Socratic dialogue for young entrepreneurs - A Conversation with Michael Strong

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

My role as a thinker and writer in coming to an ultimate evaluation is fundamentally human, and we give up on that, we're not educating our kids for the future. And I think this process of open-ended Socratic dialogue where they're responsible for having an opinion is the core concept for how to sustain thinking and writing into the future with AI.

Hi everyone, welcome back to this week's episode. My name is Tim Logan and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. Too often, simplistic arguments against educational change are that providing more opportunities for increased agency for young people, for example, following their own questions, inquiries, and cares, etc., means less rigor, depth, and intellectual stretch. Anyone who's been involved in these approaches in sustained ways knows that that simply isn't the case. However, the myth persists. This week, it's my great pleasure to be in conversation with Michael Strong, who has had an extensive career in many different educational systems and approaches, but with a fascinating mix of classical practices such as Socratic dialogue along with entrepreneurial skills. Michael is one of the most experienced innovative school program designers in the US. Most recently, he is the founder and CEO of Socratic Experience, an online academy blending classical and entrepreneurial education, as well as the Flourishing Adolescent Cultures Initiative at the University of Austin, Texas. He's also the author of The Habit of Thought: From Socratic Socratic Seminars to Socratic Practice, as well as the lead author of Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World's Problems. Michael was also the original co-founder of Conscious Capitalism with John Mackey, Whole Foods fame, and he's also married to the incredible Senegalese entrepreneur Magatte Wade.

Fantastic. Well, thank you, Michael, for joining. I've had the real privilege of going deeply into your work to understand quite a few decades now worth of work in the broadly, you could say, progressive education space. But I know that's a sometimes a strange term, but I think, you know, you've been really pushing at the boundaries of whether it's Montessori or the Socratic work that you do. You've been doing that for, so I'm very, very interested to learn more about what you've learned over those decades and what you're seeing now perhaps about the way things in education might be changing and moving. So yeah, thank you for joining.

Well, thank you. Yeah, it's fascinating. Maybe it might be helpful to to give sort of a trajectory of how I got where I am. And then, you know, you and I can compare notes on how things have changed over the years. Going way back, there's a university in the United States, a college, St. John's College, with campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe, where for 4 years, all one does are Socratic discussions of classic texts. It includes classic texts of math and science, but no lectures for 4 years. You just read something and discuss it. And they call them tutors rather than professors. The professors ask questions. And they're open-ended. Reason and evidence are the only authority. And what's funny about this, going back to your, the adjective progressive, is in one sense it's very progressive. What? No professors? No authority? On the other hand, it's very ancient. So this was, I actually left Harvard to attend St. John's because I loved it so much. I am bored by lectures, no matter how famous the people are talking at me. It bores me silly. To this day, if I go to a conference, I skip all the talks and I just hang out with people at lunch, coffee breaks, and dinners. But then after, when I was in graduate school after attending St. John's, Mortimer Adler had created what he called the Paideia program. Mortimer Adler was a prominent 20th century intellectual. How to Read a Book was his most famous work, and justifiably so. Paideia was the term for both child upbringing, well, and education in ancient Greece and Rome. And so there are wonderful books about Paideia being the model of education from about 500 BC to about 300 AD. So an 800-year stretch where this was And part of it is a focus on moral, the pursuit of the true, good, and the beautiful by means of conversation. So there's a very ancient set of roots. And yet in the 20th century, education had become very bureaucratic. I'm US-based. You can speak to the UK situation, but certainly in the US, it had become very bureaucratic, very top-down. You know, I'm interested in the one-room schoolhouse in 19th century America because I think public schools then were much more flexible. I read an account of one of the great 20th century entrepreneurs who hadn't been to school until he was 17. Went to a one-room schoolhouse, the teacher said, yeah, I'll give you a diploma. Whereas now I run into kids who are brilliant, who can't move great ahead because the system does not allow that kind of flexibility. So by the mid-20th century, it became a bureaucracy. And so in the Paideia Project, the original model was once a week Socratic seminar. We read a text and discuss it. And when I first started doing this in inner city Chicago in the 1980s, I felt like I was liberating prisoners. The kids were so eager to talk and discuss ideas. It was so much fun. And I then took a job in Alaska where in Alaska, instead of once a week, they were doing it 5 days a week, say, in language arts class or history class. And the reason for doing it more was to develop habits. And this will get into a theme. Often teachers like the idea of asking students questions and having lively discussion. And often we discover it doesn't work. You ask a question, falls flat, the kids don't care, or they argue and they're aggressive. And there are all sorts of failure modes. But one of the things my colleagues and I in Alaska figured out is to get to the success success mode more consistently, you needed to develop habits. And I say consistently because there are also cases where any teacher can have a class discussion and it's just amazing. But it's really about how do we go from occasionally it's amazing to consistently with more populations, more difficult. And it was a matter of developing habits. And in particular, there were 3 underlying habits we were focused on developing. One was learning to read. And of course, you know, I'm mostly secondary. In 7th grade, they know how to read, but do they know how to read analytically, carefully, slowly. And this is sort of more of an Adler, but let's think about what we're reading. And that's not something that most students naturally know how to do, especially in a digital age when reading is becoming an esoteric skill. I, I joke that it's becoming like Greek and Latin.

Yeah, that's true.

The second one is group dynamics. You know, if some students are aggressive or dominating or, you know, whatever it is, insulting, then you're not going to have a successful conversation. So we paid a lot more attention to group dynamics and included a debriefing session at the end, coaching students on how to behave I have a rubric in the book. I have a book, The Habit of Thought, that includes a rubric which, with some behavioral descriptors, you need to have a healthy social interaction for this to work. And then finally, the third prerequisite is taking ideas seriously. You know, as an adult person interested in ideas, you take ideas seriously. I take ideas seriously. All of those of us who talk about ideas as adults, we take ideas seriously. You're an experienced educator. Not all, say, 7th graders or 10th graders take ideas seriously. They're, what's the assignment? How do I get it done? What do we need to do to get an A? And so we had to spend time explicitly on what is just, what is unjust, what is fair, why does it matter? And of course, in their social lives, they really care about these things. Nobody— give you a quick technique. If I want to get a class that's not interested in ideas going, I'll say, do you care if your best friend betrays you? You know, of course they care if their best friend betrays them. And so they're kind of humanistic universals you can always go to. And yet when I read Plato, should we bring our best friend to justice if he has done an injustice. You know, it gets into questions. Is that a betrayal of your best friend or not? Or is that the higher good for your best friend? And so part of getting them to take ideas seriously is go from their direct, immediate social reality where they're very passionate to these more abstract, generalized ideas. So those, you know, we got going and we were on grant money in Alaska for 3 years. Then we ran out of grant money. Some parents asked me to start a private school because they loved what we were doing. So I became an accidental education entrepreneur. This is in 1994, I believe. And since then I've been creating private schools, one charter school based on Socratic dialogue with more and more consistency where my number one goal as an educational leader is let's get a deep commitment to these underlying habits of intellectual dialogue, faculty-wide, student-wide.

That's fantastic. No, I think that's a really good context setting. No, I really appreciate it. And obviously for those who aren't aware, you're also now taking that into the online space with Socratic Experience, which I'd love to talk to you about briefly and flourishing Adolescent Cultures Initiative as well at University of Texas, right? But just before that, because I think one of the things that I find so interesting is how, and this is one of the reasons that I was really keen to talk to you, is how much there is looking backwards, let's say, in the history of education that somehow got lost with, like you say, the transactional bureaucratic instrumentalizing of the systematic education approach. But if you look back beyond that, there was, there's all this richness and, you know, a lot of the same language. You're talking about flourishing, talking about inquiry and dialogue and collaboration and lots of the similar kinds of themes that, which are coming up again now as supposedly innovations that we want to bring into the education space. But actually there's a, there's a remembering, right? There's a bringing back. And I think that's really powerful. And one of the things that, for example, I found really inspiring was the Trivium, reading about the Trivium. You know, the first three liberal arts and just how much the inquiry and the grammar and the dialectic, how universal some of those dynamics are. It's, you know, and it cuts across the polarized conversation about education that it's either knowledge or it's skills. There's so much richness in the way that these ideas were held in tension and through the Socratic dialogue, you then bring a lot of those things, as you say, as you are collaborating and discussing with other people. So just to reflect, I think it's, it's a fascinating thing that's happening. That we can learn from.

Well, thank you. And, and just to comment a bit on that, you know, I follow a number of people involved in what I'll call the pedagogical wars on Twitter, where the traditionalists are always bashing inquiry learning, bashing discovery learning. And of course, there is a whole research literature showing how it doesn't work and that sort of thing. And at the same time, in the United States, there's a classical school movement that very much looks to the trivial, and they also respect the philosophical tradition. The way I interpret it is if these things are implemented poorly, of course, they're not good. And there's a sort of stereotype of inquiry learning where you just expect the kids to figure it out on their own. No. You know, and I often talk about mini lectures. If they need a little bit of factual background, even though I'm primarily Socratic, occasionally they do need a little bit of background knowledge. And I'll just get up and do a 5, 10-minute lecture to give them that bit of background knowledge they need and then back into the inquiry. Yeah. But I want them thinking about it. About things. And so I usually don't get involved in the pedagogical battles because both sides are kind of stereotypes. And I think as real practitioners, we want to create in our individual classrooms and in our schools practices that are effective at getting kids to think and learn. And it really is not a dichotomy. It's really— give you one concrete example. One point I was working with a teacher who had been teaching the French Revolution for 17 years, and she had a 3-week unit. And I said, well, I want 2 weeks of this for Socratic dialogue on Rousseau's inequality. And she was like, oh no, I only have 3 weeks, but she let me do it because kids weren't interested in 3 weeks on the French Revolution. But after spending 2 weeks reading Rousseau and talking about inequality, when she finally had a week for the didactic, now they get why there's such passion and violence. You know, I think in a disembodied textbook, who cares about the sans-culottes? But if you've been riled up about inequality and you hear all these arguments, then, oh my gosh, this was explosive. And then they care. And so a lot of this is is getting kids to think and talk in ways that are meaningful to them. You know, as an educator, I always like the example of you throw spaghetti at the wall and see if it sticks, and you want stuff to stick. And in so much of education, it, it just doesn't stick.

It doesn't. Yeah, absolutely. But I, I wonder perhaps you could talk just briefly about the, at a very basic level, the, the structure that you would go into a classroom using with a Socratic dialogue, because I think one of the things I find very interesting is, and as you say, there's this strawmanning of these, of the caricatures of the other side of this pedagogical culture war, actually there is something very important about an enabling structure to provide opportunity for space, you know, for the young people to bring in themselves, for agency, for bringing meaning and purpose into it. But it, it's actually like there's something about the structure in which it is facilitated that allows for that rather than quashes that if it's done well. And so maybe, yeah, maybe you could just speak to the Socratic dialogue just briefly.

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I'll focus a little bit on the, the 4 core disciplines, language arts, social studies, science, and math, because it's different in each case. But our basic structure is, and yeah, I have a virtual school, The Socratic Experience, which is doing a virtual version of what I've done for 30-some years in person. But the basic classroom structure is 15 to 1. You know, I've done Socratic dialogues with 20 in a public school, 30. With 30, you really need to do an inner circle and an outer circle, and it's hard energy up on the outer circle. You know, sometimes you can do it smaller groups, but 15 to 1 is a nice, you know, 10 to 15 is kind of a sweet spot. So that's the basic structure. And then starting with language arts, which is, and I hate the term language arts, but in what might be called a traditional English class, it's mostly literature. We read a lot more philosophy, certainly read some literature, but we want kids thinking about ideas. You know, Plato is a great place to start. And depending on the level of the student, for more advanced students, they read outside of class. For less advanced students, we might actually read the text together in class. I like to read very difficult material. My standard is a text that is so difficult no student can understand the text on their own.

Yeah.

And the reason for that is then there's an immediate puzzle solving. Often teachers want a controversial topic. Let's do a political topic. And the kids come in and yell at each other for a while with arguments from elsewhere. And there's not a lot of thought. Whereas if we read a passage from Buber or Plato or Toni Morrison or James Baldwin, their first reaction is, what does this say? It doesn't make any sense. I have no idea what this says.

Yeah.

And you know, I have a book called The Habit of Thought. My goal is to get them to think. And by means of having something that's difficult to read, but then initially, this is part of training them how to read. We go through it paragraph by paragraph, clause by clause. Why is it a semicolon rather than a period? That sort of thing. To give you an analog to help understand how I see a text, at one point I was in a 4th grade classroom and we had 3 one-paragraph passages, one in French, one in Spanish, and one in German. And the students didn't know any of these 3 languages, but turns out there were sufficient cognates in the 3 languages that almost like a puzzle, they could figure out.

Interesting.

Yeah. And so that's sort of my paradigm. You know, you take a difficult paragraph, can we make sense of this? And so it is kind of a learning club. How do we make sense? And then they're collaborative because If the goal is to make sense of something that's opaque, we have to think about what it means and we have to be constructive in our comments. We can't just, you know, accuse each other of being racist or something. It's like, how do we do this? So we train them to learn how to read and discuss ideas. And yeah, in an English class, typically 4 days a week we're doing this activity and maybe 1 day a week writing. And it doesn't need to be strictly 4 and 1. Maybe it's interspersed throughout, but roughly 80% 20% thinking and talking about ideas, 20% developing the art of writing. And of course, as somebody who writes a lot, I think of writing as primarily thinking. I often say I hate school and love learning. What I really hated were language arts classes where I would get this arbitrary prompt, write on the symbolism of blah, blah, blah. What? Whereas when we have thought about something at some point, my favorite description, some writer said, I want to write the way a cow needs to be milked. You know, it's just, it's bursting.

You just have to.

And so you want these kids to have thought about it so much much. Yeah. Uh, and that's of course a high-end extreme, but they really do care about the writing when they've been talking to their friends about it. They've been arguing about it and they develop a strong personal voice in the writing. So that's a, you know, language arts extreme. Then history, you know, is a little bit more didactic content, but it could still be 30% discussing text, 40% coverage of history. Science, it's maybe down to 10 or 20% discussion of ideas and the rest more didactic problem solving. And then math, it might be relatively rare, the Socratic, but, you know, still some sense of we can think about anything. So that's kind of a high-level sketch. We want to develop the habits rigorously, especially in language arts and social studies, and then have this sort of way of thinking be respected across the program.

Yeah, amazing. And What you're saying there about just really going and committing to a complex text is, you know, I'm sure there's lots of teachers out there kind of feeling there's an easy move to say, oh, actually this is just too difficult for these students. You know, we'll find something that's more on their level. And sometimes there's a dumbing down of the content and, you know, the ideas within the text. And so I really appreciate that, you know, there's a collaborative collective commitment to understanding together, because I think that's also an— that feels like an important insight for young people to be getting as well, especially now, even more so now, I think that one mind brain is insufficient to understand anything really that we're coming up against now. We need multiple perspectives and we need a collective intelligence to, so I think there's something important there. Could you just say a little bit about one of my curiosities as you were talking was what's the teacher doing, the, the educator, the facilitator, whatever system you're in, whatever name you wanna give to it, but what's the adult in the room doing during this to facilitate That's a great question.

And then I want to get to something related to that. So primarily asking questions. So I'll give you a very simple format. Again, my book has a lot more. Suppose this is a class, we're going to read the paragraph together in class. And what do you think it means? How do you make sense of this? Or I might even start with kind of a metacognition question. Go around on a scale of 0 to 10, how well do you understand this? 10 is you understand every clause, every paragraph, half every word. Zero is you're not even sure what language it's in. Maybe it's Mandarin, maybe it's Polish. Of course, they're all more than zero, but, you know, give them a sense of understanding it's not binary. I think one of the background things we're fighting against is the primary model in education remains didactic, where the teacher transmits content, the student is examined on whether or not they had that content accurately. And if the student's understanding is this is a game where the teacher's just not telling us, go ahead and tell us already, or I'm going to be judged as to whether my answer is right or wrong, it totally destroys the process. So the teacher needs to be authentically open-ended. And yet, reason and evidence is, as you go through the paragraph, well, your interpretation is this, but how do you explain that word or that sentence? So teachers reasoning and thinking and following student reasoning and thinking, very often I will rephrase something a student said. So a student provides an interpretive hypothesis. I might say, so Tim, it sounds to me as if you're saying that this means blah, blah, blah. Have I gotten that correctly? And so I'm reflecting back to them my understanding, and often it's— I clarify things because I've got a lot of experience in the world of ideas. But I want them to be comparing propositions about what the text means between their own mind and the text and among students, and really relating how to reason through to get to an answer in the text. Yeah. And it is important that it be based on evidence. And so occasionally I will get to a point where where there's a student who has an interpretation, and I know it's wrong, but I can't find evidence in the text to show her why it's wrong. And I might say, you know, that interpretation does make sense based on the evidence you've provided. It turns out that if you ever have to take a test on this, this is what, you know, people will say it means because— and often it's because there's extraneous information they didn't have.

Right.

You know, had you known this, then you would know. But I want to be— I want to have a very clear separation between didactic content between the student on the one hand and the authentic agency-based situation and inquiry-based situation on the other. Because one of the worst ways to kill this is if the students believe they're being manipulated. Oh, the teacher wants me to get to this answer. I used to give a lot of demonstration classes in public schools in the US. And often the students, and especially in gifted programs, would, in the middle of a dialogue I was leading, they would turn to the teacher and say, I don't know what answer you want. That's exactly right. Mostly, a lot of our best students are used to guessing what answer the teacher wants.

Yeah.

You know, in poker, this thing, you know, a tell, and you don't want to give the students a tell. You want them really to have to reason it out on their own.

Yeah.

You know, and then just going, you know, in the background, I want to say something about writing. You know, there's a great concern that AI, GPT, whatever, are destroying instruction and student writing, high school, college. There's some debate as to whether or not people will need to learn how to write. I think thinking and writing are actually going to be more fundamental. You know, The entrepreneur Peter Thiel actually believes that the future, because of AI, verbally talented people will be more valuable than mathematically talented people. And one way I think about this, my son is a senior data scientist at Amazon. Amazon has a culture where at the beginning of meetings, you know, you write a memo and everybody reads the memo together for like 20 minutes at the beginning of the meeting and then discusses it. And, you know, as mathy as my son is, his main work is writing memos for discussion in meetings. And he has to make, of course, very sophisticated judgments about what matters. And this is not something you can outsource to GPT. And so I just use that as one personal vignette of students will need to think and evaluate and write clear, coherent summaries of that. And it's fine if they use GPT to support. I think of GPT as great for filler garbage when you're writing.

Exactly.

If there's something, I'll have it do the summary. But my role as a thinker and writer in coming to an ultimate evaluation is fundamentally human. And if we give up on that, we're not educating our kids for the future. And I think this process of open-ended Socratic dialogue where they're responsible for having an opinion that they can defend vis-à-vis their peers in real time is sort of the, the core concept for how to sustain thinking and writing into the future with AI.

Yeah.

No, fantastic. And can I just ask just a few quick questions? One curiosity I had was, do you also train the young people to become the facilitators of the dialogue?

Absolutely. Thank you so much for that. Yeah. And it's a natural process actually. Actually, going back to St. John's, one of the really interesting things that St. John's does, usually it's thought of traditional great books and so forth, but to teach there, whatever your PhD is, you have to teach all subjects. So if you come in with a PhD in physics, you have to teach Greek. PhD in Greek, you're going to have to teach physics. And, but the idea is the leader is simply the best learner or most experienced learner in the class. And I happen to be good at math. So by my senior year, I was in essence leading some of the math classes where the PhD in finch, didn't know what was going on, right? So I'm very radical that way. And this is extremely progressive, is if the students become really capable at the practice— and I do see it as a practice in an Aristotelian sense— yeah, that as they develop artistry in the practice, then they naturally take on more of a leaderly role. And very often the adults will back out. We do have a specific role where students can become, as it were, trainees or apprentices in our classes. And very often, even in middle school, we'll give leadership of a portion of a class or a bit of a class. And so there is a gradual transition where a community of practitioners, actually as faculty, we do Socratic seminars together as faculty, and faculty love that. One of the things they love most about my schools. And then, yeah, the students gradually become part of what we do. And I've got a number of graduates, one graduate who's working with me now, and other graduates who are in apprentice, adult apprenticeship programs to work. So it really is, you know, it's joyful to be thinking and talking about ideas in a warm intellectual environment. And so of Of course, we're all just doing this because we love doing it and we're developing our practice with it.

Yeah, I love it. And, and the other question was, when you say text, you see text in the broadest sense, so it's not necessarily a written text, but it could also be a visual text or, you know, some musical text or something that invites responses in other ways that are non-propositional.

Absolutely. Absolutely. So certainly we do a lot of, you know, paintings and images. We've done music, you know, we've done in person, it's hard to do virtually, but laboratory experiments. So you're absolutely correct. A text can be anything. I would say the advantage of working with words on a page is that it does constrain— going back to the reason and evidence— students looking at a painting don't always on their own have a solid sense of reason and evidence to get to an interpretation.

Yeah.

It often tends to be much more what I feel, whereas if they've been trained sufficiently on texts, then they can carry it over to visuals. And then very differently with music, if people are well-educated music theory, then they can do incredibly sophisticated Socratic dialogues on music. In the absence of that, it tends to be kind of an emotional response. So, uh, yeah, any text, but certain kinds of background expertise are more relevant.

Yeah, I know that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, definitely. And then just moving on slightly to your Socratic experience, experience now, what have you learned from taking that into the virtual environment?

Well, it's a great question. I would say, of course, it's a little bit trickier to get students who are not engaging if they're in front of you in the room. Room, you know, you can get them engaged more directly. You just have better cues about who's engaged in what way and so forth. And so I would say that's a bit more of a struggle. We do insist on cameras on because of course cameras off, you've got nothing.

Yeah.

One thing we do in person, but it's perhaps more important online, is debrief. So at the end of a session, last 5 minutes or so, we'll go around what was most valuable, least valuable, what was the best part, the worst part, some kind of feedback mechanism because especially with quiet students, you want to know, are they quiet because they're thoughtful, because they're angry, because they're tuned out and playing video games, because, you know, they're afraid? There are countless different ways in which they're not engaged, and you really need to understand why they're not engaged, and that way you can use that information to get them more engaged. We also have a system where every student has a mentor who meets one-on-one, 30 minutes every 2 weeks, and the mentorship is really important to increase engagement because is, you know, in those 30 minutes, the mentor can kind of do a deep dive in terms of what's going on in the classes, how's it working for you. And then ultimately, I'll go more broadly, our real goal— this gets into the entrepreneurship and creative professional part of what we do— our real goal is for students to take responsibility for their education and their life. We all dream of kids who are just so motivated, and I think all educators are frustrated. What do we need to do to get the grade? And sadly, the default, certainly most public schools, but I think even most private schools, is what do I need to do to get the grade. Whereas in the mentorship piece, we're helping them build a future, this Socratic dialogue, getting them to think about their own ideas. We have a personal growth section where we have a 2-hour block that's called Socratic Humanities. The first hour is personal growth where we talk about how do you set goals? How do you learn from your mistakes? What do you do if you're not getting along with a friend? Much more direct, immediately relevant. Then the second hour, we go into the classical texts, more philosophical. Difficult. But what this does is personal growth. They're spending time thinking and talking about who they are and how to be a better version of themselves. The mentorship one-on-one, they're getting coaching on how to be— set goals and go somewhere they want to go in life. And then the background philosophical conversations really get them thinking about what they believe the true, the good, and the beautiful is. And so collectively, these elements give them more of a sense of direction. And then finally, we have have, you know, the expectation in high school is they're all doing an entrepreneurial or creative project. We have showcases twice a year where students show what they've been doing. And I would say our top third are doing amazing projects. The middle third are kind of in progress. And then we've got another third who are just like, what? I'm expected to take initiative? You know, and they're usually new and it takes a little while and so forth. But I would say collectively, you know, the, the goal is to have a school environment where where it's all about where am I going in my life and am I responsible for my direction in life. And once you get students to a certain point, they actually crave this. And the students hate the meaninglessness of most schools.

Yeah.

And so, you know, I think standard schools are kind of caught in a catch-22 where the teachers don't like the meaninglessness of it and the students don't like the meaninglessness of it, but it's hard to get to a different position where everybody's engaged in a direction that's meaningful for the students.

Yeah. No, I, I have, thank you. That's so good. 'Cause that's where I wanted to go next was the segue into the entrepreneurial. But I think at a superficial level, someone might see Socratic dialogue and entrepreneurial spirit as two very different things. But actually what you've just articulated there, I think is a really powerful through line of this initiative and agency and responsibility, personal responsibility or commitment to your own personal growth. And how do you answer the world when it's speaking to you about what, what needs to be done here and how do I step into that space to do it? I think there's something really interesting that connects them. But I, I was really curious to hear a bit more about your experience in that entrepreneurial space, because I think as an educational entrepreneur, as you said, a reluctant one. Yeah. Perhaps initially, but clearly it's been a big part of your career story is how to inspire entrepreneurial thinking and, and acting. Building those capabilities in a way that's, well, I think goes way beyond education. Am I right?

No, absolutely. And I'll kind of back up to your perceived and, you know, conflict between the two worlds. So, you know, at the extreme, there are intellectuals who are solely in the world of ideas who don't care at all, or maybe aggressively anti-business and don't care, but perhaps have never taken the initiative to start their own project of any kind. And at the other extreme, there are some very narrow business people that are strictly about about making money and gaining status and have no patience for meaning and purpose. Those are the extreme polar opposites. Between that, I'm very interested in kind of independence and initiative. I'm very big on Emerson, self-reliance, and I see a through line from Socrates asking questions, getting people to think independent in ancient Greece to the kind of 19th century American spirit of just do it. I even think the founding of the United States To hell with King George, we're going to create our own country.

Right.

You know, for me, entrepreneurship has very broad connotations of taking initiative to get things done. And, you know, from that lens, I think everything wonderful and of course many bad things as well were done by people taking initiative. And so for me, that's why it's so important that the students be responsible for their own lives and not be passive. I'm also a big fan of John Taylor Gatto, you know, New York State Teacher of the Year, who described conventional education as training in how to be passive and dependent. And so we really want people who are independent thinkers They also have a sense of meaning and purpose. And then part of their direction in life is how do I take initiative to achieve my goals? I actually teach a purpose class based on the famous ikigai diagram. What do you love? What are you good at? What will the world pay for? What does the world need? Because I want students to be thinking about these 4 things and how to integrate them in their own lives from a young age. And so gradually we get students taking initiative and trying things. And the whole atmosphere is let's take initiatives and try things. And I, again, And there's, you know, an epidemic adolescent mental health crisis. And of course, I think that, you know, social media, Jonathan Haidt, Jane Twenge are onto something there. But I think the flip side of that is if life is meaningless, they have no sense of purpose, no sense of agency, of course they're going to be vulnerable to this. Whereas for me, the real way to address the adolescent mental health crisis is connection, community, meaning, and purpose. If they're built based in a community where they feel warm and supported and they are developing a sense of initiative and agency where they can go out and do something that is meaningful to them, in my experience, they are much happier. And, you know, it kind of addresses all the other issues.

No, I mean, I couldn't agree more. I think there's some, it's the bullshit jobs, right? David Graeber. And it's the bullshit jobs in the organizations and corporations are just, you know, are, have a, have their equivalents in the schools. Is it, you said earlier, they kind kind of the young people sometimes break the fourth wall almost of, of school and cuz they know what's going on, they know what the game is and they know how to play the game and it's meaningless, right? Sometimes you'll get students who will engage with the ideas.

Yeah.

Hopefully frequently, but the actual game is not about that and they'll call it out. And, and so as I completely agree with, there's something much more enlivening about being able to engage in meaningful work. And I think there's a really important injunction to adults to give that to young people at a very young age. I think we often hold that back 'cause they're not ready for, to do really meaningful work. So we have to kind of create these false projects or these things which are a, a superficial pretense at the reality of the job because the reality's too complex or painful or whatever. And I think there's so much learning in engaging with genuinely meaningful work.

Huge. Maria Montessori talked about valorization and what she mean, meant by that is teens need to feel valued in their communities. And I think I think it's a fundamental need. And again, going back to the adolescent mental health crisis, if they don't feel valued by their communities, there's something fundamental to their development that's cut off. And, you know, then the question is, how do you do that? But for one, of course, if they're engaged in dialogue, if they are helping us to figure out what the heck is Kant saying or whatever, there's an immediate valorization that they are part of a community that's working together. But beyond that, to go to the more entrepreneurial and creative direction, You know, digital work provides incredible opportunities for teens. You know, we've got certainly coding, a lot of— I've spent the last 20 years in Austin and San Francisco, and I've known a lot of great student coders, some of whom developed great companies based on that. But also, you know, writing. Somebody who's a writer can now publish in all sorts of venues. Now I've got students publishing in Medium and fan fiction. Atlas Obscura is a publication about exotic tourist destinations. I had students publish articles there, a million monthly page. Yeah. So they're contributing to the world in a real way. Digital marketing, I think, is undersold. People don't realize every website wants more eyeballs. And young people, digital natives, are often much better at figuring out how to get eyeballs from Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, you know, Twitter, whatever. And so there are a lot of roles that young people can play where they actually have a comparative advantage. And it can be tiny. You know, I had a student who learned to code and there's a website called Replit where he would make $20 doing, writing some code, but he feels valuable in the world because he could go out there. And, you know, I'm all for in-person things, lawn mowing business or fixing engines, or, you know, there's some things you can't do digitally. But because I have a virtual school, a lot of our kids are engaged in some kind of virtual work.

Yeah.

And gives them this sense of, yeah, I'm, I'm doing the adult thing.

Yeah.

Amazing.

Lots of adults are very successful who started as teens doing digital work.

Yeah, absolutely. And that leads me towards a kind of a suspicion that I had, I have to say, to be perfectly honest, was very much challenged by Magat Wade, your wife, thinking about the idea of bringing more deregulated markets to Africa and enabling more entrepreneurial spirit in different African countries. Because I think one of my particular passions is about the climate crisis. I think we, you know, we are in big trouble and very simplistically it can be framed that business has a lot to answer for in terms of the way that it has generated a narrow profit incentive, which has exacerbated many of those dynamics around growth and carbon emissions, et cetera. And so there is a slightly simplistic argument that the business is the baddie and that, you know, we need to actually rein in some of that consumerism and, and growth. And I, I think there is a significant part of neoliberal capitalism that has a lot to answer for. But I think what your ideas and your wife's ideas challenge me to think more about, what are some of those kind of impulses that underlie those, that entrepreneurial spirit that actually clearly social entrepreneurship can be entrepreneurialism for good and for, for positive social impact. But also it can be just an important thing to nurture. There's still tensions around the climate issue for me, but that it has a kind of positive net benefit by encouraging those kinds of environments where people can think and be entrepreneurial. So yeah, I guess I'd invite you to reflect on some of that slightly incoherent ramblings.

No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. I would focus on two buckets that are very different. Different. One is, should we internalize externalities? Absolutely. And what exactly is involved in internalizing externalities? You know, there you can get into cap and trade and carbon taxes and, you know, that's a sort of technical economic conversation. But of course we should internalize externalities and why we haven't been able to do that and all that, different question. But on the other hand, and I think this one is perhaps more interesting as an educator, I think many of us are frustrated by the extent to which, and here as an American, I'll throw Americans under the most, even most. I think America is at the forefront of individuality. That is materialism and status climbing. And there is, I think, a legitimate critique of American culture as simply about, you know, materialism and status or hedonism, call it what you will, and different dimensions. And I think there's a legitimate concern that we're losing a sense of meaning and purpose. And so I actually think that longer term, most kids are not excited about about, okay, I'm going to grow up and have a job that I hate and make money, whether it's a little money or a lot of money. At the end of the day, I think for most young people, that's not exciting. They want meaning. Whereas if they can envision a life where they're doing something that is meaningful, they are making a decent living. Nobody really wants to be poor.

Yeah.

But, and, but they're also in this creative adventure. I think that's important. And I think, you know, that's where maybe a David Graeber wasn't giving anybody an inspiring path forward. One thing that's inspiring, you know, I know young people just crave communities of thinkers and doers where they're building things, you know, and so I think part of what we need to do in addition to the internalized externalities issue is we need to make K-12 more meaningful and support meaningful career paths just as something that may seem not relevant, but I think it's an important part of our program that we don't stress or require college. I think in the US, it's all about test scores and grades to get into college. That's part of what enforces sort of a fear-based, anti-meaning experience in high school, where conversely, it's what do you want to do? What do you want to be? What do you want to contribute in the world? And maybe that involves college. You know, if you want to be a nurse or doctor, absolutely college, but you don't have to be. And so I find I've had a lot of students who are initially very anti-college. Once they realized it was an option and we were really, maybe you do, maybe you don't, what's, what's best? Test, then if they opted into college, they were motivated in a different way. Conversely, I've had students who were just totally into the college grind and like, you know, I would really rather do this other thing, at least for a few years. And so I think having a fear-based, anxiety-based, performance-based, and therefore meaningless adolescent education is part of the problem. I know, you know, one can't blame the business, but I think one can also blame an education system that destroys the appetite for meaning and purpose.

No, 100%. But I guess I'd also reflect that some of the role models for the more entrepreneurial path are the Jeff Bezos's, the Richard Branson's, the Elon Musk's, where of course they've been incredibly successful in inverted commas in many ways, but they've also had unintended, perhaps to be charitable, negative impacts. And I think there's a place in in our work with young people for inspiring social entrepreneurs who really have used the vehicle of business to create value, to create jobs for people, to build up communities, to do all those kind of very regenerative things. The engine of which sometimes is the entrepreneurial spirit and the businesses that are being built. There's a social purpose. And I just, I mean, I just wanted to highlight that you were one of the, you know, the early founders of Conscious Capitalism. Capitalism. Am I correct? With John Mackey? And I think—

No, John Mackey, founder of Whole Foods, and I co-founded Conscious Capitalism initially. And right, John is very purpose-driven and he's— I highly recommend his writings on Conscious Capitalism, you know, and of course my wife is very purpose-driven as well. And so you're correct, absolutely correct. And that's why even for me, it's not even as a for-profit or nonprofit. I think they're great nonprofit entrepreneurs, you know, and in my work with Conscious Capitalism and John Mackey, I've advised perhaps hundreds of social entrepreneurs, and it's just a pragmatic decision. It's better to structure this as a for-profit or nonprofit. And really, it's not about, you know, ultimately it's being purpose-driven. And so then once one is purpose-driven, then let's be pragmatic about what's the best way to achieve purpose. And then you get into hard strategic creative decisions. But I think you're right. It's important to highlight all the different meaning and purpose-based ways to take entrepreneurial initiative. And part of this is having a community of people who are not reflexively anti-business, but also are not aggressively just about making money. People who want to integrate initiative on behalf of the good with pragmatic, how do we get stuff done?

Yeah, no, absolutely. I'd love if I can just to finish up asking you about the Flourishing Adolescent Cultures Initiative, because I think that's a initiative that you're engaged in, and I just wanted, yeah, give you a bit of space to speak about that. It looks very interesting in terms of the types of things you're doing there.

Yeah, no, absolutely. Thank you. Well, first, you know, I got into this because of my love of Socratic dialogue, but over the course of founding all these schools, many of my schools were typically small. You know, often they would start 20 or 30 students. I think the biggest one was 150. So small schools. Schools. And often these would attract, you know, who goes to a new school? It's not the kids that are doing well at a conventional school.

Right.

Usually people that, you know, some of them love the pedagogy philosophy proactively, but many of them are leaving other schools because they're unhappy. And so I've known hundreds of kids that were anxious, depressed, suicidal. And over time, I saw a very definite pattern within a few weeks and a few months, they would often be happy and well.

Well.

And, you know, sometimes at a previous school, they had had, you know, their parents might have had money and have had the best psychiatrists and therapists and camps and, you know, throwing money at a problem and conventional expertise at a problem when the child was at a school that was not a good fit for who they were as a human being did not work. Whereas being— this is why for me, the recipe is connection, community, meaning, and purpose. You take a kid who is perhaps literally suicidal somewhere else and you put them in an environment where there are warm relationships and they're supported in finding a direction that's meaningful to them, and they're given the flexibility academically to do something that's meaningful for them. And some of this are children, say, with learning differences. I've had kids with, you know, substantial learning differences who are suicidal because they felt stupid at a regular school. You know, sometimes a child will be doing remedial math for 3 or 4 years, and it's humiliating, frankly. And so I just, as an educator, Hey, your genius is animation or filmmaking. Let's take a break off from math for a year or two and let's rock animation or filmmaking. And there's no space in the standard system for this way of approaching the equation. So, and then I've got a number of theoretical lines, you know, I make the case that adolescent dysfunction and mental illness is an evolutionary mismatch. That is, we evolved in small tribes where we were immersed in connection, community, meaning, and purpose. We put a kid in a meaningless, you know, large large stressful high school, and of course they're going to be miserable. There's also Durkheim, a sociologist, found that Catholics were less likely to commit suicides than Protestants, and atheists even more likely. And that research is mostly held up. There's some nuances. So there's also this independent line of thought that well-being requires connection. And then the virtues— I'm Greek enough, you know, in the philosophical sense— that we need to be immersed in a culture where we can practice the virtues. And there's a sense of meaning and purpose. So there are independent intellectual lines of evidence that I saw as complementary to my experience as an educator, and I saw this as very powerful and completely, or almost completely, undeveloped in mainstream academia. So the University of Austin, who welcomed my thesis, and our intention is to do research that looks at different kinds of schooling environments. In the US, there is some research on public, parochial, private schools, but very little on the character and wellness benefits of Montessori or IB or Quaker school or Waldorf or homeschool and unschool, self-directed. I'm very interested in how very different learning environments impact. My hypothesis is most of these smaller, more personalized experience will have significant wellness, you know, mental health benefits for children and also character, again, the initiative responsibility. So I'm excited about creating a structured research agenda that really looks at how different kinds of schooling have significantly different outcomes.

Fascinating. Yeah, that's, that's very important. I think, I mean, I, I've always said, I think there's a very important size and scale issue in education. I mean, you know, I just don't understand how we can imagine that in a factory-sized school of 5,000 young people, they can feel the same sense of belonging as they do in a something below the Dunbar number. Number, you know? Yeah. It's kind of intuitively obvious, right? And yet we keep building these huge structures in which we supposedly are educating our young people. But fascinating. I'm, I'm glad, would be very keen to share that and, and read the research when it comes, 'cause I think this is an important role for that. Huge.

Well, and just to, to go, you know, the horrible thing, most school shooters were bullied and often bullied brutally and aggressively, you know? And so some students can go to 5,000-student high school and be okay. Okay, but many students are not okay and not okay in a big way.

Yeah.

And there are lifelong damages. And of course, in a smaller school, Dunbar scale, you know, there are kids that are mean to other kids, but you can address it. You can know what's going on. You know what the relationships are and everything works much better. So very—

Absolutely. I, I think it's, there's a kind of sometimes a dismissal of the romantic idea that, you know, in these small communities, everything's rosy and everything's lovely and all these kids and adults are living their best life.. But, but as you say, you still have the same tensions and challenges and interpersonal issues, but there's an ability to relationally deal with them in a very, very different way as you would in a large school.

So, well, just one concrete example. I was, uh, actually did a charter school in a small town of about 1,200 people, you know, which is a little bit above Dunbar scale, but not a lot. And when a kid was, got in trouble with the law, we were able, I was the high school principal there, and the the judge would call me and say, well, this kid, you think what's going on with him? We talked to the police and we could kind of triangulate with really detailed knowledge about this young person and how we can help them to get to a more positive place. It's the very opposite of a bureaucracy. You know, again, in the United States, everything's become so rigid. Discipline has become so rigid. Again, this is where all the political debates are. It's either this or that, this or that. I think in successful communities, it's a nuanced assessment of what does this particular human being need in this particular context.

Exactly. I love it. And it brings, you know, comes us back right back to the one-room schoolhouse and then right back to ancient Greece and the small communities of inquiry. Yeah. Love it. Thank you, Michael. I mean, this is, yeah, absolutely fascinating. I really appreciate the conversation. Thank you.

I enjoyed it tremendously. And yeah, look forward to hearing now, as anybody who's listened, I'm super passionate about this. You can follow me on Substack, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Facebook. And I live and breathe creating healthy communities for young people based on— Thank you.

And we'll share, share all the links in the show notes as well. So yeah, thank you very much.

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