indicators, mental health indicators, are cut by half. So something as simple as, you know, can't we create schools where people care about kids? And again, I'm not blaming the teachers. They're in this mean nasty bureaucratic impersonal system where they don't have time really to care, and that's not what they're rewarded for. But it's truly nightmarish that we've got at such scale kids who don't feel as if an adult cares for them. So simple to improve. So I can keep ranting forever, but I'll pause and let you dig in.

So again, in the wake of the COVID education disruption, we've seen what were already skyrocketing rates of use anxiety, depression, and suicide take off even further. And politicians are responding. You see various governors and the Biden administration allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to improving youth mental health or to addressing the youth mental health crisis in public schools. And I wonder your thoughts on that. You know, is that the solution to just funnel more money into these schools when it could be the schools themselves that are leading to some of these crises?

Oh, it's a great question. I'm forgetting the name of the big organization that does social-emotional learning, but there's, you know, one big huge reputable one. I should have the name on the top of my head, but at any rate, and then social-emotional learning, huge investment in it. I looked through their website in some depth at one point, and they, you know, have what they call evidence-based you know, programs, and something like 90 to 95% of them did not involve changing the structure of schooling. So the way I think about it is until and unless we change the structure so there are— there's human connection, so that there, you know, is less bullying, so that there's more of a sense of purpose. Again, none of these goals are controversial, but that whole establishment is forced to work within what I love the expression, the grammar of schooling. So Larry Cuban and David Tyack wrote a book in which they brought up this term, the grammar of schooling, and it's public and private. You know, you have 3rd grade curriculum, 4th grade curriculum, you have report cards, you have grades, you have credits. Students are evaluated by means of standardized tests. There's a certain structure to standard schooling. And insofar as individual human needs are not being met in that structure, I don't think all the money in the world is going to change it. Again, I've seen very wealthy parents have kids struggle with these issues in traditional schooling. But just talk about purpose for a bit. You know, you need to have, you need to have something that is compelling to young people about who they are and where they're going in their life. It's one of the reasons we have mentoring. We also need to talk about purpose and meaning and so forth in an open-ended way. And kids need to be able to be honest about who they are, what they care about, what they're afraid of. We have a lot of kids, you know, there's all the negative things in the world. We spend a lot of time talking about all the negative things they're hearing about. I actually get them into prediction markets in terms of how likely is this horrible thing going to be or not. You know, there are a whole host of things about how do you live in this world and have a sense of personal goal and communities that support your goal. And I would say it's very difficult, difficult, difficult to do in a standard public school. Take another example. The history textbooks need to be approved by committees, which means that anything that might be considered offensive to any group is taken out of them. And history textbooks are very bland and boring. You know, they're designed to be as bureaucratic as possible, whereas we read real history about people disagreeing about this and that and this and that. Life is about people disagreeing and believing things passionately and having civil dialogue with each other about these things. And so, you know, I think when, when all of that money just goes to support the system, I predict it won't have a significant impact. Whereas something I'm working on is to get funding to support researchers to do ever more research on how small personalized programs, purpose-driven programs will, I think, will have a higher outcome. There is data. I'm sure you know CARDIS. CARDIS has done some research on this. The number of organizations that have done research on this, but we need a lot more research on how different forms of schooling can help students' mental health. Because I think once we do a deep dive into this, we'll see that putting a middle schooler into a 1,000-person public middle school is not a good idea for 70% of them, as a guess.

I love that idea of more research into the ways in which that just changing the structure and the setting of learning can have huge mental, emotional, and intellectual gains for kids, and really for all of us, right? That we flourish when we have more agency, we have more freedom. And, you know, you've been very focused on supporting entrepreneurship and recognizing the power of free markets. You wrote a book about conscious capitalism and, and seeing that progress and change can often happen really much more quickly and successfully through free markets. And even with Socratic Experience, you try to make the tuition for your program accessible to many families and are also working in states where they students can attend Socratic Experience through an education savings account or some other school choice mechanism that defrays the tuition cost. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how you see, you know, kind of the free market forces potentially being beneficial when we think about education and educational change.

Absolutely. And before doing so, I want to back up to your point on happiness. If you look at the research literature on happiness, it's the purpose, agency, meaning, all these things. If academia took that research and applied it to the actual experience of certainly secondary students and most elementary students, they would find that it is completely misaligned with happiness. There's just no way to reconcile what we now know to be the need, what human beings need for happiness, with what actually happens in most K-12 schools. And 75% of high school students are unhappy. Hello. So going back to your question, I describe myself and encourage all of us in this movement to describe ourselves, you as well, as entrepreneurs of happiness and well-being. No.

Yes.

And when governments control education, it becomes easier to be an entrepreneur in, you know, gambling, addiction, pornography, all as it were, those sorts of things. Whereas structurally, it's very hard for us to compete on a level playing field as entrepreneurs of happiness and well-being until we get something like the Arizona ESA program. Famously, the educational scholarship accounts of Arizona give parents considerable autonomy regarding how they spend the $7,500 roughly that are allocated to each child. And because now, and this is only since October of last year, because now Arizona parents have amazing freedom, they can select the educational program that is best for their child. And it seems like a no-brainer. We eat, we're free to eat what we want. We're free to do what kinds of recreation we want. We have a lot of freedom in all parts of our life. But somebody I knew, a parent in Arizona who moved from the Midwest to Arizona because it was a free-to-educate state. I love that, a free-to-educate state. Where now Arizona parent can find if they want a Catholic school, if they want a school for children with learning differences, if they want the Socratic experience, if they want a gifted program, whatever they want. They can pick a program, they can homeschool, they can unschool, they can pick an à la carte selection of options that is best for their child. And parents— one of the things that really drives me crazy is when education policy wonks say that parents don't know enough about education to pick their child's education. Like, parents know if their child's thriving or not. And that's the number one issue. And we're talking about, is your child going to kill themselves or not? I don't need a PhD in education. You know, is my child going to be recruited by a gang, as in Miss Virginia, the fabulous film? I don't need a PhD in education. So this notion that we need to be a policy, education policy wonk. No, thriving is number one. If children are not thriving, there's absolutely, you know, that's the most urgent issue. And I would love to have the mainstream education research establishment acknowledge thriving is a sine qua non. We can talk about test scores. We can talk about curriculum, all that. After we have thriving. But until and unless we have thriving, the whole game is rotten.

Right. So optimize for human flourishing. And to your point, parents are the best judges of that for their own children, that they're able to really see if they're, if their kids are flourishing or not and should have then the ability to select the best educational environment for their child that enables that flourishing. And so as you think about, you know, the states that you're operating in with Socratic Experience and especially ESA states like Arizona, of course, Arizona has led the way in school choice for a number of years. They've really built up a culture of parental choice in education. I love the parent that refers to Arizona as a free-to-educate state. I think that that's really true. And Arizona tends to have very few regulations for education, which encourages education experimentation and entrepreneurs like you and, and innovation. And I wonder if you can talk about, you know, what you see elsewhere across the country, what some of the hurdles might be for you as an education entrepreneur trying to bring your phenomenal school to some of these other students in other states. You know, what do you discover as you do that?

Absolutely. And again, I'm just mentioning Arizona, this wonderful organization called Love Your School. And going back to parents knowing Every child should love their school. Every parent should love their school. It should be the fact that it's not normal to love your school. That should be just shouting alarm bells. You know, Matt Barnes, good friend of mine, you know him, he's a wonderful person. He says the, you know, he used to be in medicine and, you know, people when a child is taken to the emergency room, there's a sense of urgency. And the fact that parents don't feel a sense of urgency about lack of thriving, it's like the kid's bleeding in the Emergency room. Hello, thriving. So with that little rant out of the way, um, going back to, you know, you're the one who called my attention to Iowa only allows accredited private schools. One of the reasons, again, we offer both an accredited option and non-accredited option is I believe the standard grammar of schooling, as baked into most accreditation standards, is harmful to some percentage of kids. Is it 10%, 20%, 30%? We don't know. I think no one knows the extent to which the standard grammar of schooling is harmful. Maybe it's 90%. Again, until we have an absolutely unmitigated focus on thriving, we will not know the extent to which the structure of schooling is harmful to kids. And so to give you a few case studies, you know, a lot of our kids can have learning differences. I've seen kids who have been in, you know, sometimes expensive private special ed schools, $60,000 a year, that kind of thing, where they're still forced to do remedial education. And so if Maybe math is not your thing and you're having to repeat 4th grade math for the 3rd year in a row. That's hard on one's ego. Meanwhile, they might be brilliant at animating or video production or audio engineering. You know, often these people who may have even substantial learning differences can be brilliant creatives. And one of the things we do that brings these kids back to life is forget the remediation. Let's go— people talk about strengths-based education. No, you are a genius at animation. How do we help you create Cultivate your genius. How do we help you get to professional quality digital production values within a couple of years? As a teenager, can you make money doing this? And all of a sudden they're a star of the show. They're the star of their own show. Somebody cares about them and their genius. It's so different from let's do remedial math again this year. And, you know, there's some kids, again, at some point we might want to help our creatives and we do help our creatives, say, learn to do a spreadsheet so they can manage their finances. But having, say, if they're coming in suicidal at age 13, and I mean literally, I hate to say it, but I've seen so many kids who literally wanted to die. And, you know, first thing we do is forget all the remediation. What's your genius? And we work with them on being amazing. And after a few weeks or months of, wow, people see me, they care about me, they're helping me have a wonderful life. So transformative. Whereas if we were forced to do all of the standard subjects, you know, we could still do some of our Cultivate Your Genius kind of thing, but the subtext is, yeah, you're still a loser in these things and we're going to prove you're— I'm really being mean, but this is the subtext. You know, we're, we're going to force you to do things that you're bad at, and the net result is going to be to make you feel miserable, and we'll try to help you a little bit. Again, I'm just so morally offended by this all. So for me, it's a moral campaign to create greater freedom so we no longer are forced by the state to damage kids. I see, you know, baked-in standards, accreditation, grammar schooling as a requirement to damage a certain percentage of kids.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. And I think you're right that these regulations around curriculum and accreditation can limit incredible programs like yours from being introduced to more and more families. Michael, you and I have also talked about teachers and teacher credentialing and how that can be another gate that— or another hoop that you as an education entrepreneur might need to jump through. You have educators around the world and want to be able to access talent everywhere. I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that and again, how state-level regulations could interfere with that.

Well, thank you. That's a big one. And actually, you know, Florida is known as a school choice state competing with Arizona, but Florida is much more restrictive. And in particular, the programs, Florida choice programs I've seen, all required teacher credentialing. And I don't value teacher credentialing at all. Somebody who's been in a Socratic college program like St. John's or Boston College or Thomas Aquinas, or various ones where for 4 years you're thinking and talking about ideas. That's a much better foundation. I still need to train some for the classroom, but it's a much better foundation than, you know, a teacher, an education degree. And then, of course, coming from the Montessori world, Montessori has had its own credentialing system for a century. And having a standard ed degree is absolutely of no value going into Montessori. You need the Montessori training because it's different and distinctive. So just in terms of distinctive pedagogies like Montessori, Socratic, Waldorf, you know, I think Acton Academy feels a similar need. You know, I think Sudbury probably could benefit from distinctive training as well, even though it's a democratic school. I think there are lots of ways in which distinctive pedagogies require distinctive teacher training. Separate from that, I like to hire young, certainly internationally, but also young, motivated, brilliant people. I find that If I have a 19 or 20-year-old teaching a digital skill, the kids respond in a way they wouldn't if I had a 50-year-old teaching a digital skill. You know, not to be ageist, you know, and with something like social media, digital marketing is a big thing. Everybody talks about software development. Digital marketing is an amazing opportunity. And of course, there are specialists in digital marketing in TikTok and Instagram and, you know, LinkedIn and Facebook and You know, every platform— Reddit has its own digital marketing specialty. And I find it much easier to find a TikTok specialist, digital marketing specialist at 19 than a credentialed person at 45. You know, it's just, it's silly in some of these things to follow the credentialing thing. And again, it goes back to social mobility. Suppose poor kids are forced to only be taught by accredited or, you know, certified teachers and this pipeline of fast-moving digital skills is not even available. I have a young person teaching a generative AI course. You know, generative AI, you know, ChatGPT has transformed the world. How many accredited teachers are ready to really do innovative, cool things with generative AI? You know, it's, it's at some point it'll be, it'll be self-evidently absurd that our existing pipeline of teacher trainers has no value for agency-based schools. You know, again, it might, might for traditional schools, but I see the future around agency-based schools. We need our own teacher training, teacher prep, distinctive standards, and it's, it's like a different operating system. You know, it's like trying to use Apple software on a Microsoft platform, just incompatible. And so they need to let us develop our You know, I'm obviously an Apple fan. They need to let us develop our Apple ecosystem and they can keep their Microsoft ecosystem and see where it goes.

So let's talk a little bit more about the future of these agency-based schools and learning models. You know, you talked about the many of the parents of the students in Socratic Experience are entrepreneurs or creative types. I guess we would consider them more the early adopters of schooling alternatives and some of these other innovative models. And I think that's shifted a little bit over the past couple of years as more and more families have recognized that there are additional choices available to them in terms of education. But we're still, you know, sort of on that early adopter stage, in that early adopter stage. I wonder what you think will move us and how quickly we'll move beyond the early adopters to this becoming much more of a mainstream phenomenon?

That's a great question. I think a lot of it is education and exposure, educating the public and exposing the public. You know, I live in a world where I know literally hundreds of adults who had non-traditional educations and have spectacular lives. Many people don't know anyone, you know, many— I'll pick on the Northeast. I think the Northeast is the most conventional place educationally. Where most people still think you need a high school diploma and still think you need a college degree. I would say something about the whole tech world, San Francisco Bay Area is, I would, I think it's more of a norm there that high school and college are optional. Certainly the Thiel Fellowships have done a great job of that. But, you know, Steve Jobs was a high school or a college dropout. Most of the, or many tech entrepreneurs were college dropouts. So there's a skepticism about education in the world of tech entrepreneurs. Again, Austin as well. In Austin, almost everybody here knows somebody who goes to an alternative school. They may not themselves. So if you're in a place where it's normalized and you know personally, I think there's this fear. And part of it is the system does preach. There's still people that tell parents, oh, you need this diploma and you need that credential. And that world does exist. But, you know, I track large corporations that no longer require a college degree. Actually, the Biden administration is talking about reducing, eliminating the college degree as a requirement for many government jobs. Hallelujah. You know, I think we need to increase the domain of places where degrees and credentials are no longer required. You know, occupational licensure is another relevant issue. Obama, to his credit, was trying to fight the stranglehold of occupational licensure. And so on the one hand, we need structural changes to reduce the extent to which these things are required. And then we need more exposure to people many, many thousands, probably millions at this point who have succeeded with non-traditional credentials. And then when you think about the thriving, the happiness and well-being that comes from this alternative path, at some point I think we'll see a tipping point. And once that tipping point is achieved, I think it'll be like the fall of the Soviet Union. I think at some point in the next, say, 20 years, 30 years if I'm really Crazy, but in a few decades we'll see the collapse of the traditional system and agency-based models based on performance rather than credentialism are going to win.

So 20 to 30 years, but what can parents today, parents of school-aged children today, do while they're waiting for this tipping point? Their kids will be, you know, old by the time that happens outside of conventional homeschooling, presumably, and they have to solve a problem today. You know, what advice do you have for those parents?

Well, first, follow Kerry McDonald because she's one of the best sources of information on this. Um, second, we have the Liberation of Education conference coming up May 20th, May 21st, liberationofeducation.org. We did it last year, uh, we're doing it again this year. Again this year, it's designed to expose parents to different kinds of educational options. Some of this is knowing the different things exist. You know, I've known about Montessori, Waldorf, Sudbury, Acton, you know, now with online options, you know, SORA and Prisma and, you know, Socratic Experience and, you know, dozens and hundreds— Synthesis. There's so many cool options. You know, people— again, my vision of education is people ask, what's the right kind of food? And that's a ridiculous question. You know, we have restaurants and we have gourmet restaurants and fast food restaurants and organic restaurants, and you can grow your own food and make your food at home and There are a million ways to eat and there should be a million ways to educate. Even when people talk about what's the best school, well, what do you mean? Do you want agency-based? Do you want holistic? Do you want high-performance academic? Do you want a great deal of physical activity? What do you want? Again, citing Matt Barnes, you need to have a vision for your child. Our job as parents and educators is to identify and develop the genius of each of our children and it almost certainly going to be a different genius for each child. And once you've identified the genius of your child— also Rebel Educator, follow Hannah Frankman on Twitter, @RebelEducator— follow Carrie MacDonald, come to the Liberation of Education Conference, and learn about these options. And I, I would encourage parents to learn it joyfully. You know, I think there is this anxiety of, oh no, how do I pick a school? Uh, part of what we want to do is to make learning fun and about thriving instead of this, um, you know, school district bullying you and pretentious people telling you're bad if you don't do the conventional thing. No, come find out how many fun, interesting people there are on this side of the fence. So that's my short rant for today on that.

So great advice for parents looking for a change. And again, I highly recommend Socratic Experience as a high-quality virtual learning program. But what advice do you have for education entrepreneurs like you, Michael, who might want to go off and create a new kind of school, microschool, learning pod, online learning platform, other kind of learning community? What advice do you have for them?

That's a great question. And first, I can give you more credit because you're documenting these cases. I think one of the things to look at is how to get access. Now that we're in the realm of ESAs and school choice, how to get access to those dollars? Just as somebody who started lots of small private schools, it's really hard. You know, you have to— you know, a lot of my schools started out between 10 to 20 students. Again, Socratic Experience started out with 3. I was able to keep it going until— we're still not completely in the black, but we're very close to being in the black finally. But, you know, it's hard to, to make it with 10 or 20 students and parents paying on their own. You can play with spreadsheets and look at budgets and so forth. And if, if you have some parents who can afford— enough parents to afford to do tuition, absolutely go for it. But having states where the funding follows the child is going to be a game changer for educators. That's really important for them to know. So in Arizona, the process is you apply to Arizona to become a listed you know, an authorized vendor on ClassWallet. And once you have been authorized as an established vendor, then parents can choose to, you know, basically send that $7,500 to your school. So I would encourage parents in Arizona-like opportunities, and you would know better than I, I don't even know if Utah is going to be Arizona-like or, you know, Iowa-like, but Yeah, if you can get 10 to 20 parents who have access to the government funding and you can find a low-cost space, micro schools— parent educators can create micro schools. First year is going to be brutal, it's going to be really hard. Second year is going to be better, you kind of get things going. And the third year it starts to work out smoothly and becomes fun again. So, you know, uh, ideally you get a team together, you figure out a simple— play with spreadsheets— $7,500, 10 students, That's your budget. 20 students, that's your budget. What can you do with that kind of money? Can you live on it? Can you and a partner live on it? It's really, you know, some ways it's simple. The actual work is hard, but the pathway, if assuming you're an educator, you have a vision for education, you know that you can do better in the system, and I expect large numbers of educators are in that position, and it's a matter of budget funding, marketing, branding. Physical space, you know, and get going. I want people to be starting schools much like they start, you know, restaurants. You know, I know lots of people that have a dream for a restaurant, they start a restaurant. So people with a dream or a creative agency start a creative agency. I would love to encourage thousands and then millions of educators who have a dream for a better school to figure out how to start a microschool. Start— follow Carrie to start with. And then go for it. And, you know, I'm happy to help subject to my time constraints, but I do help people start microschools fairly often. I've got a lot of experience. I know what it looks like. So yeah, you know, let's create an ecosystem making it easier. You know, there's a woman who has an organization that helps start microschools. Do you remember her name?

Marilena Berger from Microschool Builders. Yes, she was on my podcast recently. There's obviously the National Microschooling Center, other organizations that are a part of this. It's been so inspiring for me to listen to the stories of these education entrepreneurs over the past year in this podcast. And many of them, I'd say the vast majority of them, are former teachers who became disillusioned by what you're talking about, what they're seeing in the conventional system and knew they could do better for children and feel really revitalized as a result of that personally and professionally. They see that now they're able to do the kind of teaching and the kind of education that made them go into this profession in the first place. So really exciting to see that.

Yeah, I think most— just to riff on that, I think most— many of the best educators go because they care about kids. They love learning, and the system has sucked the life out of caring about kids and loving learning. And yeah, starting a microschool, you go back to really, really doing great things with kids and loving learning. Couldn't emphasize that more.

And so if parents want their kids to love learning and are interested in the Socratic Experience, Michael, how can they find out more about your program?

www.socraticexperience.com. And you can sign up for a call, and we'll have one of our admissions counselors give you a call and see if you and your child are a good fit. I would say if you're attracted to the program, odds are your child is a good fit. Um, it's— yeah, it's for the right families, it's absolute joy. But we're not about jumping through hoops, so people who like this kind of message, um, have your kid join us and let's have fun.

Michael Strong, thank you again for being on the Liberated Podcast.

Thank you, Carrie. Always good to see you.