Your Children Are Schooled to Be Factory Workers | Zach Lahn | EP 370

and so when my first son was born I had a call from an uncle and he said to me hey congratulations I was still the hospital and as a joke he said well now you need to start thinking about schools and so when my son was born and I heard that question from my uncle I thought I don't care what I have to do if I have to move somewhere or start something or what it may be I'm not going to put my children into a system that doesn't understand the gifts and abilities I have just because they don't fit on the conveyor belt [Music] hello everyone watching and listening today I'm speaking with Zach Lane the co-founder of Wonder a Socratic based school system K-12 in Wichita Kansas it's a follow-up to a discussion I had with Jeff Sandifer who's a innovator on the um on the educational front for k212 and I wanted to talk to Zach today about the details of the educational process so that parents and other people interested in childhood education could understand more thoroughly the mechanics of the of the process first of all I have holes in my memory you know because I was ill for a while and I don't remember how we met we met through Jeff eh actually was the opposite oh okay it was uh I was working in education and uh became a listener to a lot of what you were doing and uh a follower in some ways and then you had explained how you had so much interest in revolutionizing education in various different ways and so with that I reached out to you I sent a cold email to you and we met Father's Day maybe 2018 in Minneapolis and we sat down uh and we talked about education and from there it sort of spurred into this hey we're very aligned we have uh similar interests and we're wanting to see some more change and from that uh then introduce you to Jeff and we started kind of working with the Acton MBA the acting academy um and that's how it's that's how it all started I see I see now so you're deeply involved in educational transformation yeah you have a school and you're going to be taking over the actin program at some point in the future well we're taking a leadership role in the Acton program yeah sure our school we have an independent uh decentralized network is what I would say of schools and our school is called Wonder okay and who's we uh so I would say well my my wife and I co-founded our school and so that's when I say we that's usually who I'm talking about well we found wonder and the process for for me was uh Acton wasn't actually the first place I looked uh this whole thing started for me out of necessity and the reason was when I was a young kid I didn't fit in the Box I had too much energy I was probably too enterprising my parents and principal didn't know what to do with me I can remember a parent-teacher conference when my principal who was a teacher at the time told my parents if I was ever stuck on a desert island I'd want to be with Zach because he'd find a way off but that wasn't necessarily a good thing it's sort of like how do we solve that problem and so when my first son was born I had a call from an uncle and he said to me hey congratulations I was still the hospital and as a joke he said well now you need to start thinking about schools and I spent my entire life trying to get out of school basically just wanting to be done with education get into the world get into business or whatever it might be and when he said that it was one of those times that something strikes you and that struck me and I hadn't thought about it and so that kicked off what was about a five or six year Journey which was traveling the country visiting schools I probably visit over 70 schools around the country and in other countries as well uh and one of those uh was acting academy and so that's how I got connected there and so what did you see when you went and saw these schools so mostly it was this there was varying flavors or the attempt to put a different uh maybe uh screen over what was essentially the same model almost all of them were the same direct instruction model we see teacher at the front of the classroom lecturing to students students in desks all day and Days Broken up by periods now some were working more in um vocational skills there are some that were like helping young people you know learn the trades and things like that great others were quite Innovative there's some we worked with a school on the campus of MIT that was for middle school high schoolers that was quite Innovative they were very Hands-On very project oriented very project driven but what I noticed is that it was still something that was ultimately led by adults and so that seemed to be the trend everywhere no matter how Innovative the school was so the basic model that you perceived was teacher in the front of the room rows of desks regimented periods the children as absorbing knowledge essentially knowledge is something delivered as factual you saw a lot of variations on that but no fundamental transformation oh yeah variations on that also variations on socioeconomic status within the school that was something because when many people think about school they think public and private what they don't understand is 99 of those schools operate the exact same way just what you described one one teacher at the front of the classroom and students listening and trying to absorb taking notes and not being necessarily engaged in Hands-On learning or taking ownership over their own life yeah well it's an interesting model it's an interesting epistemological model because it presumes that the most appropriate knowledge the most necessary form of knowledge that children will gain is factual and descriptive right that it's semantic it can be transmitted through words that it's memorization predicated that it comes from a central Authority that the children should be socialized to sit immobile essentially and listen passively rather than actively that they should do that in a group that they should be regiment regimented in time right so you might say contrary to that while children should be actively engaged in exploring they should be questioning they should be moving around there's no necessary reason for that regimentation they should be developing their own Vision the the the Enterprises could be project focused um and that education should be much more about the acquisition of skill rather than the acquisition of regurgitatable knowledge I mean that that's a few Transformations that you might consider and so okay but you you you said that while you were investigating all these schools you came across the acting academy and what made it stand out in your mind well it's all the things that you just mentioned are all what I would call there's some about the the process that you go through within the school and much about the content that you're going to absorb in the school or that you're engaging with what I think that we need to step back and look at is that when we're talking about different schools what we look at is not so much the content the academic content like we know largely what young people should be engaged in as far as like the basics like we know that what we talk about as a system and what I mean by this is let me give you an anecdote I've probably talked to over a thousand parents at this point about our school about what they want from education for their child and one question I always ask is what do you dream your child will be able to do when they're 18 or when they leave the house and without exception I do not get an academic answer I do not get I hope they can do complex math I hope that they've mastered calculus I hope that you know I don't get academic answers what I get especially the younger the child is is I hope they can go out into the world with courage I hope they can know how to be right well yeah work well with other people touch on in that list of Alternatives was character development moral character development and and and motivation right and so all right so the parents have a vision that's more aligned with that they want their child to be of good character to be able to go out into the world forthrightly and so so what do you make of that when when you hear parents tell you that well what I make of it is that almost all parents want that however when you try to marry the idea of the traditional school with what I would say parents are actually asking for is agency they want their child to have agency over their life which is having the power and resources to fulfill their potential something like that and so when I look at the judicial model you look at it's predicated on compliance yeah it's predicating control permission to speak permission to move about permission to work with others well what I say is those two things don't marry you can't you can't put your child in a system like that and expect that they will fulfill this potential of agency within that because those are some of the most formidable years of your life you think three to 12 especially from the development of the brain like you're learning what system you're within and how to operate within that system and Jordan it's actually quite a conundrum for people especially with conservative beliefs because we say hey this is what we want we talk about it at home we talk about agency and and freedom and responsibility and yet we send our children to a school that doesn't uh advocate for any of those yeah well I did some background research into the origin of the Public School System partly because I developed these programs the self-authoring programs and one of them is an exercise that helps people develop a vision for the future and I implemented that with my University students first and so it asks them to um imagine their lives five years down the road they could have if they could have what they needed and wanted assuming they were taking care of themselves properly what might their life look like they read about that for 15 minutes and then they write about the hell they could produce around themselves for in five years if they let their bad habits take the upper hand and then they go through seven major domains of their life and write out a vision and a strategy for that so it's intimate relationship and family friendship career um resistance to Temptations like alcohol and drug abuse use of time outside of uh outside of work let's say productive and generous use of time outside of work and uh care of themselves physically and mentally we're going to add civic responsibility to that list and so it's an attempt to help people derive create a differentiated vision of what their life could be like and who they could be and also to conceptualize themselves as the sort of person who can derive a vision and I use that in my classes for years and I conducted three research studies using that program and we showed that if you had students do that exercise for 90 minutes in their orientation session before they went to trade school they were 50 percent less likely to drop out which is like absolutely staggering result and their grade point averages of students already enrolled went up 35 right which is crazy right for 90 minutes but the crazy thing really crazy thing was as far as I was concerned and it took me probably a year or two of thinking to really notice this was that well this isn't rocket surgery as a ridiculous Canadian comedian would put it right of course people should have a vision for their life you talked about character development moral developments like well that's what parents want for their children we would like our children we would like those we love to be active engaged moral agents um aiming upward and yet we do nothing whatsoever in the school system to Foster that ever even once even for one day so my students having despite having gone through 14 years of education and being top of the class all things considered because the University of Toronto was a fairly selective School no one had ever asked them to do an exercise like that and that the more I thought about that the more I was dumbfounded by it and then I did some investigation into the derivation of the American North American European for that matters public education system and found out that it was based on the Prussian model and the prussians produster Universal education system in the late 1800s because they were afraid they were losing military superiority and they wanted to produce a Cadre of mindless obedient soldiers that was expressly the purpose and then that model was adopted by prototypical fascists in the U.S again in the late 1800s this is before Mussolini and all of that time corporate types mostly who wanted to produce cadres of obedient workers and that's why the desks are in rows and that's why there's Factory bells and that's why it's top down leadership and but what was really stunning about that wasn't only that that was the model but it's it's worse than that because the people who built the schools were consciously aiming at eradicating the will of the students who were part of the system because they wanted them to be obedient now you know we did need we there was a demand for factory workers at the time and there were a lot of rural people flooding into the cities and no one really knew what to do with the kids because they didn't have farm work and there was some need for an education system and there was some utility in producing people who knew how to abide by a clock and who could their foretake on factory jobs but that as a model especially now in the modern world where things change so quickly that you can hardly keep up and people have to be dynamic and that sort of nine to five lifetime factory work is maybe well it's a dream of the past in some ways even though it might not have been that desirable to begin with it certainly has nothing to do with the way people live now but well the education system hasn't changed except perhaps for the worst in 150 years it's just it it's it it's absolutely jaw-dropping that the fact that this is all the case okay so you saw in the acting schools you saw a completely different model and walk us through that like I don't even understand what a school day would look like in a decentralized system I I went to London I saw uh um Kate Burleson School the the uh Michaela school and she she's taken that teacher dominant let's say teacher Authority student listening model to its ultimate degree I mean she's very very good at it the teachers are handing out information at a rate that's absolutely staggering and the kids are awake and listening although they're responding a lot they they have an opportunity to talk to each other that's structured and they do a lot of responses to the teacher so they're really engaged and I can see that a model like that can work right there may be a variety of models that would work for kids but your model is very different and so what what would it what would a child experience what would a classroom do you have classrooms what would a classroom look like um what would a typical classroom look like what's the typical experience of a child in a school like yours yeah so I think you have to start with understanding the role of the adult the classroom and when you understand that in today's age with what we have the tools we have available to us and the systems that we use we do not have a need for an adult to be the transmitter of content knowledge to a child in elementary middle school high school we've proven that we know that it's been going on for over a decade so at our school young people are broken up into different ages it's not a monoculture which that exists nowhere in nature you don't ever see a buffalo only with like one set of Ages roaming the planes so we have varying Studios that somewhat line up with what you say like lower elementary Upper Elementary some of this comes as well from an understanding of what Maria Montessori has done and and did and a lot of that has withstood the test of time and really quickly to digress for a second what you mentioned about you know 1894 the the gang of nine got together I think it was and decided this is what people should learn physics biology chemistry and this this is how they should learn and that largely has not changed at all but it's important to know at that same time there was a debate being being waged waged about how young people should be educated some of these models like Montessori even the first idea of kindergarten things like that those came out of those similar times but this one took root and took hold because it had maybe utility at the moment in the moment but has stayed largely unchanged and that's I I don't think anybody could argue that's not to the detriment of the of the generations that have come before one of the things I hear often is well I went to a school like this and I turned out fine and I and first of all no you probably didn't yes and is it is it the the thing that we're doing to say we want to institutionalize the the limit of potential of reaching potential it's not did you do find us what could you have done if people knew saw and understood the gifts and abilities that you could bring to the world so you are if you're in our school you'll see an uh a school that's not run by adults so how many students about so we could have uh one Studio say uh Elementary Studio that has maybe 30 Learners and one adult and that's a good thing the more adults that get into the classroom we say the worse the The Experience gets and that's for kids how old that that ratio that that's about six and a half to around 11. okay so you have 30 kids from six and a half to eleven in one room yep and there's one adult in there yes okay what's the adult doing so the adult is what we call a Socratic facilitator so they're operating in an inquiry-based fashion primarily what they do is we launch every day with a Socratic discussion and that's where we put young people in the shoes of a hero facing a tough decision or dilemma and then we provide two uh choices a b choices or maybe more that are opposed very opposed to each other but both could be seen as equally uh equally acceptable answers and then that facilitator their job is to allow the young people to engage in a discussion in a debate we do this for 15 minutes every morning uh and that's how things start that's how every day launches that way it launches intentionally which is I think something we can talk about too is that a bell ringing to to start a day is not an intentional launch right attention first launch yes and so with us what we do is we say hey we're here maybe the Studio's facing something like uh there's a lack of respect or something like that or they're upcoming to a a exhibition that we hold I'll talk about those and it's like crunch time so we'll put them in the shoes of a hero usually a real hero from history that faced a similar situation with high stakes discuss and debate and then and you there's two sides to the argument oh yes there's always two sides to the argument and all the kids from six and a half to eleven participate absolutely yeah you know in my in my graduate seminar what I used to do uh as I learned how to run seminars rather than lecturing because I like to lecture and that worked well for me I would assign a paper to students they would read it in class because often they wouldn't read it they'd say they read it but they wouldn't have so they'd read it in class and then we would derive alternative um standpoints from the paper two opposing viewpoints and I would assign a Viewpoint to to group to one group of four or another group of four it was usually 16 kids in the class the other two groups would evaluate and grade and provide feedback and then we'd go around the room and I assigned it arbitrarily and the goal was to form a group of four and to lay out your argument and then to conduct something approximating a debate with the other team and it was really useful for the students it was engaging for them and they had a chance to lay out their argument and to make it publicly and to learn how to speak publicly but also to learn that because the sides so to speak were assigned arbitrarily they learned how to understand that there was many things to be said on multiple sides of an argument right and then to really put that in place and that was a very effective model and so you're doing something like that in the first 15 minutes first 15 minutes every day and these why why is that the first thing the kids do well I I think so well one it's an intentional way to start the day but I think you have to back up and understand that you know something I like to say to parents is that look young people are embedded in a story and a narrative they wake up every day in a story and so we as as parents and I think as adults we should just be very thankful we get to be a part of this story it's so much fun to be a part of the story and so when we talk about entering into our school there's this idea in game making about the magic circle the magic circle is essentially you enter a place and when you enter that place the world change it's that world and so our world at the school we are heavily embedded in stories and narratives the hero's journey is something that like really is is uh tagging and catalog the way we operate the school that you're a young person on a journey to find your calling and change the world and that's a true calling on your life and the world needs something of you and so what we're doing in these in these Socratic discussions is really embedding them in story because you know can I digress here just for a second hey digress away so we talk about the idea of building uh character or our moral education and I think that's somewhat of a misnomer because number one parents are the primary uh people that should be helping to impart moral education on children but and what role does the school have so it's actually very interesting if you look at the work of Martin buber he was uh he he uh talked about in his uh essay uh the education of character he talked to this idea how he would try to teach character lessons in a classroom and he'd actually say the opposite would have the effect it would be that he would talk about how you shouldn't lie and then you get an essay from the a person in the class that was the biggest person that would tell not tell the truth about how you shouldn't lie right right you talk about how you shouldn't bully the week and you get the strong ones snickering you say how you can't teach ethics in an ethics class yeah you teach ethics and morals in in a number of ways experience relation to others but also stories yeah yeah and so embedding people young people and stories from the start in the start of the day to let them know you're here on an important journey and there's going to be a like uh a right and a wrong in the way that that you operate and it's not always that we're doing a discussion like that but often it can be how do we treat other people how do we act with respect so and what do you see when you watch the kids engage in this debate you have kids from six and a half you said to 11. so what would what would an observer see if he or she was watching this interaction oh this you know actually I have a great story to share a cure the dawn who we both know he came and visited our school and his son Hercules uh sat in on some Socratic launches with us and I I brought Akira came back to the office we did this big um show with him with Learners and he was a DJ a world-class example that we brought in and he was so gracious to come work with us uh after he Akira wouldn't observed a launch with his son in it and he came back and I said hey what'd you think and he said it brought a tear to my eye to think that these young people can treat each other with such respect and that they can disagree so politely and that they can have their views heard and understood why don't the 11 year olds dominate the six and a half year olds often they they do in in the sense of they discuss more they'll more they'll verbalize more however if you have been a six and a half year old that's been in that position and you've grown up in the system you understand that it's to your advantage to help make sure the younger ones have their voice heard as well and so what you'll see if You observe a Socratic discussion at wonder is one we start off with a polarizing topic about two different choices that is embedding them in a story but we follow What's called the rules of just conduct and those rules just kind of how do we operate in Socratic discussion so the discussion leader might say hey which rule just conduct do we want to focus on today and it might be listening with our whole body so it's like and then they'll hold each other accountable throughout the discussion to say hey remember we promised Alyssa with our whole body and what does that mean it means that they're not turning around or they're not you know uh they're paying attention they're paying attention and how do they call each other out on that without that becoming bullying or dominating it's see those are I think what you'll find is those types of things are a product of a different type of environment when you're in an environment that's based on Mutual accountability and based on peer-to-peer learning and you're building a tribe you see people within the tribe as like not as an enemy or somebody that's competing with you but somebody that you're trying to help the whole tribe move up and that's what we do see now I tell parents all the time hey when you have a child that's six and a half or seven just entering into the elementary environment like and they're in a Socratic discussion they're they're absorbers they're observing and observing information it's one of the best ways they learn how to interact in one of 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is 28 and any donation amount will help and is tax deductible to donate dial pound 250 and say the key word baby that's pound 250 baby or go to freeborn.com Jordan that's preborn.com Jordan we are the answer to save these lives dial now right right and that's that and that's interesting too because the 10 year old nine-year-old ten-year-old 11 year old first six and a half year old is someone who's close to their proximal zone of development so my kids tend to Hero worship kids who are slightly older than them old enough so that they can appear as a model for their behavior forward I mean kids in grade four really admire kids in grade six they're a little afraid of them they think are quite they're Mighty beings um that's the term Larry are and he's the president of Hillsdale College used which I think is quite funny but you have them in your class and so and I would imagine too that the 10 and 11 year olds also come to regard themselves as role models for the younger kids which is a really good responsibility to put on them so but they're treating the little the the little kids property they're learning how to do that and you're saying that they do that more or less as a consequence of being embedded in a culture that's promoting exactly that kind of interaction oh absolutely and and you mentioned that the older ones see themselves as Role Models it's not just that they see themselves they're in positions elected by younger ones to lead so we have each in our elementary it's broken up into squads and each squad has a squad leader so each so the class is broken up into a squad yes not not in the during the day it's just you're you're a member of this squad and so you might have a meeting on a Monday and how many people would be in a squad around six something like that okay so you have your little Squad and they have meetings and what do the meetings consist of uh they talk about wins and losses from the week before what people are performance review yep something like that what you hope that you want to accomplish the next week maybe are you stuck somewhere that your squad leader can help you in that so you really these these older Learners that have earned it because remember they have to get elected by the younger ones elected meaning what that they're into a group and they elect the leader of the group and how does that work technically what is an election technically in the beginning of the year it looks like they get together and they have a vote well they write down who they want to lead their squad and there's also a process for impeachment of that squad leader if they're not upholding the promises that they've committed to for the group and so the younger ones have a voice within there and it also helps to keep tyranny at Bay right so it's so okay so you've got the the beginnings of a democratic polity there how do the little kids know who to vote for well that's a learning process yeah because they get to know the other the other kids absolutely and sometimes it's following somebody that's a little bit older but you're you are correct in this it's that they see somebody older than but it's also that they see somebody they can embody they yeah they're about to be there I'm going to be that person in that age group at some point pretty soon and that's a really powerful thing and is it a goal do you think it's honest to say that it's a goal for the little kids to well obviously they end up as bigger kids but our are your Schools running well enough so the little kids actually would like to be elected as a leader at some point that's actually a vision rather than something that teachers only dream the kids want I I'll say yes but here's what I say about that I think it also comes with cognitive development as they move away from social being the work that they do because younger ones love to play and they love to be in social groups with other people school work is not that important to them and if it's gamified which we do they love doing it but as they get older what happens is they see their peers moving from one Studio to it to the other and then they start to take on work as their work so to speak like they really want to like accomplish this thing to reach this next level and then yes it's a rite of passage they see that we see this development happen you know if you're six seven eight-year-old a lot of your work is social and a lot of it and that's what it should be rather than just academic pushing pushing academic work onto a young person and this kind of goes back to the structure of how we operate and I'll digress a little bit here is look part of what got me interested in doing this in the first place was that I didn't believe that young people should be in a desk for seven hours a day I didn't fit in that that at all and so when my son was born and I heard that question from my uncle I thought I don't care what I have to do if I have to move somewhere or start something or what it may be I am not going to put my children into a system that doesn't understand the gifts and abilities I have just because they don't fit on the conveyor belt and so at our school when you look at that young people have the freedom to work with their peers they have the freedom to choose the work that they'd like to do also they have the freedom to be distracted as long as they're not distracting other other people they they can exit the room for a while if they need to be distracted and I think there's this whole idea in education in the elementary especially of young people are so distractible well it's like we're thinking that okay we don't understand that the prefrontal cortex as a protracted maturation it you can't force development in that way distractible if they're bored stiff yes you know kids can concentrate on something for a very long period of time if they're interested in it absolutely so the distractibility and this is the case for human beings more generally is if you see a pronounced Trend across a number of people the first thing to presume is there's something situational driving it rather than something temperamental yeah and so you might say well little kids are distractible it's well maybe it's because they're bored to death in the conventional classroom and I would say that's particularly true of active boys Okay so we've talked a little bit about squads and we've talked a little bit about Studios you started talking about what happens first thing in the morning okay so the kids have a discussion and they're trying to iron out a complex moral conundrum and they're doing that as a consequence of Socratic dialogue and there's an age-graded or an uh what there's a group of kids that spans quite a quite an age and the older kids how help lead the younger kids and they take responsibility for it and the little kids have something to look forward to as they grow up and so that's the first 15 minutes of class so what happens what happens next let's continue walking through the day we break the socratic discussion and then though the schedule is posted on the board so there's different levels levels of control as we say things that the guides have control over and things the Learners have control over so we put a schedule out but we're not in charge of enforcing the adherence to that schedule they mutually enforce that so the next thing you'd walk into is core skills on Mondays we open the day with a meeting with them with with the mentor so each young person in elementary has a mentor from the middle or high school that's been elected based on kind of exempl exemplifying some of the traits that it means to be at wonder and so on Monday they have a meeting with that mentor and that Mentor is asking questions like hey what what got you most excited last week what were you really proud of accomplishing what do you hope to accomplish this week are there any social dynamics or things like that going on that like that I can we can talk about things like that so they have how old are the mentors they're uh gosh from 12 to 16 right now so they're pretty young old enough to do this but pretty young and your experience is that they do a credible job at that they do an incredible job at that it's it and it's that one they use a system so they've gotten together as we've put this this Mentor program together they've gotten together to say what are the questions we should ask like what they've got together they've got together figured this out they'll run those things by us but unless we see some glaring issue which we don't because even if we saw an issue we'd like them to test it and come to that discrimination right right yeah yeah then they'll meet with the mentor on Monday and one on one one-on-one and then they break after that mentor meeting how long is the meeting it's usually 10 to 15 minutes that's okay and they do that once every week every week and it's setting your eyes to the Horizon what are you here to accomplish what would you like to do this week and I often tell parents that goal setting is an interesting thing because at age seven the proper time Horizon for a goal is likely this afternoon yeah right what am I yeah well that's a very that's worth driving home is because the younger the kid the shorter the future time Horizon yes right right and then we watch this move up when you're entering middle school they can accurately plan their entire year what do I want to accomplish in Reading Writing math quests things like that for the year and it starts your kids can do that yes it starts because we start instituting the site idea of hey we're here to accomplish something and what is that thing we'd like to accomplish and the mentors really I wonder how tight the relationship is between prefrontal cortical maturation and length of time Horizon I bet it's pretty tight you know while it's complex right to calculate yourself across a expanding Horizon of time and it means the replacement of motivation based on basic motivational States like hunger and thirst and temperature regulation desire for play all of that which are impulsive motivations it's the replacement of that with a higher order Vision where all those competing demands are integrated right integrated across time that parallels the movement from say subcortical dominance to cortical dominance something like that so you guys are facilitating that okay so they meet with their mentors and well now we're now we're an hour into the day what happens next maybe 30 minutes from today but maybe 30 minutes yes so next they go into their core skills work and this core skills work is we use adaptive platforms like for math you could use Khan Academy Beast Academy something like that uh we're reading it's based Academy it's a similar program to Khan Academy it just functions who set that up you know I'm not sure who set up Beast Academy but in the the point there is that some Learners like using con other Learners like using Beast okay and they're adaptive what does that mean it means that as you get into them like so the they can see where are you struggling yeah what areas you're struggling with and they'll serve you more of those types of problems and also like with Khan Academy and I say this to parents often I don't know that there's anybody that's had a larger impact on math in the world than South College yeah right yeah I'll walk through that a little bit well just I think there's 50 million active users maybe that's an old statistic um but he's essentially built a platform to allow for the complete self-direction of of uh of math learning yeah that's such a good deal it's unbelievable yeah and and each problem that you get there's a video related to how to solve it with salcon talking about how to work through a problem like yes yeah and I tell people well you can pause that person and you can rewind that person right I mean the dynamic is so much different than a than a traditional classroom in that way and one thing I hear from people is that a lot of elite private schools are actually assigning Khan Academy as homework and I say well it's only a matter of time before we see the actual redundancy there right it's like no kidding and so um so yeah so you might do Khan Academy or beast there's reflex math and there's different math programs yeah we have it that when you're doing a unit test for instance a check proficiency yeah whatever platform you do your practice on you you check out on con and so there's oh there's a way to make that as your standardized indicator correct yeah and so how do how do you think your students are doing on the mathematical front I guess you know this yes how how are they doing on the mathematical front well I say overall they're doing quite well now it's varying right because at the younger ages we don't operate anything that would equate to a kindergarten college preparatory environment yeah I have a I say our goals for our elementary Studio are very simple and they're two things love learning and learn to get along with other people Master those love coming to school every day and learn how to work well in a tight-knit tribe with other people and so the reason we say that is if you took the whole Corpus of elementary school work of what needs to be accomplished it's actually not that much work relatively speaking if you're at the right developmental age so you can spend time learning how learning the important work of how do I get into a flow or how do I find something I love how do I remove distractions things like that you can spend that time we have systems help with this and still be fully on track so to speak with doing with doing uh core skills work so do you have any idea how your students at any given age are performing let's say in the mathematical realm because that's quite easy to quantify compared to students in a typical in a typical Public School environment yeah well here's what I say we don't talk about this much just because you know I wonder we do one standardized test a year and it usually starts around age nine something like that and we give no administrative support for it we don't tell anybody it's happening I show up one day yeah doing a test yeah for our data that we see for the elementary age it's around two and a half cradles above where they should be okay are your kids selected on the basis of income or IQ neither we do have tuition however we we really try to when it comes to selection it's much more for the younger ages based on do the parents understand what type of school we are are they wanting to go on a journey that has triumphs and hardships do they really understand what they're getting into do you think that you have reasonable coverage across the socioeconomic Spectrum or you tilted more towards middle class and upward well I would say that I I think any like school that charges tuition is likely tilted a bit more towards middle class yeah however we have people that are you know social workers journeyman Carpenters many many uh families in the school would fall you know working class yes and it's a stretch to pay tuition but they see the value in what it is and they they say they understand that one of the biggest responsibilities decisions will make as parents is how and where we're going to educate our children and once you understand that you can't once you see it you sort of can't unsee it yeah it's sort of like I will do I've had parents say to me I don't care if I need to take a second job right right I will find a way to pay the tuition right how much is the tuition our tuition is ten thousand dollars a year over 10 months so it's roughly a thousand dollars a month and does that actually cover your expenses yes and okay so that's that's worth highlighting yeah so so the cost of the education that you're providing the kids is how much a month the the Char the tuition is around ten thousand dollars per month right there we give a few per year per 10 sorry sorry ten thousand dollars per year yes okay so you know that in in the New York State the average cost per student per year is thirty nine thousand dollars yes right so you can do it for a quarter of that I think that we could actually do it for around our projection right now is that our all-in costs when we're fully enrolled about 130 Learners will be about 4 500 a year per learner that's why it would be interesting the metric you need from a measurement perspective because you are selecting your students to some degree based on Parental interest in education and their ability to pay so you're going to be tilting in somewhat up the IQ and socioeconomic scale and probably tilting it up the conscientiousness scale a priori the real Metro could be how fast your students are learning compared to comparable students in a public school system very difficult very difficult metric to establish yeah so I'm not being I'm not being skeptical of this it's just you know very interesting to derive performance measures and that's a difficult thing to do so well I would say there might be a difference in thinking especially in elementary school for us in that if you took a learner from our school at maybe seven or eight years old and tried to map them with an elite College Preparatory School you might find that our learner is behind on certain areas compared to theirs yeah that's not a bad thing it's because children need to be allowed time to be children and they're not machines to absorb information yeah yeah well that's that's also the that's a problem with measurement is like if you're only measurement rubric is standardized testing which is generally the only reliable and valid objective measure there are things that are important that you're not measuring that are hard to measure so so for example it would be very useful to measure maturity if you could figure out how to measure it or if you could measure pro-social Behavior you can do that using teacher ratings of pro-social behavior for example peer rating so you could derive that but then you'd need a standardized sample of the same ratings from other schools to compare yourself with and the probability that you be able to drive that is pretty much a zero so well you can also look at it this way that you could compare yourself to another school or if you get down to the individual learner level you could compare yourself to yourself that was rated before yeah well that would that would be the right and that's the way we do yeah so we'll do that with end of week surveys and it's warm cool warm feedback for other Learners in in the studio end of session 360 surveys where yeah you're rating people oh yeah so you're using three and those are using peer ratings absolutely and those are posted publicly so oh yeah it's not who said it but here's here's how how each person what like the comments people had and so how does that how do okay that's interesting so how did the kids who are downgraded in a given week let's say respond to that you know because they're being they're being publicly evaluated so what's the justification for that and have you seen that go wrong is there anything that concerns you about that approach well I think if you if you first start by understanding that we spend a lot of time building the tribe so in general people are polite and respectful towards each other but they might say that let's take my son for instance uh Hudson was uh distracting me numerous times this week okay if that's one thing on the survey that he was distracting and these are the types of things that you'll see you don't if there we don't see malicious you know uh uh comments or something like that we see hey no trolls yes yes troll free environment yes trophy environment we don't we we don't see things uh like that we see Hudson was uh distracting me this week from from this and if that comes up one time that's that could be noise yeah but if Hudson is going through and he sees four times people mentioned how he was distracting them yeah then it's like looking at that and saying a reflection point it's like hey I'm distracted useful tribal feedback very useful tribal feedback yeah and and we put in time using Socratic dialogue in examples of of how to give feedback like let me give a quick example of feedback so when we first started the school about half a decade ago um we had a number of Learners that came in from Traditional School and maybe they were uh 10 11 somewhere in there and our our school year is broken into sessions they're four to six weeks long they have a quest that's like you know we put them in a simulation or they're solving a big problem or something like it could be architecture future of farming they're doing the American Revolution and those are the afternoons every day I'll get to that but okay uh and at the end of that Quest there's a public exhibition and the public exhibition is parents grandparents family members coming in and you're on stage and this starts roughly at age seven where you're presenting in front of all these people um you make sure the kids speak loudly enough so everyone in the audience can hear we uh audience feedback has made that happen yes good we actually had a parent offer to buy I used to go to my kids presentations at their Elementary School you know they'd be all these kids on stage and they were all mumbling so quietly that people even in the first row of the gymnasium couldn't hear a damn word they were saying and everybody in the bloody gym was supposed to sit there for two hours pretending that this was acceptable and while the kids on the stage were pretending to talk and the teachers were pretending to evaluate yes yeah painful to say the least I had a parent in school Jamie he uh that was happening and he said I'll buy you a small PA system in this room and we had we bought it but that that was soft so yes they they get on stage they speak we record that and then on Friday so that happens on the last Thursday of a session on Friday they get into a circle the socratic discussion and they give each other warm cool warm feedback on how they did what's something you did well what's something you could improve what's another thing you did well the Learners that first came in from traditional schools called that Friday Friday because it was so hard to hear feedback and when you come from an environment where basically there's only two grades anymore there's a and not a that's basically what there is now when you come from that environment and you hear you didn't do perfect or didn't do exactly well well I just failed and so we would give them the option of hey you could get written feedback or you could get verbal feedback yeah the wrong choice in there is written feedback because you don't have the context of the kindness of the person giving it to you right right but they elected that for a little bit yeah until they went back and so learning one of the I would say a very important lesson in life is how to take and take the feedback you can incorporate that and what construct active feedback is yes right and so in elementary when they're learning to give the weekly survey it might be that we start off start off with like a drop down menu like you're selecting a different learner than a drop down like is is is what is the issue you had somewhere in here and it's like a pre-written hey Hudson was distracting today I'm sorry Hudson yeah now this is there for the eternity yes for eternity um or in or they can write their own feedback if it's something specific so that starts at a very young age this idea of you know tribal reinforcement about how do we operate in here do we have an ethos of how we operate I'll tell one other anecdote about that um we we've learned at that school like ours we cannot recruit we can't go out and say hey would you come to our school the reason is you have to be looking for what we're offering you have to believe I think that's true when you ever almost whenever you do anything with anyone it's so much better to have someone come looking than to go sell yes exactly I made what I would consider maybe a mistake saying I I I met these Learners and I thought gosh their parents were amazing they thought they'd do a great job we invited them to apply to the school and that was a hard lesson I learned one but one of the most important lessons there was that these Learners came in and I often say there's two behaviors we can't incorporate as a school one would be a blatant disrespect for other people in other yeah manipulation yeah so that's anti-social Behavior yes and I don't mean that you get into a conflict we have conflicts rise all the time and I'll talk about how we resolve those but um they these Learners came in the school and for various reasons they were highly disrespectful things like that yeah the tribe came to me in my office one day the and it's usually the older girls they they really value order and and um and I think for some reason what we see is a lot of the uh older girls take leadership roles somewhat younger than some of the younger boys would and they came to my office and they said hey look here's all the things we've tried here's what's going on yeah they just don't understand we don't do those things here right right and I said guys what you're saying is that there's a way that we do things here that's an ethos we have something that defines us first off that's amazing like how amazing is that we have that yeah and second we troubleshooted different ways that we could solve this ultimately owners weren't weren't fit for the school well one thing that's worth knowing on that front by the way is that if anti-social proclivities are not rectified by the age of four they're virtually impossible to rectify after that no matter what you do right anti-social Behavior proclivities are more stable than IQ and psychologists have tried everything you can possibly imagine to rectify anti-social Behavior proclivities with either zero or negative success right so so your observation that if you have kids who are tilted in the overtly troublemaking Direction and that would be Associated say with that overt disrespect for others the probability that you're going to be able to do anything about that is extraordinarily low yeah right it's a it's one of the most dismal fragments aspects of the Clinical Psychology literature because psychologists have thrown everything they had at the remediation of antisocial Behavior the only and with no with no effect the only exception I've ever seen to that is the work of someone named Dan always who went on an anti-bullying campaign in the Scandinavian countries and managed that quite effectively but he did that really through a cultural transformation of the schools rather than a focus on the individual behavior of Any Given students so anyways all right so let's go back to the days so yeah we've we've gone through the socratic dialogue we've gone through the meetings with the mentors and and I think that's pretty much where we stopped in terms of progressing through an actual day and then you are going into what we call self-directed courses oh yeah we talked about the Khan Academy a bit there too and so you're going to self-directed core skills and now I think the important thing to understand about a school like ours and this is where my what I mentioned earlier is so important is the system is so much different and our schools largely ran by systems and recipes that we hand off to Learners so for instance people would say well you're saying that the guide doesn't have the traditional role in the classroom that they are not there for uh telling Learners what to do how do you get Learners to do work what what and so well number one if something's gamified and it's fun they want to do it and they actually really enjoy doing it so even something that's gamified like Khan Academy or some of these other platforms it's enjoyable for them to do and it's enjoyable for them to watch their progress yeah and I think it's a progress towards the goal that really gets them you know maybe it's dopamine or something like that that it triggers but also within the school what you think of the school as like being embedded in a game we have what are called Freedom levels and So within the studio you have the ability to earn your freedom by solely by the work that you do it's not subjective it is it's you earn this a guide cannot take this away from you and so for instance say you move up one percent in Khan Academy in your grade level and the grade level is based on where are you at right now and you'll make goals towards where do you want to be well you move up one percent you earn 20 points so this is the game if you earn 300 points within a week the next week you're at the highest Freedom level means that next week you get to choose what you work on when you work on it and where you work on it within our sort of like life yes very much so and and so but also if you say hey uh I if you're distracted for a week or something like that you're getting less work done you might be on freedom level one and that would look like hey you have a desk and there's what you do what what the schedule look like on the board and but and what we find is that 80 to 90 percent of the Learners are on freedom level two or three they want the additional Freedom it's enough of incentive just to say I have the agency over my time in the day I know the steps I need to take to get it they've agreed and helped develop this system it's been a part of what they've done and so it's how you incentivize eyes you know maybe uh work or hard work but the true answer especially the younger you are is that gamification of work is enough you have fun game to play and I often ask people talk to people if they say hey the studio is getting a bit uh disorderly it happens I would ask well what's wrong with the game that we're setting up how can we make the game more fun to play and so so that's of course okay so if I objected well life isn't going to be fun so how do you know you're not setting up a micro environment for children that isn't representative of the macro environment to which they'll have to adapt no I mean I I enjoy the descriptions of the programs that you're putting forward and I would I would love to believe that that was all true without any reservation but you know I'm trying to allow myself as many skeptical thoughts as I can possibly manage and so and I am curious about this I mean I know that Khan Academy has had a lot of success in their mathematics training and I know they use a gamified approach but that what that really is is a carefully Divine Design system of incentives rewards that are that actually match the motivational structure of the Learners you could call that gamified but it's actually just adapted properly for learning but but do you feel that do you feel that you are preparing the kids for the realities of the real real world and what evidence do you have that that might actually be the case when you say reality is a real real world can you be specific on that like what well that that that's a good that's a good objection actually well let's say um let's say that 30 40 of your regret your your graduates at you know after high school go and get a just an ordinary job a construction job uh job in a restaurant uh a job in a local store a job um are they are they going to be fit for those positions given the experiences that they've had in the in your in your school I think were maybe prematurely asking the question and here's why I say that Elementary is very different than middle which is very different than high school so there is a progression upwards so okay okay if I gave you the goals of studiosis ahead of time saying if you're under Middle School it's this love learning and learn to get along with people okay so Elementary is by Design about developing a love of learning why is that is because when you get into Middle School the if I had to put one sentence goal be learn to work hard for three hours a day which is awesome so you're you're inculcating a more conscientious Focus increasingly as they progress absolutely all right okay well that's very that's a very good answer all right all right and so you've built that in where it's developmentally appropriate you said your goal is yeah actual on task work for three hours a day and yeah you're right you can you can you can you can have a wonderful life if you can work focused on one thing for three hours a day yes yeah and that that's actually a very very high level of attainment to manage that yes and they do it in middle school and I'll talk about how and why but yes the the design of elementary school is more exploration love of learning social learning to get along with other people and I'll give you an example of that about and this applies to the real world and success in the real world at a normal school if you find that you have uh maybe a continuous conflict with another learner maybe at a large school one of the most common things is they'll separate those Learners in different classrooms yeah but that that's not what you can do in life is that every time you have a conflict with somebody that you or a big conflict that you're going to just remove that person from your life well it also doesn't necessarily eliminate the conflict right it doesn't it actually does maybe does the opposite of enforcing the negative behavior yeah yeah and so I wonder what happens is if you have a conflict with another learner either learner can call a conflict resolution session and you can have a 30 minute cooldown period if emotions are high yeah yeah they'll do a what so what what happens is they will find a mentor what we call Peacemaker from the middle school or High School somebody that's earned their chops so to speak in helping to make peace in the school and they sit across from each other as a three-foot table with the mentor on the side and the mentor has a formal conflict resolution these happen two three times a day that because conflicts happen in society that's just the way it is and so the mentor will read off it starts like this why are we here we're here because Heroes solve problems they don't run from problems and then it goes into what you would consider like a speaker listener exercise each person gets a chance to be heard have it repeated back to them and vice versa they negotiate a bit in there at the end of it is what's one concrete item the other person could do to make this situation better more yeah that's very good yeah and that takes negotiation by the way absolutely and that is negotiation yes because maybe something you propose the other person could do wouldn't be something they think they actually can do yeah but Jordan we see this happen with six and a half year olds that are learning to get their voice they'll call a conflict resolution on something it's older than them and they know that one of these mentors in the middle school or High School are going to give them a fair Shake and they get to have their voice heard sometimes it's an intimidating you know set of circumstances but it one of the one of the most fulfilling things you can see in a situation like that is a young person learning to know that if they can voice what how they're feeling properly that they can be heard and issues in their life can be addressed yeah yeah uh yeah well and you're moving the kids towards reconciliation absolutely yeah conflict is inevitable and Reconciliation is possible but it has to be negotiated and so the the strategy that you laid forward there is very wise yes okay so back now so the kids are are concentrating on exercises like Khan Academy that's on the mathematics front what else are they learning in elementary school deep books they're going they're going into deep books badge books and so they'll it's part of the reading so they'll be selecting books to read that are um uh that they can earn a badge for so to how do they learn to read so you usually in the younger studio so we have a Montessori Studio that starts before this that's where they generally learn to read one of the uh one of the items of success in our elementary studio is a basic Proficiency in reading so you either come in knowing how to read or will work with you on programs like Lexia or something like that to build your reading profession so these are these are programs that are external again like com that have been designed to help kids run through a phonics training program how do they teach them differently yes basically it's Alexia Reading yeah Lexia is one of those that we use it's reading it's reading comprehension or or just basic reading but and you're impressed with these programs well I've seen them work very well yeah yeah but you know I think ultimately young people want to learn and and I think something that's also very true about this whole discussion is that there's something very different between teaching and learning and they're two completely different things in that sense I don't know that it's true I I actually think it is true that all learning is self-learning and self-motivated learning and so yes at the younger ages getting into the exploration of learning maybe three through six age in the Montessori Studio that we have that's where they first get introduced to reading and then they'll they'll as they get through Middle School they'll really master that you know level of reading but they'll start with books that are appropriate for their age level and for their their uh competency in Reading how did you identify those books well it's not necessarily up to us we we select a library of books but they can pitch any book they like if they like a book that they to have in the library so okay I see so you crowdsource that problem absolutely and and here's the reason why you have to look at what is the goal of reading the goal of reading is to help somebody develop a love of reading and the way you develop a love of reading is by reading what you love and so one Surefire way to make sure that somebody doesn't like to read is to force them to read things that they're not interested in and and what what I found young people especially learn from this is if you're forcing them to do this work uh something that they don't want to do they might do it because maybe that you know they they're pressured to get this grade or something like that usually they're memorized it rather than learn it yeah but they often hate it do they just resent it yeah and they also resent the adult that makes them do it yeah well and then they'll resent the whole damn Enterprise yes you know because you'll have kids I remember I had friends like this who said I hate reading it's like well you know that's a terrible thing for a child to say because to say you hate reading is the same as saying I hate exploring I hate thinking I hate discussing right and but I mean they were very honest in their hatred and the reason they hated it is because well they weren't taught how to do it well and then they were forced into reading things that they didn't want to here's something I remember from grade eight I think this pissed me off more than anything that ever happened to me in junior high and there were a lot of things that happened in junior high that I wasn't very happy about and this was probably the top of the list so um I was a very fast reader as a kid and I could generally read all the books for the year in English class in the first two or three days and I would usually do that by reading those books behind a textbook in all the other classes and so I remember telling my teacher I don't know three days into the bloody English course that I had read old books and her answer was read them again and I thought you know that's really a bad answer because what I just announced to you was that I already did all the work for the Year this week and I was basically asking you you know could you give me some more books and by the way this is a school so you'd think that would be a place where that question could be reasonably asked and the answer was do the work you've already done again and make sure that you don't have any enjoyment whatsoever while you're pursuing it plus shut the hell up and don't bother me again right yeah I should say in that same school I had a librarian there Sandy naughtly who uh was the wife of the of the Socialist leader in town in the MLA and I used to go to the library and she would give me books and and good books yeah and she taught me a lot because she'd give me a book and I'd read it and I'd tell her and she'd give me another book and that was unbelievably useful that was self-guided learning in some ways and so I really loved that my dad had two he was teaching grade six at that point he used a system called SSRI which was sussain styling sustained sustained silent self-reinforced instruction something like that I haven't got the acronym exactly right but it was grad graded texts in a file folder of increasing difficulty with self-evaluation and you could progress that through that at your own rate God I loved that I would have I would have had a fine time in school I had to feel empowered by that too well plus there was a challenge constantly no one I could find the edge of my reading ability and start to play with that instead of having to read things that you know I had figured out I'd read like four years before so it was gay I suppose that was an early form of gamification but it isn't really gamification it's just using the processes of of incentive reward properly well and that's a crucial part of gamification is that right is it incentive rewards it's proper incentivization so maybe at a young age it is gamification in some ways maybe if that's like how well a game is actually an activity where the incentive rewards are lined up properly that's how you define a game so it it isn't like a game exists outside that it's that a game is a micro environment that's structured so optimally that people will engage in being there voluntarily yes right I think that's a huge point of engaging being there yes absolutely yeah well you know there's a there's a moral rule in in some ways that emerges out of that which is that if you haven't set up the environment so that the participants will engage in it voluntarily you set up a pathological environment it's a tyranny or it's either tyranny or chaos those are the Alternatives I wonder we say something like this look if we're if there's an issue in the studio involving two to three learners okay well likely they're going through something and they have you know like they have a lot of energy or they're not interested in what's happening right now if it's 50 of the studio what are we doing wrong right how are we making the game wrong yeah but about reading this I think this is very important I had I had a um a parent that was interested in the school say to me you know well how do you determine what they must read and he was very much in the classical education side which I have a lot of like I I really enjoy a lot of that and he said well you're telling me that they don't have to read these great books they don't they're not forced to read these great books and I went through this idea of reading and developing a love for reading and also that I would ask maybe pose a question something like this what's more important the four years maybe of high school that you're engaged in Reading deep books making sure they do that or making sure they love reading so much that the next 60 years is filled with enjoyable reading right right and I think that's maybe well and people will if you teach them to love reading they will advance in their reading to their zone of proximal development and they'll read the most complex books they can manage assuming they have enough knowledge to find those books people will do that automatically yes and so you might say well you should instill a love of the classics and what that would mean optimally is that you inform people that great books exist and you show them where they are but you pretty much have to let them come to those books on their own and they may not be able to do that well maybe maybe ever in their whole life because great books tend to be relatively complex on the intellectual front but they may have to come to that obliquely like in a lot of Behavioral psychologists will give their clients self-help books and intellectuals in the popular culture sure are they have derogatory attitude towards self-help books I mean the whole genre is like well that's self-help it's like well first of all what's your objection to that exactly you don't think people should be trying to help themselves yeah and then I don't know if you notice but that's actually introductory philosophy moral philosophy that's what a self-help book is and you might say well I have contempt for it because it's introductory it's like well where the hell do you expect people to start most people don't even read right and then when you see people who are willing to take a step into the domain of self-help it means they've actually progressed and they're reading enough so they're starting to contemplate the elementary ideas of moral philosophy and even theology it's like you should do everything you can to reward that right well it's an Awakening of sorts for them and it's like that's for sure who are we to say that the point at which they're Awakening is the point is not the point that they should be at it's like they're in a journey right now and this is where they should be because they've elected for that to be the place and how can we criticize them for not being in a different place yeah well you do that by you know proclaiming your moral superiority on hypothetical intellectual grounds yes it's a pretty path it's a pretty pathetic game so so okay so you've got your kids you you're instilling in them a love of reading at least in principle by teaching them to read so you know that kids actually tend not to enjoy reading so to speak until they can read a phrase at something like a glance and they can start re reading for meaning rather than to have to struggle with word comprehension and so part of the trick with teaching kids of course is to get them past the point of stumbling over words so that so that it becomes as easy to read as it does to talk or to listen let's say so but you've solved that problem to some degree by using these sophisticated sophisticated reading education programs that are analogous in some ways to the Khan Academy it I would say that's part of the solution you know when I say solution it's just we're providing them the tool to be able to unlock something that they really want and they want to know how to read they want to be able to get a book off a shelf to be able to read it but I think also you have to rethink what what you're thinking of as reading why can't a comic book be there as reading why can a graphic novel be there as reading and it can be and the younger ones love those and so they can develop that love of reading by something that like we would think well where's the content value in something like this and but in many of these are great stories but well they're not popular novels unless they have a they're not popular literary um Endeavors unless they have the capacity to grip the attention of the reader and they're not going to grip the attention of the reader unless they tell a good story so I think that is self-selecting I mean a story won't elicit attention from a reader if it isn't doing something for them yes so to the process of the school so yes we'll engage in reading so what does the reading process look like well number one they'll pick a book that would cost you a badge book something that they would is maybe at their level of development that you know on the cusp of being difficult right something that and it also maybe is interesting possibly associated with their hero's journey something like that but this could be a who is book or something like that at the younger ages then they'll read that book and write a review on that book and then they'll read that review during a Socratic discussion or after one completes before they break the circle the younger ages that's it you read it you write the simple review on it the review it doesn't have a word count like requirement it doesn't have anything like that the idea is that you've read a book you've written and you've answered three or four questions on it what was your favorite character what surprised you the most things like that and then you presented in front of the tribe then as you get into the older Studios they'll actually vote on your book review did it meet the requirements do we feel like they met like really understood the plot line or something like that or and also is there evidence that they didn't read the book so there's some self reinforcing here and they can if they deny the book the book review so to speak it's not oh it's done it's like hey address these things and then come back and represent repeat yeah that's good yeah yeah and what this and then the next book they read for their next batch book one of The Rules is it needs to be more difficult than the last so maybe they're not ready to do a badge book review for a while again because they're still working on reading proficiency they have a goal the book they want to do next but they're not quite there yet and so they're striving for something there but what this tears up to if you look at I'll give you a quick story about what I walked into on the middle school one day and mind you this is all from this system of not forcing reading working to make reading fun and so I walked into the middle school one day and it was during a time in the schedule called drop everything and read and so it's just we're all they're all reading I saw three girls and one boy sitting and we have kind of like it's more it looks like a shared workspace some something comfy like this they're they're sitting in different chairs reading and the books that I saw them reading were Atlas Shrugged the boys who challenged Hitler The Da Vinci Code and unbroken and this is all from without us saying you need to read any of any of these books this is from them going to the shelf and when you get in Middle School a deep book is a book that's won an award to change the world in some way and that's like kind of how you pitch a book that you'd like to be a deep book and so by giving them options in selection they wanted to challenge themselves and they wanted to read about like heroic stories and that was that's just something that uh when I walk in and see something like that I'm thinking like yes this is the way this should be that they're moving up in this progression of of Excellence or maybe proficiency or something like that yeah and they're voluntarily choosing to go into these deep stories all right so back how much more content should we cover content process with regard to elementary school well I think one thing I failed to mention at the beginning is our years couched in what I call badge plan and so a badge plan is at the beginning of the year you're after a couple weeks being in the studio because we really make the first session remember our years or four to six week sessions and we take at least a week break so we take four to six week session and in that first session a learner will start working a badge plan for the year and basically what they're doing on their own at first is saying this is what I'd like to accomplish in reading and math and writing questions they're starting to Envision goals for themselves and how how young this starts at roughly seven years oh yeah that's really good and but and it's important for parents to know this is that that is not an accurate assessment at seven years old it requires like feedback you can say hey I'd like to accomplish four grade levels of math this year well that's a great ambition but what they'll get it is then feedback from a guide and from parents on saying hey do we think these are smart goals and we really use that rubric that they're specific measurable but what I really like to focus what is the Smart goal specific measurable attainable relevant and time-bound yeah okay so and we're too great we start we have a rubric of evaluation for their vision and that's also peer evaluated absolutely and that gives the peer something evaluated hey great this is really specific that you want to accomplish three great levels of math this year but is it attainable yeah and they'll walk through like what that could look like so at the beginning of the year they set out a badge plan that badge plan is a signature is put on it by the student a signature is put on it by the guide once once they go over it and say it's it's filled with smart goals yeah and then parents and that essentially sets the stage yes and that's another thing we need to talk about a little bit is contracts within the studio but yeah that is one of them that then they have a document that says here's what we've all agreed I'm doing this year and so right if you need to reflect a plan have a plan and a goal and a goal and we do a check-in on this halfway through the year and they can adjust their goals at that point did I set two hard of goals were they too easy where did I get all my badge book Suns right away because I was so focused on the love of reading that I have for Harry Potter or something like that and so they'll have they'll have that as their their plan uh and then at the end of the year they'll check in on that plan how did I do and that is not a graded process it's an iterative process to get better and better at making a making goals that you can attain yeah well right it's also it's also a great way of inculcating what the process of coming to self-knowledge but also accurate self-knowledge you know we we tend to think especially in our idiot culture that people are transparent to themselves I can Define who I am and that's simply not true because you're too complex to be transparent to yourself and so you're going to have all sorts of delusional ideas some negative and some too positive about who you are and what you're capable of and part of the way you modify that so you come to a realistic appraisal of yourself is by smacking yourself up against the world and succeeding or failing but also by encountering other people who go yeah I don't think so or who Pat you on the background I'm saying good job right and so by having kids develop an unrealistic Vision to begin with which is what's going to happen with young kids because what the hell do they know and then by modifying that with peer evaluation and guide evaluation you're also helping the children come to a much more yes what precise and accurate understanding of who they are and how they can foster their own development absolutely that's really nice to have that inculcated so young okay so so the kids have a contract and they develop a goal and the peers give them feedback their teacher their their guide their parents so they're they're coming to more accurate self-evaluation what's let's turn our attention to middle school and high school we've concentrated a fair bit in elementary and that's fine so so lay out the situation in Middle School form yeah and I think just briefly something I'd say about uh the re the reason I think there's a big folks in elementary school is that most schools in the United States get preschool kindergarten right it's don't take it too seriously have a lot of fun explore the basics be social when you get into Elementary School it's like there's a switch that flips it says Hey College is coming school's not fun homework is here and so I think what Wonder does is we're able to take that period of childhood and allow it to still be childhood but there comes a time when you need to like start to move up and that's why we say Elementary love learning get along with other people in Middle School work truly hard for at least three hours a day in flow but and then I'll add High School there too have a tested embedded idea of what you'd like to do with your life and so let me back integrate into that yeah with it in in elementary or in Middle School you are doing far more I would say you're you're getting you're still doing Socratic launches every day you have the kind of core work that you're working what's the age range for your middle school it's 11 to 13 somewhere in that range and it's okay it's a bit fluid because in a normal school the constant is how how long you can take to do some work the variable is how proficient you are at it in our school with Mastery the the constant is we Master we work for Mastery the variables how long it takes to get it to get that done and so if it takes you a few months or whatever extra do that that's okay and it it works within the system so they have a similar structure where they're doing morning core skills work afternoon quests it's very much built on challenges that are delivered from a guide to the Learners and they go through on their own with challenges in western civilization with writer's workshop and they're building that body of work throughout a session three out of six weeks the key if I worked broadly at middle school and high school the key is that and this is maybe a thought about a protest against delayed maturation is that if you look at some people that we really respect in the world like Da Vinci you could look at Carnegie these people start apprenticing at age 12 and 13. they were in the real world getting real world experience at age 12 and 13. and Michelangelo Michelangelo and so there's no reason that young people today aren't capable of the same thing and so one of the defining characteristics of our middle school as you're working on hard work and remember mind you we have if done properly at our school there's no homework at any point throughout the school this is all done within the time frames that we have at school the progress how long are your school days roughly 9 to 3 30. okay so standard standard schooling yes yeah and so what you'll start in middle school is your apprenticeship process so you're starting to confine you're starting to constrain that your State's exploration and Elementary as you get into Middle School you're really starting to hone in right and you can work three hours and so this is also the unanswered the question that I posed earlier which is how do you make sure that this is aligned with the real world yes and part of your answer is well we put kids out in the real world they're in the real world starting at 11. so starting at 11 you'll get your first apprenticeship and and that apprenticeship starts like this then this this is something I think is so important is that one guides and parents don't secure apprenticeships for our Learners the Learners do we help them with recipes for it and here's like what a recipe would be number one what do you love take things that you've learned in the world experiences you've had experience you've had in elementary school where you explored through all these quests that we do in the afternoon take all that and develop and develop a list of 10 Heroes that you have based on something that you would love to do you'd love to learn more about maybe it's videography say in elementary we did this Quest on videography I loved it you know in middle school you'll take that you'll you'll find heroes in that field locally you'll take those 10 Heroes narrow it down to three and then from those three Heroes you go through a process of finding their email address and this is local this is local yeah it can't it can be otherwise you can do it otherwise there's probably more what somebody might do in high school but to start with those I'll give some examples too because they're very powerful you have Heroes you narrow it down you find their email address your you have to write an email that will get opened first which is not always easy for busy people yeah number two in that in that email you have to make the case for how they've inspired you like what work have you done to research this person what do you know about them and then how can you explain your teaching them how to do a really high quality job applications really absolutely and if you get one of these it's like I've gotten one from a Learner in the Middle School unexpectedly who wanted to start a school like ours that's her that's her journey in life and I read it and I was like there's just no way I could I could like turn this down it's just no way I couldn't do it but so they're writing an email one that will get open two in that email they're requesting a five minute phone call in that five minute phone call they're requesting a 10 minute in-person meeting right and in that very sneaky yes in that in first I mean they're requesting a six-week apprenticeship and but it's all very genuine meaning it's like saying this is a person that's inspired me in my life this is something that I I want I have specific things I want to learn from them and so a couple examples of that in our school um we now have high school our oldest age is 16 right now just because we grow with the Learners that are at the older ages we don't enroll into High School you really need to start at the at the lower ages and work up you could probably guess why yeah have you tried it yes and what's been your what's been your experience they're too cynical no it's happening usually a lack of self-motivation you come into an environment where no adult is telling you what to do every day right and you've been in a knockoff and you've been in an environment where everybody's been telling you all the time and that's why I tell people about the role of our guide is that the reason our guides don't answer questions like like like they do is that in life there's not somebody standing over your shoulder all the time giving you answer the things but the information is at your fingertips if you know how to properly utilize it and you're motivated to do so and we know this kids are doing this every day right they're not doing it for their schoolwork because it's not interesting or fun to them but they're doing it for the things that they're passionate about in the world on YouTube and things like that so for for one example we have a young girl in the school and her grandfather is somebody that uh works with the wrongfully accused and at a young age that took hold of her and she's very inspired by that so at age 11 maybe 12 right in there she decided she wanted to be an attorney potentially and so she did this whole process and she's went through this process now for three years I believe where she's validated this idea that yes this is what I want to do which by the way one of the most important takeaways from apprenticeship you could probably have is that I don't want to do this thing that I thought I did definitely we've got stories about that too but she's done that and now at age 15 she's participated in jury selections depositions these things she she's on the way to be doing the work that somebody that is uh graduated from uh college is just starting to do right she's doing that work right and one other example what sort of feedback are you getting about her from the people she's been apprenticing too we've well I would say that I have an a quick answer about that well one of the one of the girls that is in the studio as well she wanted to uh intern Apprentice at this pet store this she wants to work with animals in a zoo and things like that she was too young to be hired as as an apprentice but they said hey we'll let you Shadow and so she went into Shadow and then and it was just their personal policy that she couldn't be hired until this age a certain age she went and did that and after after that next year they said we were so impressed by the work that you did that we've changed our policy so that you can come work here and I think when you're coming up in this environment and you're learning how to work well with other people and what these Learners say uh we tell they understand is that be happy to do any job right it doesn't matter if you're emptying the garbage cans like you're getting into somewhere yeah and somebody's giving you their time and Jordan a powerful thing I might want to say here is I think this is a very important point is that the role of a mentor is an opt-in relationship meaning I think that's often the confusion with maybe a teacher that's wanting to bring a personal thought into a classroom is that that's a mentorship relationship meaning a young person asks you to be a mentor or seeks you out as a mentor otherwise the job is academic like parents are sending their kids to school to learn academics and and I think that's what's so powerful is they're electing their mentors here so the last thing I'll mention about uh apprenticeships because mind you they start at 11 and they'll go all the way through high school and there's a process for this but the last thing I'll mention is that we had one girl that was uh and I'm mentioning girls here I've also we also have boys that have done great apprenticeships as well she thought for sure I want to be a veterinarian and she at 11 interned with a veterinarian who's a surgeon she loves horses loves animals the the first sign of the surgery room and what couldn't handle it almost almost lost it so to speak and that was an amazing learning for her at a young age because when might you learn that otherwise if maybe it's after undergraduate school or something like that right and so she knows I still want to work with animals I love them but this direction isn't the precise direction right what an amazing learning right yeah yeah yeah so that's that's how we look at apprenticeships in the school they start at age 11. so you're still doing your core skills type of work still moving up in bad or deep books you're doing chemistry physics biology much more intentionally I would say so you're doing medical biology and um chemistry and we're making it very uh very relatable um and then in high school this is where it really kind of everything comes together so you've have a love of learning you know how to work well with other people you have the habits of hard work and now what is it it's you've in Middle School you've also tested this idea in the world you've gone out in the world do things and so what happens in high school is what we call the next great adventure and the next great adventure really is you're declaring after doing three to four years of apprenticing this is where I want to this is where I fit into the world this is what I want to do so you're declaring you're putting a flag in the ground and then with that you're going on a journey of deliberate work through high school and that deliberate work is number one declaring it saying this is what I'm going to do number two you're doing you're finding people in that industry and you're doing a minimum of 10 interviews with these people that have done what you would like to do and have inspired you in some way and then through that you're asking them you know tough questions these are long pretty long interviews that people people um say yes to then from there you're going into uh deliberate practices of this work so it could be getting a credential on the work from a third party Source or it could be um uh and the kids figure out how to do this themselves essentially we have we have recipes yeah process we hand off to them yeah and that they engage in this process absolutely but there's never a time when adults going to help you with your interview or meaning like they're going to be there at the interview with you or anything like that yeah there's not a time when they're going to help you secure an apprenticeship and how are the high school kids monitoring themselves and why does that work explain to me well you you in we walked through the elementary school situation where there were kids from six and a half to eleven participating in high school the age is what 14 to 18 18. and it's the same basic model the kids yourself the young people are self-monitoring and did they turn the 14 year olds do they turn to the 18 year olds for mentoring is that absolutely and it just happens naturally meaning like and they're already accustomed to doing this it's it's it's you know when you walk into an organization you can see the culture is way different in this place than it is otherwise that's how that's how it would look there's times when our men middle school high school guide will be out of the studio for long periods of time and they've actually said to him you know he he was gone our middle school high school guide is a stellar individual and he loves what he does he was gone for a number of days once and so I was sort of doing the check-ins with the learner Learners and when he got back he said hey what did you like and not like it when it's gone and their response to him was we actually like it when you work outside of the studio more because it reduces the Temptation for us to go to you with a question and it requires us to to work together on these items so yes right it's similar necessity yep peer-to-peer accountability yeah and and uh and work so now have you had students graduate from high school and go on to colleges and universities already have you been in operation long enough for that to happen our oldest right now is 16 but in our network of schools and we're we're just one school I'm only I only speak for ours um yes absolutely there's been Learners that went up through this same model that have went on to create apprenticeships go to different different types of colleges and uh you know start jobs things like that do you have any idea how your kids are doing when they go out out of the schools into the actual world well I think we hear anecdotes about that about somewhat of what you talked about before about hey there is sort of like you're leaving this environment which is basically a civil society yeah is what we said right right is what's set up there that's governed by Learners with appropriate handoffs of systems and recipes and so there's comments about what they see maybe that it's very difficult for people to make decisions like not not them for other people that went through different models it's a very common thing that we see and uh and that a lot of the work maybe in undergrad seems like fake work right we know it is it is and so those are comments but I think the idea is that they're they have they've developed agency to go out into the world and aim towards something that is very valuable I wonder if your kids are going to be statistically more likely to be entrepreneurs right because my suspicions are that they would have some I wouldn't say difficult difficulty fitting into traditional environments but unwillingness to do so and the proclivity to set up systems of their own that actually function properly which is one of the advantages of course of setting up your own school or your own business is that yeah I think that's that is okay so if parents we're running out of time on this segment we're going to flip over to the Daily wire plus side momentarily and and uh I'm gonna walk uh Zach through some autobiography biographical reminiscences and talk about how his Destiny and his calling came to be let's say but um let's close this off practically speaking so a lot of the people who are listening to or watching this are going to be interested in while learning more and also about how they might maneuver so that they can set up a school like this in their local environment so what's what are the what are the practical what do they need to know practically in order to manage that well I think number one practically you need to know the type of school and model that this is we've talked a lot about it here but being at wonder is a journey for parents and Learners and what I mean by that is the process that we're actually engaging from from a psychological standpoint a therapeutic standpoint for parents might be something like differentiation and because you have to you have to be able to be willing to let your learner succeed and fail so if you're ready for a journey like that truly ready for that which so yeah you're teaching the parents how to let their kids be independent or how to Foster that Independence yeah that's a good deal well how else will we be able to well I would say this when you make when you set up an environment like this where young people have agency if we're taking that agency away arbitrarily we're not really helping them without the agency absolutely and so you have to give them sort of like a space that's theirs that we all agree the journey you're on we've made a badge plan as well yeah now you go off and accomplish this we believe in you and I often say to parents that something I'll say to my kids is look this is your journey it's not my journey yeah right yeah I am just so glad to be a cheerleader on the sideline and I I cannot wait to see what you do right so if you're if a parent is really ready to say hey I want my child to be one of the people who leaves school with agency and ready to launch off into the world I think you can look at Wonder we're looking to expand our schools as well and and you can look at Acton Academy and there's many schools around there's maybe 300 schools in in the Acton Academy Network and um now and there's plans to expand that oh is well it's consistently expanding based on parent entrepreneurs that want to take on this hero's journey of their own and so you know right now we're looking specifically we're in Kansas you know we're looking in Iowa as well my home state um to expand our schools and the purpose is just to allow more young people to have this experience in life because I had somebody say to me once and these kids are so lucky and my thought to them was no this is what they deserve they deserve to be able to have like agency over their life appropriately at a young age to have mentors and people that they look up to it isn't even though you know it isn't even only that they deserve it right I mean you could say well you're you're optimizing a juvenile polity that that reflects how the world could be and should be constructed but it isn't just that the kids deserve it it's that because they're such a stellar resource it's appallingly inefficient and pathetic of society not to utilize their full resources and so because you know one of the things you made mention of early in our conversation was that you know each person has something to offer in the world that's unique and people are unique I mean we're all human but each of us has something about him or her that's not ever going to be replicated and that needs to be brought forward and it's in everyone's interest to ensure that that's brought forward and you start that by not demoralizing children right so if there's a social interest here too that that isn't that isn't merely limited to the individual I think Paris maybe don't understand how deep that extent goes and I'll just real quickly give this example imagine you have an eight-year-old that's just starting to write and they're starting to write stories and they bring you this little book that they've written yeah the appropriate response to that is wow yeah like was this here's what you did well yes here's what you could improve on boy it's great you've done that yes the pro yeah the proof response wow how hard was this for you to do looks like you worked really hard on this yeah what we all have a a tendency to do is say hey but did you notice you spelled this word right right right and there's nothing that's more demoralizing to an eight-year-old that's just accomplished something that they're proud of than to hear how they didn't do it right yeah yeah and so if so I would just say for for parents that have this belief want this for their children there's schools out there like action Academy who wonder and you know the idea of where where can they go we can put the links and so forth in the description of the video but where can they go to find out more information so to find out more information about Wonder our website is daringtowonder.com daringto wonder.com and can I tell you a quick story about where that came from sure GK Chesterton I read something from him a long ago in his essay on Authority and education and he said this he said that even back then one of the biggest problems that he saw was that um the newest ideas were being taught to the youngest people meaning that they hadn't been vetted these ideas hadn't been fed but they're somehow making their way into the to the school and he said that's the exact opposite the oldest ideas should be the first things taught and he said true education is to believe something so confidently to know so confidently that's true that you would dare to tell it to a child I just thought thinking about what's happening in the world today and how like the new ideas are infiltrating quickly without being vetted yeah it's going back to this idea of that you would know something so truthfully that you dare to tell it to your child right I think that's the appropriate guiding principle well that's a that's a really good place to end and it's a very good time to end so I guess what we'll do is end um I'm going to thank you everyone who's watching and listening for your time and attention and you know I've been fascinated by what the acting academy and and and other uh sophisticated Advanced and forward-eeming schools have been doing you know and I'm going to do an interview at some point with Kate verbal saying about uh her approach in the UK which is quite radically different than your approach and I was struck immensely by the success of her school um it's it's a much more formalized system of learning but as I said there's there isn't necessarily only one way to solve a complex problem and it's not like she's not teaching her students to be autonomous because she's definitely teaching them to be autonomous so that element is is very much shared um but um well thank you very much for coming in and talking in more detail about what the schools are doing for those of you who are watching you might if you like this and you're interested in you might also want to check out the discussion I had with Jeff Sandifer which was more abstract in some ways um this this part of the reasons I could I wanted to talk was to fill in the anecdotal details and to describe in some more detail what was actually happening on the ground in the schools and so you know I think that was very useful and also very interesting I'd like to come down at one point and you know spend a couple of days watching your school just to see because I'd like to see exactly what's going on for myself I also think that would be very fun so maybe we'll we'll do something like that in the future that'd be a good thing to plan and so um well your website again daringtowonder.com yeah and the Acton Academy website for further accessacademy.org actonacademy.org all right well thank you for everyone for watching and listening I'm gonna flip over to the Daily wire plus side you can continue consider joining us there if you want to uh hear more about the background of Zach's life for example and to discover with us what motivated him to pursue the path that he pursued which is kind of what I do on the daily word plus side um you might want to consider giving them some support because well if you like this sort of discussion they're the ones facilitating it and that's real good of them thanks to the film crew here in Toronto today and uh Zach for making the trip up here that's very much appreciated thank you and uh thank you all very much for your time and attention see you soon [Music] thank you

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 388,323

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: 5umJbXekS8k

Length: 102min 3sec (6123 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 26 2023