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MINDFOOD II: Top 5 Cursed Problems in School
18 Plays2 years ago
Welcome to our latest podcast series: MINDFOOD, easily digestible content for education.
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Top 5 Cursed Problems in School
Hello and welcome to Mindfood: a series of more casual content that's easily digestible.
This episode is brought to you by Brad Latzke, Michelle Edwards, and Ann Trapasso
So what do I mean by Cursed Problems? Well…
In 2019, Alex Jaffe gave a talk at GDC (that’s the Game Developers Conference) called “Cursed Problems in Game Design”. Since the video was released in 2020 it has gotten over 600,000 views on YouTube. In the video he says that a game’s essential experiences, why the player came to play, are the player promises. These promises exist both in the heart of the designer and the player: they are the reason a game exists, it’s what we care about at a fundamental level.
A cursed problem, then, is not merely a problem that is difficult to resolve, but is instead an unsolvable design problem, rooted in a conflict between core player promises. The promise of two things that cannot co-exist. The premises of the promises are fundamentally incompatible, they are in violation of one another. Oil and water. You cannot solve cursed problems, rather you have to innovate around them.
The analogy to schools and schooling and the appeal of this discussion to us is if you replace player with student and game with school, it doesn’t take much to realize that many of the promises of school are incompatible with one another, both in the minds of the designers - who often have specific objectives in mind - and in the student experience of the systems and mechanics of school. We thought today that we’d try to unpack the cursed problems of school, the promises of school in the minds of students and educators, the difference in the experience and objectives of school, and analyze what the potential solutions to these cursed problems sacrifice along the way.
These are the central conflicts of schooling!
This podcast is also available on video! See: https://www.youtube.com/c/HumanRestorationProject
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Mind Food' and Sponsorship
00:00:20
Speaker
Hello and welcome to Mind Food, a series of more casual content that is easily digestible.
00:00:26
Speaker
This episode is brought to you by Brad Latsky, Michelle Edwards, and Anne Trapasso.
Introduction to Hosts and Main Topic
00:00:31
Speaker
My name is Nick Covington.
00:00:32
Speaker
I'm the creative director at the Human Restoration Project, and I'm here with Chris McNutt, our executive director.
00:00:38
Speaker
And today on Mind Food, we're talking cursed problems of school.
00:00:43
Speaker
But before we get started, I want to address a question that we frequently get, which is, where can I get that shirt?
00:00:51
Speaker
So I'll put the link in the show description to our web store available through our partner Raygun, where you can find the designs that we have available with the Human Restoration Project logo on there.
00:01:01
Speaker
All proceeds benefit us at HRP and are union made here in the Midwest.
00:01:06
Speaker
They're also ethically sourced and sustainably produced.
Understanding 'Cursed Problems' in Gaming
00:01:09
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And that stuff matters.
00:01:10
Speaker
So what do I mean by cursed problems of school?
00:01:14
Speaker
Well, in 2019, Alex Jaffe gave a talk at GDC, so that's the Game Developers Conference, called Cursed Problems in Game Design.
00:01:24
Speaker
Since that video was released in 2020, it's gotten over 600,000 views on YouTube,
00:01:30
Speaker
And in the video, he says that a game's essential experiences, so why the player came to play, are the player promises.
00:01:37
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So these promises exist both in the heart of the designer, the designer promises, and the player.
00:01:44
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They're the reason the game exists.
00:01:46
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It's what we care about at a fundamental level.
00:01:48
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So a cursed problem then is not merely a problem that's difficult to resolve, but it's instead an unsolvable design problem rooted in a conflict between those core player promises.
00:02:02
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So the promises of two things that can't coexist.
00:02:04
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The premises of the promises are fundamentally incompatible.
00:02:09
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They're in violation with one another, oil and water.
00:02:12
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So you can't solve cursed problems, rather you have to innovate and work around them.
00:02:16
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So an additional definition that Alex gives in that video is that a cursed problem can also be rooted in the conflict between promised experiences and objectives.
00:02:25
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So that's to say the way players experience the game is in tension with the game's objective, and so forces the player to either endure a poor experience to reach the objective,
00:02:36
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or subvert the objective for a more engaging player-driven experience.
00:02:41
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And he starts off with a couple examples of cursed problems in game design.
00:02:45
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You can chime in whenever, Chris.
00:02:47
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So in an online PvP, so that's player versus player environment like an Overwatch or a Fortnite, you'll face what he calls the skill inflation problem.
00:02:56
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This is one of his cursed problems.
00:02:58
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Players who are new to the game but want to become the best and master all of the skills face a long journey to do so that takes a lot of time.
00:03:05
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Gotta put in a lot of hours.
00:03:07
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But they also want a stable, vibrant community of players to play the game with.
00:03:13
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So the curse problem in these promises is that the long journey to mastery leaves you with a rising skill pool while a stable, vibrant community demands a broad range of skill levels.
00:03:25
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So this skill gap inevitably alienates some players who can't or won't invest the time needed to master the game as they're also unable to advance within the community.
00:03:35
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So the gap is the distance between the most senior and hardcore players and the newest and the most casual.
00:03:43
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It's so true of every video game.
00:03:46
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If you play video games and you miss the boat and you're on two or three years down the road and it's an online game, it's the worst experience ever to go in.
00:03:57
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Valorant's a good example of that.
00:03:59
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So I've always really wanted to play Valorant because that's what the kids play.
00:04:02
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It seems cool.
00:04:03
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I played Counter-Strike, which is apparently pretty similar.
00:04:06
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I've hopped into that for like three games.
00:04:08
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And what happens is that when people have been playing for a very long time and you're new, the toxicity is so, as you suck and they have years of experience and they want to win because that's how they get more and more competitive.
00:04:23
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So it's, it turns away new players as well.
00:04:26
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And that issue of toxicity and like communication is going to be another one of the curse problems that I'll bring up here, too.
00:04:32
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So another example that he gives is another one that you have a lot of experience with that we'll talk about is Diablo three's infamous auction house.
00:04:40
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So you could buy any in game item for either gold or real world currency.
00:04:46
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So I'll let you explain your experience of this, maybe your side on it before we go any further.
00:04:52
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Yeah, so in Diablo, that's a game where you move your little character around, you kill stuff, and they drop things, like armor pieces, weapons, gold, that kind of stuff.
00:05:02
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And typically, the core gameplay loop is you go out and you have fun hitting your buttons and you kill stuff, and then maybe you find a better piece of armor or a better weapon, which then in turn makes you more powerful, and then you can do that faster or against stronger enemies, etc.,
00:05:17
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Diablo 1, Diablo 2 are just like pretty standard online games.
00:05:20
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You do that.
00:05:21
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And the end game, so the thing that you do like once you've done everything is like optimize.
00:05:25
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So it's like, how can I hit slightly harder?
00:05:27
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How can I move slightly faster?
00:05:29
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In Diablo 3, they decided that, hey, what if we made a system
00:05:34
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where not only could you get these cool drops, but you could sell them for real money on a marketplace.
00:05:42
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Because a major issue in Diablo 2 is that that existed, it was just not regulated.
00:05:47
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So you weren't allowed to do it, but people did it anyway.
00:05:49
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People would sell stuff on websites, and they'd buy it.
00:05:52
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So they figured, well, we'll just co-opt that.
00:05:54
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We'll do it ourselves.
00:05:55
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And the issue was that you got to the hardest difficulty level, which was an immortal.
00:06:00
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Is that what it was called?
00:06:01
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I can't remember.
00:06:02
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I have no idea.
00:06:03
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I didn't get that far.
00:06:04
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There was a difficulty and then there was another difficulty level.
00:06:07
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I could be wrong about this.
00:06:08
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I can't remember.
00:06:08
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You get to the hardest difficulty level.
00:06:11
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And I remember it being incredibly challenging, like absurdly challenging, that you needed really good gear in order to get through that.
00:06:20
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So you would load up the auction house menu and you would buy, like for $5, a better piece of gear if you wanted to progress.
00:06:29
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But it turned the game into this weird...
00:06:33
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it reminds me of NFTs nowadays or marketplace-driven gaming.
00:06:37
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Because if I spend $10 to get better gear, that allows me to progress further and have the potential for better gear to drop, which I could then take and sell on the marketplace and make my money back.
00:06:49
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I personally made like $300 playing Diablo 3 by going around and killing stuff.
00:06:54
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And I would sell it on the auction house because I was lucky with the drops.
00:06:57
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But I remember it leads to a lot of problems because one,
00:07:00
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it's pay to play because getting into that sphere of being the best requires a monetary investment because the difficulty was so hard.
00:07:08
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The chances of you getting there without spending money were quite low.
00:07:11
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But also from a community standpoint, it's incredibly toxic.
00:07:15
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I remember one of my friends, he had like a new piece of armor drop on the ground.
00:07:21
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And one of my other friends who was also playing with us, it was a substantial upgrade, like way better than what he currently had.
00:07:27
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It would allow him to progress further into that.
00:07:30
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higher difficulty and he's like oh yeah i'll give it to you then he checked the uh auction house price it was like 25 and he sold it sorry buddy i'm just gonna sell it to some random guy on the internet uh so like in theory on paper kind of a cool idea i think like it's innovative it's very different but at the end of the day it leads to a complete degradation of actual gameplay you're just like reading numbers on a screen every single drop is just like
00:07:56
Speaker
oh, is that one worth money?
00:07:57
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Then I'm going to pick that one up.
00:07:59
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It's less and less attached from my character.
00:08:01
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Yes, it subverts the entire premise of the game.
00:08:05
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And that's what Alex talks about too, right?
00:08:06
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So if the central premise is that you get rewarded for your efforts with loot drops that let you advance through the game or to develop cool armor sets and all those kinds of things too, like you get perks, aesthetics, and all those kinds of things.
00:08:20
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So your character grows in power over time while the auction house mechanic canceled out that rich loot experience by making items, what he says, basically fungible for one another.
00:08:31
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So now instead of hunting for loot, you just farm monsters for gold or you just farm the loot and then sell it on the auction house for real money there too.
00:08:41
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So eventually the auction house-
00:08:45
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Okay, okay.
00:08:47
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It was incredible.
00:08:48
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Yeah, I did not get that far, I'll tell you that.
00:08:51
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So eventually they shelved that mechanic, and one Diablo producer is quoted as saying, the auction house, quote, undermines Diablo's core gameplay, that is to kill monsters and get cool loot.
00:09:06
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And now there's a whole, you know, everything else now with Diablo Immortal as the mobile gaming platform.
00:09:13
Speaker
That's maybe not a cursed problem and just the issue with the mobile gaming ecosystem just writ large.
00:09:20
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So...
00:09:22
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Now we'll get to one real quick that he actually proposes a solution for, and that's exactly what you were talking about, Chris, with that on the toxicity of online gaming spaces.
00:09:31
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So Alex calls this the co-op abuse problem because in high stakes co-op games, again, maybe Valorant is in there, Overwatch, Rocket League, League of Legends, anywhere where you need to coordinate broadly with a team in order for the success, the victory conditions to occur for you.
00:09:50
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players who want to play to win often become toxic or abusive of teammates over voice chat and of, you know, the sidebar chats for people who aren't on their skill level.
00:09:59
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And players come into those co-op games because of the sense of social belonging.
00:10:04
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So if you're not quite at the skill level, right, you face that level of toxicity and abuse, it's going to turn you off from playing the game entirely.
00:10:12
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So the curse problem there is the central tension of toxicity and social belonging is
00:10:18
Speaker
is a curse of co-op games.
00:10:20
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Now, he says the solution, or I guess he says rather the solution to any curse problem is going to require you to sacrifice one of those premises.
00:10:29
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So either an experience or an objective, or for you to sacrifice, you know, like whatever you were holding sacred as a designer, right?
00:10:39
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The promise that you were going to deliver as a designer in...
00:10:42
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face of player experiences, or you're going to have to sacrifice one of those player promises.
00:10:48
Speaker
So you can't, you might not be able to have it all, for example.
00:10:51
Speaker
So yeah, yeah, I have an example of that, actually, a video game example.
00:10:56
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So recently, Omega Strikers came out, which I've been playing a lot of very fun game.
00:11:01
Speaker
It's like a soccer game with super powered characters, I guess.
00:11:05
Speaker
It's made by former League of Legends producers.
00:11:09
Speaker
So it feels a lot like League.
00:11:11
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And if anyone
00:11:13
Speaker
has ever played League of Legends, they'll know that probably what it's best known for is it's absolutely terrible community.
00:11:20
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It's incredibly toxic.
00:11:21
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Like, logging into that game, you'll have people that grieve you, berate you.
00:11:25
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Some of the worst things ever happened in a chat on that game.
00:11:28
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So in order to solve that problem, what Omega Strikers did to sacrifice to make their goals align, or whatever you want to call it, is they kind of got rid of a lot of the community.
00:11:39
Speaker
There's no in-game chat.
00:11:41
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There's only emotes, so you can't actually talk to other players.
00:11:45
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So there's no way to verbally berate someone for not doing well.
00:11:50
Speaker
Yes, and that's exactly what Alex says is one of the potential solutions.
00:11:54
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So it basically comes down to your values, right?
00:11:57
Speaker
What do you value more for your players?
Parallels Between Gaming Issues and Education System
00:11:59
Speaker
The social-emotional safety in that community building or what he calls the fantasy of harmonious cooperation?
00:12:06
Speaker
Because if you give just unlimited voice and text chat and those kinds of things, that's just going to open itself up for abuse, right?
00:12:12
Speaker
So you can have the fantasy or you can have the social emotional safety.
00:12:16
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He says one of those solutions to toxic teammates is to limit player communication in those various capacities.
00:12:22
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So either being only able to use emojis or a lot of games have pretty robust ping systems where you don't even need to chat, but you can communicate.
00:12:29
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Open up a menu window and then either scroll through them or mouse through them, etc.
00:12:34
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to communicate with players.
00:12:36
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So that sacrifices then the rich social channel for relationship building while maintaining the core gameplay there.
00:12:46
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You can focus on the game and not on the toxic atmosphere.
00:12:48
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The other potential compromise that he says is to lower the stakes.
00:12:52
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So that's to say limit individual responsibilities or make the impact of individual decisions and individual mistakes less salient or less obvious to the team.
00:13:03
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So you don't necessarily know who's doing what at any given moment.
00:13:08
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So
00:13:08
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That sacrifices the fantasy of harmonious cooperation, but also gives us a more rich social emotional environment.
00:13:16
Speaker
So you can't add your cake and eat it too, right?
00:13:19
Speaker
Now, the analogy to schools and schooling and the appeal of this discussion to us should be obvious by now, right?
00:13:25
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The cursed problems of school.
00:13:27
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So if you replace player with student...
00:13:29
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and the game with school, it doesn't take much to realize that many of the promises of school are incompatible with one another.
00:13:37
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At least the experiences could be in tension with the objectives or the promises of the designer and what they hold sacred are going to be in tension with the player promises that they seek, the student promises rather, that they seek to get out of their schooling experience.
00:13:55
Speaker
So we thought today that we'd try to unpack those cursed problems of school, the promises of school in the minds of students and educators, the difference in the experience and the objectives, and analyze what, if any, potential solutions or workarounds we could have for these cursed problems along the way.
00:14:14
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So we're going to kind of run through a list of the central conflicts of schooling.
00:14:18
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Do you want to start, Chris?
00:14:19
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Do you want me to get going first?
00:14:21
Speaker
I can start.
00:14:22
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So we framed this as a top five.
00:14:25
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Although Nick and I were discussing earlier, Nick is against doing any kind of top 10 or top 5.
00:14:29
Speaker
As you listen to our last top 10, you'll know that he doesn't like doing hierarchies, apparently.
00:14:32
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But mine is in a top 5.
00:14:34
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So we're going to do top 5 cursed problems of school.
00:14:40
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Here's number 5.
00:14:41
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You had to sneak this in here.
00:14:44
Speaker
Oh, my God.
00:14:44
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You had to sneak it in.
00:14:46
Speaker
So here's my first cursed problem of school.
00:14:51
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And hopefully I did this right because I haven't looked at your list before.
00:14:53
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So we'll see how different they are from each other.
00:14:56
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My first person problem is the issue of college scholarships and competitive admissions to universities.
00:15:03
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So the promise being that you can attain this amazing education by going to a competitive university.
00:15:11
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by out-competing everyone else within your school that there's selective admission.
00:15:17
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So you, in theory, should be surrounded by the most astute, the most academic compatriots, I guess, in your educational endeavors.
00:15:27
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The reason why this is a cursed problem is that it makes kids inadvertently heavily focus on everything that it takes to get into a university.
00:15:38
Speaker
We recently saw that news report about, like,
00:15:43
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LinkedIn posting job descriptions for people to write other folks' college admissions papers.
00:15:50
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Make up experiences, embellish what they're actually doing for these kids that probably have all A's, but maybe need a little bit more, a little bit of help to get into Yale or whatever.
00:16:01
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So I'll spend $5,000 to get a better college admissions letter.
00:16:04
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The problem with having
00:16:06
Speaker
ultra-selective, ultra-competitive college admissions and scholarships is that kids then obsess about getting into college and lose their childhoods.
00:16:18
Speaker
There were so many different circumstances, I remember while teaching, where kids would
00:16:22
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be working from like 8 a.m.
00:16:25
Speaker
when school started to 8 p.m.
00:16:28
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doing after school clubs and activities, dance, music, sports, whatever.
00:16:34
Speaker
Not necessarily because they love doing all of those things, but because they wanted to have the most stellar resume possible to get into their dream school.
00:16:43
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And that's hyper problematic because at the end of the day, what's going to happen to those kids is they're going to get into their dream school and then they're going to be adrift.
00:16:52
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They're not going to know what to do next because that's not how learning works.
00:16:57
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It doesn't matter where you go to school.
00:16:59
Speaker
You could go to a public community college and do just as well, if not better than someone who goes to like a Brown or a Yale or, you know, one of those schools.
00:17:09
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So my kind of sacrifice to make this,
00:17:12
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I guess, in order to make this curse and problem work.
00:17:15
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I had three.
00:17:18
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I'll list them in order of how difficult they would be to do.
00:17:22
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So this first one really isn't a sacrifice as much as it is a way to work with the existing curse problem, which is helping students understand that it doesn't matter what school you go to.
00:17:32
Speaker
Frank Bruni wrote a great book, we actually mentioned it on the last Mind Food, called Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be, which I've always given to kids who
00:17:40
Speaker
are those kind of kids that are obsessed with getting into certain schools.
00:17:44
Speaker
And recognizing that, is it cool to want to go to a certain school?
00:17:47
Speaker
Sure.
00:17:48
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But if you don't get into it, it's not the end of the world.
00:17:51
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That book outlines, I believe, like 100 different successful people, like politicians, activists, business leaders, etc., who went to just regular old state schools or community colleges or didn't go to college at all.
00:18:04
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And they ended up being just fine because it's about the individual, not about the place.
00:18:09
Speaker
It's more nuanced.
00:18:11
Speaker
In terms of the two things to sacrifice, one is very obvious, which is you just make free college.
00:18:19
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So that way you don't need to worry about scholarships at all.
00:18:22
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If college is free, you don't need to worry about competing for scholarships.
00:18:26
Speaker
There's still the issue of competing to get into schools, but at least the competition is not –
00:18:33
Speaker
existential in the fact that you won't be able to go.
00:18:35
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You'll be able to get into a school.
00:18:37
Speaker
It just might not be your top pick.
Critique of STEM-focused Education and Its Impact
00:18:39
Speaker
So that's one person problem that you could solve is doing that.
00:18:42
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The second thing that you could do is remove grades and standardized testing from the college admissions process.
00:18:49
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So if you refocus that towards projects, community activism, other forms of
00:18:57
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things that kids would do within their high school career.
00:19:01
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You could build about changes in the education system, similar to what the mastery transcript is doing, where you're changing the directive.
00:19:09
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Now, are there potential problems that could result from doing that?
00:19:12
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Yes, because you're still going to have people that embellish and hyper-obsess and all these things.
00:19:19
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So it's a yes and approach.
00:19:22
Speaker
In a perfect world, I think we would see free college and it would be normalized that
00:19:26
Speaker
K through college is a thing that you just do.
00:19:29
Speaker
I personally think that we're at the point in human society where you need some kind of post-secondary, including trade schools and other one to two year licensure programs, but you need to do something.
00:19:42
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And I don't think it's a radical statement to say kids are better off if they go to college.
00:19:48
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I think that that is needed.
00:19:50
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I know personally that was when I feel like I actually knew what I was doing was after I was in the college environment.
00:19:57
Speaker
So that's my number five is college scholarships and competitive admissions.
00:20:01
Speaker
That's what William Dureshiewicz gets to in Excellent Sheep, too, is that so many in high school, so many students and families put so much pressure and weight on that on selective university admissions that then by the time students actually get there, they think that they have arrived, but they've arrived as like this burnt out husk of a shell of a person.
00:20:24
Speaker
And then they realize that that hustle doesn't stop.
00:20:27
Speaker
Right.
00:20:27
Speaker
It's like then then the hustle is to get the top internships and then the hustle is to get the you know, and it's always just achieving the next status symbol is what it is.
00:20:35
Speaker
And you're always going to be falling behind if you're not right racing to achieve that that next level.
00:20:42
Speaker
And the reality is that to what you said, you can get that same level of education at a community college, at a state school, at, you know, somewhere else that's local, that's not going to, you know, necessarily.
00:20:56
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bolster your credentials amongst the elites in society, but still give you an education to be able to do what you want to do.
00:21:03
Speaker
So that's a really interesting one.
00:21:04
Speaker
My first one, so the way that I follow these
00:21:08
Speaker
since I'm incapable of doing top five lists, is kind of starting with this premise, right?
00:21:14
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And then all the rest of mine sort of start from this fundamental premise.
00:21:17
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We'll kind of get to like what really is the fundamental tension.
00:21:21
Speaker
Some of these things are the symptoms of these tensions.
00:21:24
Speaker
So we'll kind of talk about some workarounds in here as well.
00:21:26
Speaker
So the student promise of school, right, is actually a conversation we just had this morning with somebody else, but to validate their identity.
00:21:35
Speaker
And discover and grow in their interests and their strengths.
00:21:39
Speaker
So that should be, when kids go to school, I see this in my daughter.
00:21:43
Speaker
It's like she's constantly figuring out who she is in the world, what is it that she's interested in, kind of building up her social circle, building her intellectual capacity, etc.
00:21:57
Speaker
One of the promises of school is to guarantee a well-rounded, perhaps albeit standardized outcomes.
00:22:04
Speaker
So to get every kid at the same place by the end of the grade level or by the end of their time in that system.
00:22:13
Speaker
So, right, the fundamental tension is between I want to be validated and discover and grow.
00:22:19
Speaker
And then the school kind of says, no, we need you to be at this particular place in this particular time.
00:22:25
Speaker
So really a cursed problem, I said in this, is really like grades and grading is like the symptom of that tension.
00:22:31
Speaker
So.
00:22:32
Speaker
I think behaviorism as a whole is going to be a key theme amongst all of these.
00:22:38
Speaker
So that is like, how do you get kids to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do?
00:22:42
Speaker
So what do you do?
00:22:43
Speaker
You set up a system of carrots and sticks that incentivize preferred behaviors, punish undesirable ones.
00:22:50
Speaker
Yet we know how grades and grading impact intrinsic motivation to the, to the, uh,
00:23:01
Speaker
at the expense of intrinsic motivation, right?
00:23:06
Speaker
So...
00:23:07
Speaker
I think a workaround, as we've talked a lot just in our resources and materials, of course, is going to be some sort of thing that both validates student identity and helps support the goals of school that guarantee a well-rounded, albeit standardized outcome.
00:23:22
Speaker
So we have to give a little bit on that standardization part in order for students to have their identities validated.
00:23:28
Speaker
So that's more of an ungraded approach, like portfolios, student-led conversations,
00:23:33
Speaker
just really needing to rebuild structures around a different theory of human motivation.
00:23:38
Speaker
So not just that we're like deterministic, reward-seeking, and punishment-avoiding animals like B.F.
00:23:44
Speaker
Skinner's pigeons or Pavlov's dogs, you know, that those things are all rooted in, but that motivation is very complex and it's very much rooted in social connection and in our own identity.
00:23:56
Speaker
And
00:23:57
Speaker
There's a lot of cutting, I would say cutting edge, but God, it's been out for years and decades.
00:24:03
Speaker
It just hasn't really had an impact on education policy writ large.
00:24:08
Speaker
But some of the research that we've been doing, Chris, for our upcoming conversations and presentations on systems design through understanding game design and video games really get to the heart of
00:24:22
Speaker
of those issues as well.
00:24:23
Speaker
So yeah, that's kind of the grades and grading as an expression of this fundamental curse problem of individual identities and standardization.
00:24:34
Speaker
Yeah, it's also like just the acquisition problem where you always expect a mark in return for the work that you do, whereas complex problems, which is what we are facing by far the most in society,
00:24:49
Speaker
don't have that simple like do this, get this back.
00:24:53
Speaker
So it's fundamentally not aligned with actually tackling the problems that we face today and in the future, nor has it ever been.
00:25:01
Speaker
It's a very manufactured system.
00:25:03
Speaker
It only works within the context of a classroom.
00:25:06
Speaker
Right.
00:25:06
Speaker
The return on investment, right?
00:25:08
Speaker
The measuring of the inputs and outputs, you know, some of that stuff is just fundamentally more difficult to measure than others.
00:25:15
Speaker
Speaking of...
00:25:18
Speaker
So my number four is the cursed problem and the, I guess the goal or the promise of school being preparation for the jobs that are needed the most.
00:25:35
Speaker
And I say that in scare quotes.
00:25:37
Speaker
So like STEM and the humanities.
00:25:39
Speaker
So there's this overall focus in school to prepare kids for
00:25:45
Speaker
the jobs that are in demand and the jobs that are in demand, at least that pay that boast are STEM careers.
00:25:52
Speaker
So there's a lot of marketing within schools to like go into coding, design, engineering, all that kind of stuff.
00:26:00
Speaker
And at the wayside are the social studies, the humanities, English, et cetera, all that kind of stuff.
00:26:05
Speaker
Um,
00:26:06
Speaker
And as a result, like a lot of our funding initiatives towards schools, a lot of our testing, a lot of the things that people are forced to care about tend to be related to STEM as opposed to the humanities.
00:26:19
Speaker
And I think that this is very much like getting into that libertarian nature of the market and like what education is.
00:26:25
Speaker
I would argue that education is not a market, but it's belief that like, well, because STEM majors pay the best and because those are the most jobs that are there,
00:26:33
Speaker
Education should respond by creating incentives for people to go into that field and focus on it.
00:26:39
Speaker
And it would just like, again, like an input output model.
00:26:42
Speaker
The problem is, is that that doesn't work because look at where the world is right now, where we're focusing exclusively on STEM and have been for decades now.
00:26:53
Speaker
We are
00:26:54
Speaker
and this is coming up in our documentary, which is releasing on the same day at this podcast, but release, we'll see.
00:27:00
Speaker
100 Seconds to Midnight, we're the closest disaster that we ever have been.
00:27:04
Speaker
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists tracks
00:27:06
Speaker
how close are we to nuclear crisis, climate crisis, cyber warfare attacks that shut down our power grid, all of these different things that are existential to the human race.
00:27:18
Speaker
We're closer than we ever had.
00:27:20
Speaker
We're closer than we were during the Cuban Missile Crisis where there were nuclear weapons off the coast of the United States.
00:27:26
Speaker
And guess what?
00:27:27
Speaker
All of those fields have in common.
00:27:28
Speaker
They're all STEM-related.
00:27:31
Speaker
Climate change, nuclear weapons, and cyber warfare are all
00:27:34
Speaker
techie things.
00:27:35
Speaker
But if you only prepare people for how do I program a nuclear weapon, as opposed to preparing them for how do I think ethically?
00:27:45
Speaker
How do I draw upon history and literature and cultural context?
00:27:48
Speaker
How do I relate more to the people around me and care about them and care about my social, emotional well-being?
00:27:55
Speaker
If you only prepare them for the technical, you miss out on all those ethical conversations that are needed
00:28:01
Speaker
now more than ever, and I have a strong feeling that that will always be the case.
00:28:04
Speaker
It's always going to continually be now more than ever because things are only going to get more complicated and more dangerous.
00:28:12
Speaker
The types of weapon systems that we have, the threats to humanity,
00:28:15
Speaker
are only going to get worse.
00:28:17
Speaker
So you need people that are well-rounded.
00:28:20
Speaker
So kind of rehashing on that, the issue being school being preparation for the job market, specifically STEM, and the curse of problem being that if you focus exclusively on STEM, you miss out.
00:28:33
Speaker
The obvious solution to this is to
00:28:36
Speaker
decouple schools from the job market, which is easier said than done.
00:28:40
Speaker
But I think we need to stop viewing education as a marketplace.
00:28:43
Speaker
It's not a marketplace.
00:28:44
Speaker
Classrooms are different than the workplace.
00:28:47
Speaker
There's nothing wrong with paying STEM people more money for doing their task if that's how capitalism is going to work.
00:28:54
Speaker
But that also means that folks that are in power have an obligation to invest in the humanities, recognizing how existential these threats are.
00:29:05
Speaker
I think that you could take a cynical look at that and say, well, why would they?
00:29:08
Speaker
Because they're making a lot of money regardless.
00:29:11
Speaker
But I think that there's also something to be said about the common humanity of just saying, no one's going to care about all your money if we're all dead.
00:29:20
Speaker
So we need to start investing in other things beyond just that.
00:29:23
Speaker
So that's my number four.
00:29:25
Speaker
A couple of things to add to this that kind of come to mind is one is just the conversation we had with our partners at the Holistic Think Tank about the interdisciplinary curriculum that we that we built for them.
00:29:35
Speaker
Right.
00:29:35
Speaker
When we when we look at that, that concept of the the atomic clock.
00:29:40
Speaker
Right.
00:29:40
Speaker
The fact that we're 100 seconds to midnight.
00:29:42
Speaker
The climate crisis is one of those factors kind of inching us ever closer as I mean, we're just experiencing in Florida.
00:29:49
Speaker
Right.
00:29:50
Speaker
with the hurricane that just rolled in yesterday.
00:29:53
Speaker
So the climate crisis can't be something that just scientists solve because we've had that information and they've been blowing the whistle on that for decades now.
00:30:03
Speaker
So there has to be a pairing between the scientists doing that STEM work and then policymakers, but also the work of an educated public to be able to separate fact from fiction and propaganda and misinformation and
00:30:17
Speaker
you know, go to the polls and elect officials who are going to act in the long term, in their long term interests of their constituents and of humanity rather than in the short term interests of, again, like financial, you know, there's there's a lot more money in supporting fossil fuels and, you
00:30:34
Speaker
And those kinds of industries than there is in, you know, putting caps on carbon output and investing in green energy.
00:30:42
Speaker
But but maybe that's that's that's a different conversation.
00:30:46
Speaker
The other part of that, too, is actually I was listening to a debate about the debt cancellation on Sam Ceder's channel.
00:30:54
Speaker
And what I found really fascinating in there that Sam brought up that I hadn't necessarily thought of before is the person he was debating with said that, well, people should go into college expecting to get a return on their investment.
00:31:06
Speaker
And Sam's rebuttal to that was to say then, okay, then who's going to be a teacher?
00:31:11
Speaker
Because you're not going to have poor people go to college to be teachers because they're not going to be able to afford the cost to go acquire the education, the bachelor's degree, the master's degree, and the certifications, go through the unpaid internship that is student teaching, and then go make $35,000 a year.
00:31:30
Speaker
Because then the rest of the world would call them, oh, irresponsible for taking out that
00:31:35
Speaker
that burden of debt and then to go, what, wasted on becoming a third grade teacher, right?
00:31:40
Speaker
Well, no, then only the wealthy are going to be able to get into social services and get into the kinds of work that actually do benefit the next generation and do nonprofit work and all that kind of stuff.
00:31:51
Speaker
Because it would be expected that poor people would just want to get a return on their investment, be able to pay back their loans, et cetera.
00:31:56
Speaker
So there is- I'm sure that the response was like,
00:31:59
Speaker
well, then teachers should just go to like crappier schools.
00:32:04
Speaker
It's like, it's always the same response.
00:32:08
Speaker
And like, well, the issue with that is then you have teachers who don't have the same quality education that everyone else has.
00:32:15
Speaker
And then you just make a worse, like, it doesn't make any sense.
00:32:19
Speaker
Cause like, could you imagine if you, if you turn to a bunch of parents or family members and said, Hey,
00:32:25
Speaker
you know, next year, all of your teachers went to the worst schools that you could possibly go to.
00:32:30
Speaker
And to be fair, I am not saying that all community colleges are worse just because they're cheaper.
00:32:35
Speaker
But there is certainly something to be said that if you were to go to a marketplace of ideas, as many libertarians argue for, where those who are deemed to have more value get paid more money over time within that system, you would have colleges that just like, I think of like, uh,
00:32:52
Speaker
University of Phoenix is not the one that got in a bunch of trouble for just signing degrees.
00:32:57
Speaker
You're going to get those kind of schools prop up more and more that teachers would go to because that would be the return on their investment.
00:33:03
Speaker
So to clarify, I'm not saying that that's the case right now, but that's what would happen.
00:33:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:08
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:08
Speaker
So, so the issue there, it's, it's what we're facing right now, right?
00:33:12
Speaker
Which is to say the, there's been kind of a manufactured teacher shortage, um, in the same way that there's, uh, you know, there would be a shortage of, uh, of Lamborghinis available at a buck 50, you know what I'm saying?
00:33:26
Speaker
Um, yeah.
00:33:27
Speaker
there's the fact that we just can't pay teachers enough.
00:33:30
Speaker
So instead of, instead of raising their salaries, we're lowering the standards on who gets to be a teacher, right?
00:33:36
Speaker
So anyone could just kind of walk off the street with a temporary credential and say, Hey, I want to, I want to teach kids for $33,000 a year.
00:33:45
Speaker
And we'll be willing to do that.
00:33:47
Speaker
We'll fast track members of the military and we'll fast track police officers and, and all these other kinds of people who, who want to go do that work.
00:33:54
Speaker
So yeah,
00:33:54
Speaker
Yeah.
00:33:55
Speaker
So that is a very interesting one.
00:33:56
Speaker
Am I on my number two then or number four, depending on how the list is going?
00:34:00
Speaker
All right.
00:34:01
Speaker
Four.
00:34:02
Speaker
Four.
00:34:02
Speaker
Okay.
00:34:02
Speaker
Wow.
00:34:03
Speaker
This is going to be another long one.
00:34:04
Speaker
You guys are getting your money's worth here.
Exploring Interdisciplinary Learning and Systemic Challenges
00:34:07
Speaker
So there's the student promise here in my next one that says kids want to be social, right?
00:34:12
Speaker
One of the biggest themes that we get out of student focus groups is, right, it's not just the case that they want to socialize.
00:34:19
Speaker
They want to engage in meaningful social learning techniques.
00:34:22
Speaker
tasks with the people in the room with them, right?
00:34:24
Speaker
So kids want to be social.
00:34:26
Speaker
But the school promise is exactly what I've been talking about, individualize to build human capital, to compete, to develop marketable skills, to become, right, homo economicus, right, the economically thinking person, right?
00:34:40
Speaker
You're a rational decision maker on all things.
00:34:44
Speaker
So the cursed problem in these two promises then is atomization.
00:34:50
Speaker
So students are in competition with one another for time, for attention, for resources, for admissions, for test scores, for grades, all of it, right?
00:34:59
Speaker
Because then your GPA gets turned into a class rank.
00:35:03
Speaker
And if you graduate at the top of your class, there was some money that's made available to you to go, right?
00:35:08
Speaker
Maybe it's money that you didn't need because you already came from a privileged background, all those kinds of things, right?
00:35:13
Speaker
So it turns kids who want to be social and do things together into competing machines because they know that there's incentives and rewards for knocking their friend over and getting
00:35:24
Speaker
cheating on the test and doing all those other what we would call undesirable activities in the name of atomization.
00:35:32
Speaker
So I don't know, a workaround or a way to sacrifice that.
00:35:35
Speaker
And again, I'm always going to be making these sacrifices on the school problems.
00:35:38
Speaker
I'm sorry, but my shirt.
00:35:42
Speaker
So that's to say an emphasis on community building and maybe transform the model of
00:35:48
Speaker
Where maybe there's the school time becomes the time for clubs and extracurriculars.
00:35:55
Speaker
They're not just add-ons to the beginning and the end of the day, but those are really the places where applied, experiential, hands-on learning happens.
00:36:06
Speaker
And those are the places where students can be social, you know, beings.
00:36:11
Speaker
Kind of that notion of the context is the content of learning.
00:36:14
Speaker
Learning in an environment with people, the project-based, problem-based learning sort of environment.
00:36:20
Speaker
And then, right, you can build the individual skills to say, hey, what do we need to solve this next problem?
00:36:27
Speaker
Oh, I'm going to learn this piece over here on how to
00:36:30
Speaker
you know, if you're, if you're doing a robotics course or something, right, I'm going to learn this piece and how to program it over here.
00:36:35
Speaker
We need someone who can be the physical engineer to put the parts together.
00:36:39
Speaker
Right.
00:36:39
Speaker
And so each kid kind of specializes and has roles along the way.
00:36:43
Speaker
So, right.
00:36:44
Speaker
You're not competing in, you know, AP U.S. history to see who gets the highest AP test score or whatever that's supposed to mean, but you're engaged in a collective community endeavor.
00:36:55
Speaker
That's going to make everyone better as a result.
00:36:59
Speaker
It's one of those things that once you see it, it's self-evident.
00:37:04
Speaker
I think most people think that, but they just don't necessarily believe that it's possible.
00:37:10
Speaker
Or they think that's already what's happening and they haven't seen it done better.
00:37:15
Speaker
We were talking about this earlier, but I feel like when family members, community members, politicians, whoever, come to an exposition of learning where kids are showcasing projects that they've done that have taken longer than one week,
00:37:29
Speaker
like collaborative projects that are in depth and intense and challenging and rigorous, they come in and are amazed.
00:37:38
Speaker
They're like, how are you doing this?
00:37:40
Speaker
Like, how is that possible?
00:37:42
Speaker
Like we need to put all of our money into this.
00:37:45
Speaker
And the answer is always like, well, we do the opposite of what everyone's telling us to do, which is putting kids into the little content delivery seats and going back to basics.
00:37:58
Speaker
And just ending the conversation right there.
00:38:01
Speaker
I think a lot of our science fiction imagery at HRP comes from that notion of the way that we currently do school, it treats kids like they are robots, not in the industrial nature of like, like a factory model per se, but more so in the idea that like,
00:38:22
Speaker
we're treating them like they're not people like they're like this like foreign entity where they do things differently than everyone else in society does whereas if you just take a second and think about common sense hey kids do you want to do something that you're interested in collaboratively and make a difference in the world and do it during the school day and have fun yeah hey kids do you want to listen to this lecture for 60 minutes and take a quiz over it no
00:38:46
Speaker
So like, like, duh, like it's, it's all like one of those things.
00:38:48
Speaker
Like if we just take a second and really think about this, solving some of these curse problems is obvious.
00:38:53
Speaker
We just have to take the risk to do so and imagine a better world.
00:38:58
Speaker
Right.
00:38:58
Speaker
Right.
00:38:59
Speaker
And the thing about this too, I mean,
00:39:02
Speaker
The kids are not going to change.
00:39:05
Speaker
They're going to want to be social and they're going to want to seek purpose and they're going to want to find identity.
00:39:11
Speaker
The institutions of schools are the things that we have the locus of control over to be responsive to.
00:39:18
Speaker
So the workarounds and the solutions are going to have to give on the school end, right, on the systems end and not on the end of students.
00:39:28
Speaker
And that's, again, like humanizing education means exactly this.
00:39:32
Speaker
All right.
00:39:32
Speaker
What do you got?
00:39:35
Speaker
God, it makes my skin cool.
00:39:36
Speaker
All right.
00:39:38
Speaker
Number three.
00:39:39
Speaker
This is going to be the, I think the controversial one.
00:39:41
Speaker
If there is, if there is a controversial one, it's charter schools.
00:39:46
Speaker
Charter schools is my number three person problem, just as a concept.
00:39:52
Speaker
Okay.
00:39:52
Speaker
So what are the promises here?
00:39:56
Speaker
I'm speaking from a U.S. context.
00:39:59
Speaker
So the...
00:40:01
Speaker
The promises of charter schools is for innovation outside of the traditional public school system, right?
00:40:07
Speaker
The idea is that you can establish innovative spaces where people learn differently.
00:40:11
Speaker
There's less regulation.
00:40:13
Speaker
There's less specific things you have to do.
00:40:15
Speaker
And therefore, you can create a model for other schools to follow.
00:40:20
Speaker
Like you can prove the concept and therefore public schools can adopt that.
00:40:24
Speaker
The issue with that curse and problem and the reason why it doesn't necessarily work
00:40:29
Speaker
is that charter schools, because they're often under-regulated, will fail, like they just don't work, like they'll close.
00:40:38
Speaker
They'll exploit kids to get the things that they want to get done, or they don't face the same challenges as public schools.
00:40:46
Speaker
Because the way that charter schools are set up, they don't necessarily have to serve all students.
00:40:50
Speaker
They don't necessarily have to treat individuals.
00:40:52
Speaker
Like students on certain IEPs, like they might say like, hey, like this isn't the best environment for you.
00:40:58
Speaker
So although they might have to follow some regulations like, hey, we need to follow this person's 504, they don't necessarily have to take every single 504.
00:41:06
Speaker
They can be more selective with who they work with.
00:41:10
Speaker
This gets into the funding argument where a lot of charter school folks would go like, oh, you know, we only spend a fraction of what public schools spend and look at how much better we're doing.
00:41:19
Speaker
Forgetting the fact that public schools also have to deal with a lot more and therefore have to fund a lot more within schools.
00:41:26
Speaker
Schools are more than just classrooms.
00:41:28
Speaker
They are community spaces.
00:41:30
Speaker
They're spaces where people eat.
00:41:32
Speaker
They're spaces where people get social services.
00:41:34
Speaker
And I don't think any of that needs to change.
00:41:35
Speaker
I am not part of that group that thinks like we should just go back to school being, you know, eight to four.
00:41:41
Speaker
Kids take a couple of classes and they're gone.
00:41:43
Speaker
That's it.
00:41:44
Speaker
Now, schools are very much a social safety net for many people.
00:41:47
Speaker
And we can bolster and expand upon that and work within other systems to improve those as well.
00:41:51
Speaker
So let me preface this by saying, I think that there are many charter schools that are doing really great work.
00:41:58
Speaker
We work with a lot of charter schools.
00:42:01
Speaker
But at the same time, through a bit of cognitive dissonance, I also don't think charter schools as a whole are a good thing.
00:42:09
Speaker
So nine times out of 10, when you come across a charter school, they tend to be either poor examples of existing public schools.
00:42:19
Speaker
So there's like done worse.
00:42:22
Speaker
They are like those gross academies where kids are put into lines with the promise of delivering students out of poverty.
00:42:31
Speaker
The no excuses type charter schools, which is not only inaccurate, but also just impossible.
00:42:38
Speaker
That's not how solving poverty works.
00:42:40
Speaker
You solve poverty through policy.
00:42:42
Speaker
And finally, I don't see a way that cursive problem can be solved with the existing charter school model.
00:42:51
Speaker
If you're always creating a model where other schools exist that kids have the choice to go to, that's different than the existing model and they're funded in different ways,
00:43:01
Speaker
You're forming this weird form of competition where some kids get served and some kids don't.
00:43:05
Speaker
And I don't see a way that you could ever solve that easily.
00:43:08
Speaker
I think the way that there is a solution to this, something I've advocated for before, is Deborah Meyer's concept of schools within schools.
00:43:16
Speaker
To me, the way that you solve this problem is you maintain the public system.
00:43:21
Speaker
You keep public schools the way that they are, but you break up large schools.
00:43:25
Speaker
So schools that have more than I would say, I'm just a spitballing number, like 400 people within them.
00:43:30
Speaker
you would break them into schools that have 300 or 400 kids in them each.
00:43:34
Speaker
So you have like wings of the building and each one of those wings operates in a different way.
00:43:39
Speaker
Then kids are able to kind of self-select for which learning environment they prefer, maybe which teachers they like working with, maybe what their peers are, what types of programming is offering between those schools.
00:43:53
Speaker
And obviously,
00:43:54
Speaker
the school as a whole is operating as one collective unit.
00:43:56
Speaker
So they still provide all those services.
00:43:58
Speaker
They still work with each other.
00:43:59
Speaker
They're still getting professional development together, but there's still school choice in the sense that I can choose how I go about setting up my day.
00:44:07
Speaker
It's very much changing the school environment to almost feel more like a liberal arts university where it's a campus as opposed to just a building that everyone has to go to.
00:44:18
Speaker
To me, that would be the best of both worlds because you could still do innovation,
00:44:22
Speaker
where like maybe you have a wing of the school that's doing some really forward thinking stuff and taking that risk and kids are on board with it while simultaneously still funding everyone equitably because it's just the public school.
00:44:33
Speaker
It's funded the way that we fund them, which by the way, deserve more funding, but that's a separate conversation.
00:44:38
Speaker
Right.
00:44:39
Speaker
It's the notion, it addresses the standardization promise and problem that we were talking about earlier, where if the goal is to have every kid at a single level, where imagine if those are blades of grass, some kids are going to get cut off of that, right?
00:44:53
Speaker
And other kids aren't going to be affected.
00:44:55
Speaker
So it's going to kind of squish some kids out of the margins.
00:44:59
Speaker
Now, I would say, I don't know if I have a lot of beef with public charters, per se, because they are kind of in that school within a school model.
00:45:06
Speaker
If you're attending the main public school, it falls under the same laws, provisions, et cetera.
00:45:12
Speaker
It just is, hey, here's this more experimental place where kids in this public district can also attend.
00:45:18
Speaker
I would say to clarify, I think that the systems where public schools are in partnership with a public innovative charter, so it's part of the same school district, like teacher power schools.
00:45:30
Speaker
Those are cool.
00:45:31
Speaker
I am much more skeptical of
00:45:34
Speaker
Like what happens a lot in Texas, for example, where you have entire districts that are publicly funded that are charters that are claiming like, hey, I'm going to do this cheaper.
00:45:46
Speaker
And like they prove like this use case, that's where it gets a little dicey.
00:45:51
Speaker
So not always for public charters.
00:45:52
Speaker
It depends on the relationship between the school and the charter.
00:45:55
Speaker
Yeah.
00:45:56
Speaker
I mean, I'm wary of the private charter model and I'm wary of like a private school kind of model.
00:46:03
Speaker
At least, I mean, I'm fine with the existence of these things, right?
00:46:06
Speaker
But I am wary of them as large scale solutions, right?
00:46:12
Speaker
To the problem, which really is addressing just the problem of inequity and inequality, both as an educational phenomenon and as an economic one.
00:46:22
Speaker
Again, just like you said, it's trying to solve the problem of
00:46:26
Speaker
economic inequality within the walls of the schoolhouse.
00:46:29
Speaker
And I don't know if that's been the case anywhere, but we do know that we, using government policy through the expanded child tax credit, that we did pull millions of kids out of poverty just by sending their parents a check every few months instead of just waiting out to the end of the year to give it on their tax return.
00:46:49
Speaker
So
00:46:49
Speaker
Yeah.
00:46:50
Speaker
And that's something that we don't have anymore.
00:46:51
Speaker
So, so we know how to solve child poverty.
00:46:55
Speaker
We just are choosing not to do it.
00:46:57
Speaker
And to clarify, like the goal is innovation.
00:47:00
Speaker
So like, I think that people that work at charter schools, many of them have great intentions about those things.
00:47:05
Speaker
I arguably worked on a public charter.
00:47:07
Speaker
It didn't call itself that, but it certainly has a lot of the same themes and we got to do a lot of cool stuff that,
00:47:13
Speaker
The issue is that the way it's formed and funded leads to that curse of problems.
00:47:19
Speaker
So do public schools need to innovate?
00:47:21
Speaker
Yes.
00:47:22
Speaker
I just don't think that charter schools are the best method of getting there.
00:47:25
Speaker
I think we could revamp that.
00:47:27
Speaker
And there's maybe the last thing to say on this, that there's always been some tension, and I've wrestled with this, and the notion of like, okay, so essentially having a privately funded, so either through voucher programs or expanses of charters, et cetera, alongside a public system would basically mean that you have a two-tier system, right?
00:47:47
Speaker
And one of the arguments that I've heard from voucher or big charter proponents is like, this isn't taking money away from public schools.
00:47:55
Speaker
Well, then I wonder,
00:47:57
Speaker
You know, if we already have one pool of money for public schools, but then we're going to open up a different pot of money to fund the second tier of private or either private schools or private charters, kind of however, you know, because a religious school wouldn't be a charter school, you know, but you could go to your Catholic school, your evangelical school, etc.
00:48:17
Speaker
Why not just roll that pot of money into a public system and hire special education associates who are serving the neediest kids who need that support or hire ELL specialists who are going to help those kids who generally struggle because of overcoming language barriers?
00:48:37
Speaker
If we have the resources to fund this other tier of system, why not roll that funding into providing the supports that public schools need to meet the neediest kids?
00:48:46
Speaker
Like, that's the thing that I, if it's not just about siphoning off kids to, you know, send them off, give, give their parents a check to go pay for a private school, then that's another thing entirely.
00:48:56
Speaker
But, but like, let's just be open about that.
00:48:58
Speaker
If that's the goal, let's not try to say, oh, this two tier system will benefit everybody when clearly that's not the case, but this is not a podcast.
00:49:06
Speaker
Very, very, very, very last thing on this.
00:49:07
Speaker
I swear.
00:49:09
Speaker
Which is, I think, in order for that system to work, and I think that a legitimate critique of public education and funding public education is this, is that if you do a school-within-school model or, like, you fund schools in this way, part of the equation is to hire less administrators.
00:49:27
Speaker
You don't need more administrators.
00:49:29
Speaker
You need more teachers for smaller class sizes.
00:49:32
Speaker
That's an obvious, evident thing that's so research-backed.
00:49:35
Speaker
You just hire more teachers and have more space.
00:49:38
Speaker
And just let teachers take on administrative roles, like have them teach part of the day.
00:49:43
Speaker
Maybe they cycle and they have like different duties, but nothing against school administrators, but a lot of those jobs just aren't needed.
00:49:51
Speaker
Teachers could do those jobs and you could have a teaching force that also is the admin.
00:49:56
Speaker
Not that admins don't do important work.
00:49:57
Speaker
Again, it's just that you don't need as many, like you don't need a sliding scale of increasing numbers of $100,000 in your admins.
00:50:06
Speaker
All right.
00:50:06
Speaker
Am I up then?
00:50:09
Speaker
Okay, so I'm kind of getting lost.
00:50:11
Speaker
I'll borrow a phrase from Trevor, lost in the sauce here of our Ed Reform conversation.
00:50:18
Speaker
So back to student promises.
00:50:20
Speaker
So a student promise over here is saying kids want to pursue meaningful purposeful goals.
00:50:29
Speaker
And there's also the kind of this embedded promise that purpose finding is inherently interdisciplinary, right?
00:50:36
Speaker
Because you're going to bounce from one thing to the next.
00:50:39
Speaker
A school promises said the school promise says that content experts are going to teach in disciplinary silos and to kind of flesh this out.
00:50:49
Speaker
So I could not advance, you know, in my career as a history teacher unless I went and got a master's degree in history.
00:51:00
Speaker
If I got it in something else that was unrelated, even if it would have made me a better educator, if I got a master's degree in humane pedagogy, or if I got it in socio-cultural impacts of schooling, if I got a master's degree in education leadership,
00:51:15
Speaker
That would not apply towards my lane advancement for my school.
00:51:20
Speaker
And I thought, there is no way.
00:51:22
Speaker
I am never going to go back and get a master's degree in history.
00:51:25
Speaker
Like I love teaching it.
00:51:26
Speaker
It's only like $2,000 a year or something.
00:51:28
Speaker
It's like a marginal amount of money.
00:51:30
Speaker
Yeah.
00:51:30
Speaker
So anyway, right.
00:51:31
Speaker
But those were the incentives of the system.
00:51:33
Speaker
It would only reward me for getting additional certifications to what better it be.
00:51:39
Speaker
have a history MA, right?
00:51:40
Speaker
And I was like, I don't want to be, I don't imagine that future for myself.
00:51:44
Speaker
I want to help kids be purposeful interdisciplinary thinkers.
00:51:47
Speaker
So I call this problem, I don't know, the problem of like the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing kind of a thing.
00:51:57
Speaker
Because oftentimes too, the thing, the barrier to that interdisciplinary work is that there's often little or no coordination across content areas.
00:52:06
Speaker
You know, that shows up in assigning loads of homework that shows up in scheduling the day of the test.
00:52:13
Speaker
I don't know how many times I heard things like we had four tests today and blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:52:18
Speaker
And, you know, for I'll bang this drum forever for as much as we want to say we're a research backed profession.
00:52:24
Speaker
The fact we want to bring cognitive load theory in as a way to structure our individual classrooms, that all goes out the window.
00:52:33
Speaker
If your schedule is set up on an eight-period day where kids might have four giant high-stakes assessments, graded assessments throughout the day,
00:52:43
Speaker
And, you know, no downtime for which to process any of that.
00:52:46
Speaker
It's just bell to bell teaching backed up by assessments, etc.
00:52:49
Speaker
So the curse problem there, right, is the fact that every single teacher has their own agenda, not like in a.
00:52:58
Speaker
A sinister way, but right.
00:52:59
Speaker
I've got the standards I have to teach.
00:53:01
Speaker
I have the curriculum map and the pacing guide that tell me the way I need to teach it.
00:53:05
Speaker
You know, your schedule be damned, right?
00:53:07
Speaker
Your purpose finding be damned.
00:53:09
Speaker
It's I need to get to my next thing.
00:53:12
Speaker
So I thought maybe this wasn't even like a cursed problem.
00:53:15
Speaker
Maybe this is just a really hard problem because can teachers work interdisciplinarily?
00:53:21
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:53:22
Speaker
Right.
00:53:22
Speaker
And we know the world is interdisciplinary.
00:53:24
Speaker
So kids outside of the content silos of school are going to think and work and learn.
00:53:30
Speaker
in an interdisciplinary way.
00:53:31
Speaker
But the cursed problem here is that there is not coordination.
00:53:35
Speaker
So I think perhaps a workaround to that is just giving, you know, oftentimes in the district that I came from, we had time for vertical.
00:53:42
Speaker
So I could go talk to the eighth grade social studies teachers, or I could talk to, you know, 12th grade, say if I'm teaching sophomores or something, right.
00:53:51
Speaker
But I wouldn't go meet with the math department to go say like, Hey, how are you guys tracking student progress and giving feedback?
00:53:58
Speaker
That was never a conversation that ever happened.
00:54:01
Speaker
And the notion of PLCs was also defined by what?
00:54:05
Speaker
content area.
00:54:06
Speaker
So what you have is you'd have the U.S. history PLC, which is just U.S. history teachers deciding how and what and when and where to teach that stuff.
00:54:18
Speaker
A PLC, like on any other context, a professional learning community on social media, right, you're going to be have an interdisciplinary lens on, hey, I'm looking to, you know, I want to try out this lesson over here.
00:54:31
Speaker
Help me understand this war in the Ukraine.
00:54:34
Speaker
Right.
00:54:34
Speaker
So the war in Ukraine.
00:54:35
Speaker
So I want to get a big interdisciplinary lens and talk to a lot of different people about the implications of that.
00:54:41
Speaker
It's not just going to be U.S. history folks or it's not just going to be the specific narrow lens.
00:54:46
Speaker
So I don't know.
00:54:46
Speaker
I think opening up ways for interdisciplinary, interdepartmental collaboration in really meaningful ways could be a way to do that.
00:54:54
Speaker
Or just adopting the Human Restoration Project's interdisciplinary subject curriculum, which will be available on our website.
00:55:03
Speaker
Yeah, I was just going to say there's also just a physical space.
00:55:10
Speaker
Why is it that the vast majority of schools place the same subject areas in the same spot?
00:55:16
Speaker
Like to me, that doesn't make any sense because if I'm going to work with another teacher, I'm probably...
00:55:22
Speaker
unless there is a massive age gap and I'm doing some tutoring thing, I'm probably not going to work with someone in the same subject area.
00:55:31
Speaker
I'm probably going to work with someone in a different subject area to keep it interesting.
00:55:35
Speaker
Why would 9th and 10th grade social studies necessarily work together?
00:55:39
Speaker
It makes a lot more sense for 9th grade social studies and 9th grade math to work together and do a project together because then you're building off of each other's curriculums.
00:55:48
Speaker
There's space for those PLCs to plan out
00:55:51
Speaker
Like, hey, make sure you cover this, this, and this.
00:55:54
Speaker
So that way next year I can build off on that.
00:55:57
Speaker
That's cool.
00:55:58
Speaker
I think we put too much effort into that because we tend to over-promise and under-deliver because there's like a hundred things on that list and there's no way.
00:56:07
Speaker
It is, the table is old of time when you start off your class and be like, hey, remember this thing that you learned last year?
00:56:12
Speaker
And every kid just gives you a blank stare because it's not how learning works.
00:56:15
Speaker
Like you're going to have to review it anyway.
00:56:17
Speaker
And there's just far too many things to focus on.
00:56:19
Speaker
But also, it's always hysterical to me that those PLC conversations change every single year.
00:56:24
Speaker
So you're never building upon a multi-year plan.
00:56:27
Speaker
The multi-year plan always gets scrapped year two, and you make another multi-year plan.
00:56:32
Speaker
Those kids have never actually experienced an authentic 12-year plan for their entire education because it's not how education works.
00:56:41
Speaker
I don't think the solution is better at PLC.
00:56:43
Speaker
I think the solution is interdisciplinary project-based curriculums where kids are...
00:56:47
Speaker
driving their conversation.
00:56:48
Speaker
Yes.
00:56:49
Speaker
I was thinking of structures that would allow for interdisciplinary collaboration because right now the vision is so narrow to like,
00:56:56
Speaker
Your PLC is going to be have these people in it and it's going to be with these.
00:57:01
Speaker
Like, why can't I make my build your own PLC?
00:57:03
Speaker
It's like, oh, I know that the business teacher over here and the art teacher over here and we all want to work on this project together.
00:57:11
Speaker
Right.
00:57:11
Speaker
We want kids to make this thing.
00:57:12
Speaker
Wouldn't that be cool?
00:57:14
Speaker
There's no structure in the big suburban district that I came from that would allow for that.
00:57:19
Speaker
Right.
00:57:19
Speaker
That would just have to happen spontaneously, like on our own time or outside of school, you know, for those things to happen.
00:57:25
Speaker
But would I be would I be mandated to attend a PLC every single week, you know, which is sitting in a room with U.S. history teachers?
00:57:35
Speaker
I mean, if that's what I'm teaching.
00:57:36
Speaker
Right.
00:57:36
Speaker
And being like, well, what are we teaching tomorrow?
00:57:38
Speaker
Right.
00:57:38
Speaker
which is a conversation that I had about a thousand times too many, and I got so tired of it.
00:57:45
Speaker
But yeah, now it's just getting personal.
00:57:47
Speaker
That's just getting into beef.
00:57:48
Speaker
But yeah, what is your number two?
00:57:52
Speaker
Number two.
00:57:53
Speaker
All right.
00:57:55
Speaker
My number two has themes of my previous three.
00:58:00
Speaker
which is the cursed problem of school funding and accountability, two goals that are often in contradiction together.
00:58:11
Speaker
So usually schools are funded in the United States based off of their accountability metrics to
00:58:19
Speaker
standardized tests, as well as meeting the needs of all students.
00:58:23
Speaker
There's a formula for getting your school report card.
00:58:28
Speaker
But a huge focus of that is on grades and standardized tests.
00:58:32
Speaker
That's where the majority of that funding lies.
00:58:36
Speaker
The problem is that, of course, it's important to have accountable schools.
00:58:39
Speaker
You don't want to have public school systems that have no third-party accountability.
00:58:45
Speaker
and people just do whatever they want because you want to have a quality education.
00:58:50
Speaker
At the exact same time, if you punish schools who experiment, they try something different, maybe they're just poorly funded to begin with, or maybe the kids struggle with their home lives, et cetera, and they just don't perform as well as the students that are in more well-funded areas do, it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.
00:59:11
Speaker
We know that zip codes are the best indicator of your test score,
00:59:15
Speaker
So if kids that are in underfunded schools perform poorly and then get more regulations and continue to perform poorly, it's just an endless cycle.
00:59:25
Speaker
It's like Sisyphus trying to solve this problem of school accountability reform.
00:59:32
Speaker
So –
00:59:34
Speaker
The way that we fund schools really makes no sense.
00:59:36
Speaker
The concept of – in most states, most states have funding based off of the district.
00:59:43
Speaker
So rich schools tend to look like these beautiful campuses that blow my mind every single time I drive past one to schools that are in impoverished and ignored communities that don't have AC.
00:59:58
Speaker
The disparity is –
01:00:00
Speaker
absurd.
01:00:00
Speaker
Jonathan Kozl writes about that well in Savage Inequalities where it's amazing that in the richest country on the planet, we still have schools that have water leaks during the rain.
01:00:11
Speaker
What are we doing?
01:00:14
Speaker
Also, in places like where I live in Ohio, we have school levies
01:00:18
Speaker
Where if you want to do anything else, like, for example, continue a music program, you have to have voters every so many years say, yeah, we'll keep giving $1,000 a year on our taxes to have a music program at the school.
01:00:34
Speaker
And what happens if it fails?
01:00:36
Speaker
The entire program is shut down.
01:00:39
Speaker
And I guess that sucks.
01:00:40
Speaker
So the teachers have to either quit or have to change what they do each day.
01:00:44
Speaker
And all the kids lost out on that education because of money.
01:00:48
Speaker
It's an absolutely terrible way of thinking about funding schools.
01:00:51
Speaker
It leads to a lot of disruptions.
01:00:53
Speaker
So I think that the thing that we have to sacrifice there is, one, the sacrifice is changing how we view school accountability.
01:01:03
Speaker
So to me, the formula is off.
01:01:08
Speaker
I think that there will always be a place for testing in some form.
01:01:13
Speaker
I think it makes sense to have testing.
01:01:16
Speaker
I think the types of questions that are asked and how we do test could be different, though.
01:01:21
Speaker
Why can't we ask questions about students' comfort level at school if they feel like they're accepted correctly?
01:01:28
Speaker
If they feel like people care about them, how involved are they in the community?
01:01:32
Speaker
Why can't you have auditors go school to school and see like, hey, are these kids doing meaningful tasks?
01:01:36
Speaker
And here's like a meaningful task checklist or something.
01:01:40
Speaker
Like imagine how much school would change overnight if the Department of Education said, hey, forget standardized tests this year.
01:01:48
Speaker
We're going to fund schools.
01:01:50
Speaker
If kids answer yes to this question, are you content at school?
01:01:54
Speaker
Like it would be a radically different environment.
01:01:56
Speaker
People would be flipping out and they had to change entire schedules.
01:01:58
Speaker
They had to start talking to kids.
01:02:00
Speaker
They're like, we all like, what do I need to do?
01:02:02
Speaker
Because that's a, that's not a third party problem.
01:02:04
Speaker
That is a student problem that they are going to be worried about every single day.
01:02:09
Speaker
Then you would have to invest money into like psychologists, mental health evaluators, people who are directly working with kids and
01:02:17
Speaker
As opposed to educational policymakers, which is where a lot of this funding tends to go to, or like College Board or other large nonprofits or corporations.
01:02:28
Speaker
Billion dollar nonprofits.
01:02:30
Speaker
Yeah, billion dollar nonprofits that are testing kids over and over again.
01:02:36
Speaker
I think that part of that solution also is sacrificing the idea of locally funded school districts.
01:02:44
Speaker
I think that all schools should just be federally funded.
01:02:47
Speaker
Take a small sliver –
01:02:50
Speaker
0.5% of the military budget and shipped it into federal schools.
01:02:54
Speaker
And I'm pretty confident that would probably pay more than enough for what schools need in the United States.
01:03:01
Speaker
The amount of money that we spend on things that aren't education, when that's arguably the most important thing for our future, is...
01:03:09
Speaker
is honestly absurd on its face.
01:03:14
Speaker
Think about if we spent 50% of the military budget on education, we would be living in the future world.
01:03:21
Speaker
We're living in some utopian society.
01:03:23
Speaker
It would literally be that mean, where it shows the shiny future city.
01:03:28
Speaker
Be like, what would happen if we spent 50% of the military budget on education?
01:03:33
Speaker
Utopia.
01:03:33
Speaker
Yeah, because you would have the most well-prepared...
01:03:38
Speaker
With that, part of investing in education is investing in people.
01:03:41
Speaker
So you would also end poverty.
01:03:44
Speaker
What would education in the United States look like if there was no poverty?
01:03:47
Speaker
It would be flourishing.
01:03:49
Speaker
The number one thing that you struggle with as an educator is how do you help the kids that struggle with helping themselves?
01:03:56
Speaker
If they're leaving the school and they're homeless or they're leaving the school and they're hungry or they're dealing with raising many siblings because their parents have to work multiple jobs, etc.,
01:04:05
Speaker
I can't fix that.
01:04:06
Speaker
Someone else needs to fix that for me.
01:04:08
Speaker
That's a policy decision.
01:04:09
Speaker
And here's what I've gone back and forth with folks on about this as well, because with autonomy should come accountability.
01:04:17
Speaker
And that's where, as progressive educators, we've always said, we're here to make learning self-evident.
01:04:22
Speaker
We're here to bring the receipts.
01:04:24
Speaker
And if you don't have them, well, then how do you show that the kids have done anything, right?
01:04:28
Speaker
So that's like our own standard is, is we're going to make the learning self-evident.
01:04:31
Speaker
We're going to bring the receipts.
01:04:32
Speaker
We're going to invite the public in, have the expo night, right?
01:04:35
Speaker
Have a big showcase of learning.
01:04:37
Speaker
Like that's always been our part.
01:04:38
Speaker
So the accountability towards progressive practice is that anybody should be able to come in and see it.
01:04:43
Speaker
We should be able to hand student artifacts to any adult and show like kids are learning.
01:04:47
Speaker
Right.
01:04:49
Speaker
And in places like Finland, where,
01:04:51
Speaker
Teachers are well-paid, they're respected, right?
01:04:54
Speaker
They expect a lot out of their education system, but teachers also have a lot of autonomy, right?
01:04:58
Speaker
To meet the students where they're at, to explore, do all the project-based stuff.
01:05:03
Speaker
And, you know, the finished story has been part of like that piece of test score conversation going back a decade or whatever, right?
01:05:11
Speaker
But apparently in Finland, they also have a lot of accountability in terms of the standardized test scores and things that show, hey, are we doing the right things?
01:05:19
Speaker
Well, the thing that's left out of that conversation is that Finland has, what, like 1% or 2% child poverty?
01:05:26
Speaker
So it's like, of course, if you've- They've virtually eliminated homelessness.
01:05:29
Speaker
Yeah.
01:05:31
Speaker
As a literal statement, there is not homelessness in Pemlin.
01:05:34
Speaker
And I just looked it up because I was wondering about the child tax credit thing.
01:05:38
Speaker
But when the child tax credit was in effect, poverty was a lot lower.
01:05:45
Speaker
I just had it pulled up.
01:05:46
Speaker
Let me look at it.
01:05:47
Speaker
But yeah, it was at the lowest recorded level in 2021, declining 46% from 9.7% in 2020 to 5.2% in 2021.
01:05:51
Speaker
Okay.
01:05:59
Speaker
So that's to say it was in 9.7% in 2020, 5.2% in 2021 as a result of the expanded child tax credit.
01:06:02
Speaker
And so now it's up to 17% in January 2022, the highest rate since the end of 2020.
01:06:04
Speaker
So we literally just let the child poverty rate go from 12.1% in December 2021 to 17% in January 2022.
01:06:26
Speaker
17% child poverty.
01:06:26
Speaker
So it's like, hey, I'm cool having that.
01:06:30
Speaker
Let's bring on the accountability part, right?
01:06:32
Speaker
But let's get child poverty to 2% and then we'll talk about who's accountable to what, right?
01:06:37
Speaker
Like let's hold a government accountable that lets the child poverty rate go up
01:06:42
Speaker
you know, uh, by five percentage points in a single year, just by letting a single policy lapse.
01:06:47
Speaker
Like let's start to talk about accountability, um, with, with what, with what teachers are doing in the classroom.
01:06:53
Speaker
And if I can, this actually goes really well with my number two.
01:06:57
Speaker
Is that cool?
01:06:58
Speaker
Well, let me really quick.
01:06:59
Speaker
I was just going to say really quick regarding, um, regarding that point, the existing accountability metrics don't make any sense.
01:07:08
Speaker
Okay.
01:07:08
Speaker
There was just that report released about, um,
01:07:12
Speaker
about test scores in reading and math since the pandemic.
01:07:16
Speaker
And everybody's freaking out about the concept of learning loss.
01:07:19
Speaker
Math scores went down.
01:07:21
Speaker
Reading scores went up.
01:07:23
Speaker
What does that mean?
01:07:25
Speaker
How could you dissect any data from that?
01:07:27
Speaker
We had a global pandemic where billions of people died.
01:07:30
Speaker
And reading scores went up.
01:07:31
Speaker
So how could you draw any logical conclusion beyond what those test scores are supposed to mean?
01:07:36
Speaker
There's nothing you actually act on with existing accountability metrics outside of punishing schools that for some reason are not reaching those thresholds.
01:07:46
Speaker
So the entire data is invalid.
01:07:48
Speaker
With those NAEP scores, did the pedagogy radically change?
01:07:55
Speaker
Did what was happening inside of classrooms radically change?
01:07:59
Speaker
And the answer to that is, in a way, of course, yes, just because of the huge disruption of the pandemic.
01:08:07
Speaker
But if it was like all other things being equal, if the pandemic didn't happen, would we have expected scores to have stayed the same or continue to
01:08:16
Speaker
Like, do their little marginal climb upward as they have been?
01:08:19
Speaker
And the answer probably is yes.
01:08:21
Speaker
So was the change something that had really come from inside the house as it were?
01:08:26
Speaker
Or is it something that like, yes, the impact of a million COVID deaths in the United States and, you know, 11,000 COVID deaths just this month, you know, we're still not out of this thing.
01:08:37
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:38
Speaker
You know, like that is etched in the numbers, you know, so, so yes, of course they are like, what would we expect anything different, but it is shocking that like, yeah, in the places that were the hardest hit and like in the urban reading scores, like we're like, we'll go up a little bit.
01:08:53
Speaker
They're like, well, what the, what the heck explains any of that?
01:08:56
Speaker
Yeah.
01:08:57
Speaker
You know, it was in the places that were like the earliest to open up and the most against mask mandates and like all those other things that had the biggest test score drops.
01:09:09
Speaker
So it's like the fastest to return to normalcy are the ones that are the most upset about this, about the narrative around this learning loss.
01:09:18
Speaker
But they also did the least to combat the impact of the pandemic in the first place.
01:09:21
Speaker
Like, make up your mind.
01:09:23
Speaker
What are we trying to do here?
01:09:24
Speaker
Not to mention that even before the pandemic, when you get those test scores back as a teacher, everyone knows there's nothing to actually use with that.
01:09:32
Speaker
What am I supposed to do?
01:09:34
Speaker
It's like reading some alien lexicon where it's like this giant rubric with like 100 things on it.
01:09:41
Speaker
And I'm supposed to know like, oh, standard 2.2, they didn't get really well.
01:09:45
Speaker
So next year, I'm going to focus more on that.
01:09:47
Speaker
And then next year, the data set's entirely different.
01:09:50
Speaker
Whereas if you had a different accountability system where it was, let's say, data on how a kid's doing at school socially and emotionally, I can act on that because I can change.
01:10:01
Speaker
Like if it's 40% this year and last year it was 70% that kids were addressing that, well, I can take literal actions to fix that right away.
Systemic Biases in Education and the Purpose of Schooling
01:10:13
Speaker
Content's a very difficult thing to measure in that way.
01:10:16
Speaker
Yeah.
01:10:17
Speaker
So mine to kind of build off of this is the tension between these two things.
01:10:22
Speaker
And this might be my like most controversial one.
01:10:24
Speaker
Right.
01:10:25
Speaker
So the student promise or the student expectation, I guess, is a free and accessible public education.
01:10:32
Speaker
Right.
01:10:32
Speaker
So it's like I I I want I need an environment.
01:10:36
Speaker
Right.
01:10:36
Speaker
That is accessible to me at whatever level I am at, regardless of physical, intellectual disability, you know, immigration status, language.
01:10:49
Speaker
I'm trying to anything under the sun.
01:10:51
Speaker
Right.
01:10:51
Speaker
Gender identity, any protected class that we can think of.
01:10:56
Speaker
Versus the school promise, which is free and accessible public education in big scare quotes.
01:11:02
Speaker
Okay.
01:11:02
Speaker
So that's to say, right, that the public system is going to mirror the systemic biases and prejudices of the public at large.
01:11:11
Speaker
Right.
01:11:11
Speaker
Right.
01:11:11
Speaker
We saw this obviously like Jim Crow segregation, Brown v. Board in the 1950s.
01:11:17
Speaker
Right.
01:11:17
Speaker
That issue of desegregating schools.
01:11:19
Speaker
Well, even today, schools are more segregated than they were back in when it was a de jure de jure segregation today.
01:11:28
Speaker
Or I guess de facto segregation today, de jure back in the 19, you know, the Jim Crow era in an era where we have no explicit segregation policy.
01:11:36
Speaker
Schools are as segregated as they have been.
01:11:38
Speaker
Like what is up with that?
01:11:39
Speaker
Right.
01:11:41
Speaker
So there is the need for this dual revolution, right, where there's the need to change society as we change schools.
01:11:48
Speaker
And I think we're seeing this now even more than ever with this wave of like so-called divisive concepts, laws, legislation targeting trans kids, trans athletes, et cetera.
01:11:57
Speaker
Like we're making schools less safe places for like the most marginalized and, you know, at risk kids who make up the smallest percentage of the population, right?
01:12:10
Speaker
about who can participate in women's athletics, right?
01:12:15
Speaker
And oftentimes it is targeted at women's athletics to say like trans girls can't participate in girls' sports and bathroom bills and all these kinds of things.
01:12:25
Speaker
And even to the extent like to which, you know, it's really hard to get...
01:12:31
Speaker
So part of that free and accessible public education, like as progressive educators, we might view that through the lens of a universal design for learning, where it's like, I'm going to evaluate my structures and my systems in place to make them, to give kids multiple means of access, representation, and expression, right?
01:12:48
Speaker
As opposed to a standardized model that's going to expect kids all kind of go through the same pipelines and have the same assignments, et cetera, et cetera.
01:12:55
Speaker
But along with that free and accessible public education is gonna say, if you don't fit into that standardized model, you're gonna need a specific legal document, right?
01:13:05
Speaker
That identifies you as a special education student, as a legally protected class of somebody who has a learning or physical disability who needs legal protection, right?
01:13:16
Speaker
Like, what is that?
01:13:18
Speaker
What kind of teacher is not going to make the accommodations that are gonna be needed for every kid to be successful
01:13:25
Speaker
regardless of whether or not they have a piece of paper that says, I need to get up and use the bathroom because I have a bladder issue, or I need to step outside because I have a documented anxiety, or I need this accommodation, I need extra time on this assessment because I have da, da, da, right?
01:13:43
Speaker
So it's like, again, there's like a two-tiered kind of system there too, where you need to have the resources and access to a diagnosis, a 504, an IEP to get...
01:13:54
Speaker
the services that your kid needs to be successful within a free and accessible public education system.
01:14:00
Speaker
You see like the tent, the fundamental tension in there, um, is, is, is so, you know, I, that's something that I really struggle with as like a proponent of public education is like, um,
01:14:12
Speaker
It's going to reflect those biases and the legal frameworks and the risk averseness of everything else as our public system.
01:14:18
Speaker
So as we change schools, we need to change society along with it.
01:14:23
Speaker
And those things are in constant dialogue with one another.
01:14:26
Speaker
So I didn't even I had like a little chart for all this, too, that has like the workarounds, the solutions.
01:14:31
Speaker
I couldn't come up with one for this.
01:14:33
Speaker
Right.
01:14:33
Speaker
Like be better people.
01:14:36
Speaker
Vote for people who aren't intolerant bigots.
01:14:40
Speaker
Right.
01:14:41
Speaker
Eradicate racism throughout the world.
01:14:43
Speaker
You know, like the those problems of the dual revolution are just so much bigger than like a pedagogical practice or like a thing that you can do in your classroom.
01:14:53
Speaker
Right.
01:14:54
Speaker
But those things that you do in your classroom can create environments that are more accessible.
01:15:00
Speaker
And you see what I'm saying?
01:15:01
Speaker
Like our individual actions matter so much, but the bigger context matters so much in shaping what it is in the bounds that you're allowed to operate within.
01:15:14
Speaker
That's my controversial.
01:15:14
Speaker
I think that you're alluding to what the...
01:15:17
Speaker
what the sacrifice or the solution would be, and this is spooky, just in time for October here, the spooky thing, which is we know that more equal societies are more caring, more tolerable, they are happier, either rich or not as rich, because there's no poor people in more equal societies, at least there's not supposed to be.
01:15:41
Speaker
If you're
01:15:42
Speaker
if you lessen the amount at the top and increase the amount at the bottom, not make it equal, but just make it more equitable, you are more caring, more just, right?
01:15:53
Speaker
And if you manufacture classrooms,
01:15:57
Speaker
so that they promote more equitable outcomes and you teach students to be just and around social justice issues and to care about other individuals and some of those lefty stuff like, oh, you're going to care about trans rights at school?
01:16:13
Speaker
How dare you care about the person's view?
01:16:16
Speaker
I know.
01:16:17
Speaker
How dare you?
01:16:18
Speaker
If you focus on those things and teach kids to love one another and care about each other,
01:16:23
Speaker
and they grow up and create more equal societies, more equitable societies, over time, you'll see that problem naturally solve itself because people as a whole will be happier.
01:16:36
Speaker
That is like a human dilemma of society at large, the battle between hoarding as much wealth as possible versus giving up some of your wealth, even a fraction of your wealth for society as a whole.
01:16:52
Speaker
But the research is very well documented on societies that are more equitable.
01:16:59
Speaker
The inner level, which also came up in our last podcast, I think is probably the thesis, the manifesto on understanding that concept that presents just graph after graph after graph of here's societies that are more equal, here's why it's better.
01:17:12
Speaker
Everything down to bullying is lessened in countries that are more equal because it's less about the individual.
01:17:18
Speaker
It's more about the collective, so you care about others.
01:17:22
Speaker
I don't think it's – it to me is shocking.
01:17:25
Speaker
There's not a day that goes by where I don't think to myself, like, the argument against this is that you want to take away that person and what they can do?
01:17:34
Speaker
That doesn't make any sense outside of propaganda and just general bigotry.
01:17:40
Speaker
You solve that by – you have to explicitly teach against it.
01:17:44
Speaker
You don't solve it by ignoring it.
01:17:45
Speaker
And the thing that I think is so troubling about this, there was just some survey data that came out about like, what do people care about heading into these midterm elections?
01:17:54
Speaker
And like the economy was like the highest up on the list.
01:17:58
Speaker
And there were a bunch of other things.
01:17:59
Speaker
And then like the furthest down on the list, probably like the second from the bottom, it was literally like 2% of adults.
01:18:07
Speaker
really cared about this.
01:18:08
Speaker
And it was like the LGBTQ kind of the attacks on LGBTQ.
01:18:13
Speaker
Now, obviously those issues are inflamed and huge for like, you know, non-gender conforming people because they're so salient in their lives.
01:18:21
Speaker
But just given the outsized role in the
01:18:24
Speaker
in certain parts of the political spectrum and the educational discourse, right, around those issues, you would think that that was like the premier thing that people would care about, right?
01:18:35
Speaker
But it's just, it's such a small fraction of what even encompasses people's daily lives.
01:18:40
Speaker
And probably, you know, for non-gender conforming, for LGBTQ people, those would be a less salient issue if they weren't constantly being attacked, right, and like assaulted, right?
01:18:51
Speaker
And, you know, their lives and livelihoods under threat from that, too.
01:18:56
Speaker
So, of course, they carry an outsized portion of that.
01:18:58
Speaker
But the reason I bring that up is because one thing that we've definitely seen with these attacks on public education, and here I am, I'm back to being a defender of public education.
01:19:07
Speaker
So it's like I'm wrestling with that tension in my own mind.
01:19:11
Speaker
But as I guess public education as like the public sphere where we hash these things out.
01:19:18
Speaker
Right.
01:19:18
Speaker
Right.
01:19:19
Speaker
So understanding that they're a reflection of those biases, et cetera, like the desire for social improvement says, like, let's bring that stuff into the public sphere.
01:19:27
Speaker
Right.
01:19:28
Speaker
Let's teach about these difficult concepts.
01:19:30
Speaker
Let's teach about, you know, tolerance.
01:19:32
Speaker
Let's teach about the history of the United States in an informed and truthful manner.
01:19:37
Speaker
Let's teach about climate change and evolution and all these other things.
01:19:41
Speaker
But on the other side of that is like a very direct political program that says no to all of that.
01:19:47
Speaker
That says, no, you can't have these books.
01:19:50
Speaker
You can't teach about these topics.
01:19:51
Speaker
If you do, we'll throw you in jail.
01:19:53
Speaker
If you have these books on your shelf, we'll find the school.
01:19:56
Speaker
You'll be decertified.
01:19:57
Speaker
You'll be harassed online.
01:19:59
Speaker
You'll be on Tucker Carlson's show, right?
01:20:01
Speaker
We'll make your life a living hell if you try to do these things.
01:20:04
Speaker
And also we'll write legislation that limits the ability of the public to make these decisions.
01:20:11
Speaker
So it's such a minoritarian, it's the tyranny of the minority kind of idea over here where they're not only...
01:20:23
Speaker
Not expressing the popular will on these topics, which says, yes, teach anti-racism.
01:20:29
Speaker
Yes, teach about difficult concepts in history and sociology, etc.
01:20:34
Speaker
Like teach about teach tolerance and teach inclusion when it comes to non-gender conforming.
01:20:42
Speaker
you know, people on LGBTQ issues because they're our neighbors, they're, you know, they're us, they're me, they're my parents, they're my kids, friends, and all of that.
01:20:52
Speaker
And they say, no, we're going to, you know, make it more difficult to vote on these issues or we're going to make it so that way governors can pass executive action or make it more difficult for.
01:21:03
Speaker
So you see what I'm saying?
01:21:04
Speaker
Like they're also putting in those roadblocks toward popular action because the things that they're trying to do are unpopular.
01:21:10
Speaker
So it's, it's so sucks that we are like,
01:21:15
Speaker
we're like anchored to the system that is deliberately unresponsive in pursuit of this minoritarian agenda while trying to inhabit this public sphere that public schools are part of this whole big dialogue.
01:21:31
Speaker
So we're like shackled to these groups, these ideologies, these political partisans and these political systems that don't want us to have a say in a voice in what that meaningfully looks like.
01:21:44
Speaker
That was a lot.
01:21:45
Speaker
Yeah.
01:21:45
Speaker
I mean, and what would the alternative be?
01:21:48
Speaker
The alternative would be that if this were taken to its most extreme, you would have schools for the kids that that promote tolerance and schools that don't like think about classical education charter schools that are explicitly anti many of these things.
01:22:08
Speaker
You would just have this increasingly divisive society where some people learn something and then other people learn another thing.
01:22:15
Speaker
I think that as educators, there is a space to say, no, this is what kids are supposed to think.
01:22:23
Speaker
There is nothing wrong with saying that one of the purposes of school is to say that it's okay to be gay.
01:22:32
Speaker
that's it.
01:22:32
Speaker
You don't need to rationalize beyond that.
01:22:36
Speaker
That's just a thing that is research-backed.
01:22:40
Speaker
We know this is the case.
01:22:41
Speaker
It's not going to lead to any problems down the road.
01:22:44
Speaker
It's teaching critical race theory gender ideology, Chris.
01:22:47
Speaker
Yeah, and understanding those things and promoting those things.
01:22:51
Speaker
But I think about myself growing up in the 90s, right, the 80s, 90s, I guess, and getting into the problems with
01:23:02
Speaker
Like how anti-gay culture was and like bullying.
01:23:07
Speaker
I participated in some of those things.
01:23:09
Speaker
I was online, you know, in the early Halo days.
01:23:13
Speaker
I remember what that was like.
01:23:14
Speaker
I was part of that.
01:23:15
Speaker
But school helped me understand and become more tolerant of other people, more tolerant than my parents were and my family members were.
01:23:24
Speaker
because I was exposed, one, to people who were different than me.
01:23:27
Speaker
That's a big part of it.
01:23:29
Speaker
But two, because there were explicit lessons at school that exposed me to people that think differently than I do.
01:23:34
Speaker
And over time, I learned like, oh, that's cool.
01:23:37
Speaker
I'm okay with that.
01:23:38
Speaker
And we see that more and more.
01:23:39
Speaker
Like there's kids now, like kids at the school I worked at, you know, 10%, 20% use different pronouns than the sign at birth.
01:23:48
Speaker
And for the most part, kids were okay with that.
01:23:52
Speaker
The problem is, is that when
01:23:54
Speaker
You have large media conglomerates and certain political actors demonizing that.
01:24:00
Speaker
You have a certain small number of kids that make life a living hell for those kids.
01:24:04
Speaker
And the solution can't be just ignore it or just completely like you're not even allowed to talk about it.
01:24:11
Speaker
The solution is no, you need to tell those kids that's wrong.
01:24:14
Speaker
It's okay to tell kids that certain things are wrong.
01:24:17
Speaker
If those things don't lead to a better flourishing society, those are bad behaviors.
01:24:21
Speaker
In the exact same way, if a kid...
01:24:23
Speaker
Yeah, the classic.
01:24:25
Speaker
If a kid wears a swastika to school, you wouldn't just go like, well, I'm not going to get political.
01:24:32
Speaker
You can't wear that.
01:24:33
Speaker
What's wrong with you?
01:24:35
Speaker
It's okay to do that.
01:24:36
Speaker
All I was going to say is it is... You know what I forgot I was going to say?
01:24:44
Speaker
You had me all distracted by the kid in a swastika shirt and I was like, what?
01:24:49
Speaker
That's the classic.
01:24:50
Speaker
What's that called?
01:24:51
Speaker
That's a rule.
01:24:52
Speaker
Like when you, you always like bring it back to Nazis.
01:24:55
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:55
Speaker
I forget what the heck that's called.
01:24:57
Speaker
It's like Poe's law.
01:24:58
Speaker
Number one.
01:24:59
Speaker
Yeah.
01:24:59
Speaker
Number one.
01:25:00
Speaker
All right.
01:25:02
Speaker
We made, we made it.
01:25:03
Speaker
So my number one really just kind of encompasses.
01:25:07
Speaker
The question itself, which might be a cop out, but it's okay.
01:25:10
Speaker
My number one curse and problem is defining the purpose of school itself.
01:25:16
Speaker
Like, what is the purpose of school, right?
01:25:20
Speaker
And I think that there is tension in what exactly the purpose of education is supposed to be.
01:25:26
Speaker
If you were an alien...
01:25:28
Speaker
going back to sci-fi imagery, if you were an alien and you just somehow learned the English language and were reading through U.S. policy documents from the Department of Education for the last 100 years, you would probably say the purpose of education is – well, they probably scan it and know it instantly, like matrix stuff.
01:25:45
Speaker
But you would probably say the purpose of education was global competitiveness in economic markets.
01:25:53
Speaker
It's all about like, hey, we're falling behind China –
01:25:56
Speaker
reading and math scores are low.
01:25:59
Speaker
We need to increase those scores.
01:26:01
Speaker
Because when you read over policy documents around education in the United States, and really pretty much every westernized country, you're going to find that kind of language.
01:26:12
Speaker
It's all about economics, job preparation, even military readiness, that kind of language.
01:26:21
Speaker
Or at the same time, it's about solving poverty, which this has come up time and time again, but
01:26:26
Speaker
We've been trying to solve poverty through education for a very long time.
01:26:30
Speaker
It doesn't work.
01:26:31
Speaker
Even in the best schools, the schools that are innovative and doing interesting work with kids from low SES communities, they are not moving out of poverty.
01:26:41
Speaker
The percentages are quite low.
01:26:43
Speaker
I don't have the data in front of me, but I'm pretty confident it's less than like 10% of people change their income stratification from where they were born.
01:26:52
Speaker
So the concept of education solving poverty is not how that works.
01:26:55
Speaker
Teachers can't solve that.
01:26:56
Speaker
It's a political matter.
01:26:57
Speaker
It's policy.
01:26:58
Speaker
So if that is where we're starting, on one side of the pendulum as what the purpose of school is, and I would argue that is how school is structured.
01:27:09
Speaker
School is structured to do just that.
01:27:10
Speaker
That's the reason why we have grades, standardized testing, college admissions the way that they are.
01:27:14
Speaker
All of that is rooted in this McKinsey-an vibe of, hey, we're going to prepare students to be future workers to be competitive on the global scale.
01:27:24
Speaker
That's just how it is.
01:27:27
Speaker
I often wonder if the way that we solve that problem, which is a pie-in-the-sky idea, is shifting the pendulum all the way in the other direction.
01:27:35
Speaker
So taking that pendulum of job preparation, I would argue the opposite of that in a school context would be happiness or contentment.
01:27:45
Speaker
It would be moving that pendulum, swinging all the way to the back, being like, I don't care at all if you're prepared to work.
01:27:51
Speaker
Like not in the slightest.
01:27:52
Speaker
I'm not going to give you any work skills whatsoever.
01:27:56
Speaker
I'm just going to sit you down in a room and say, are you happy today?
01:27:58
Speaker
If not, what are we going to do?
01:28:00
Speaker
How are we going to make you happier?
01:28:02
Speaker
And what are we going to do this all day?
01:28:04
Speaker
Focus on mental health and play and just enjoying our time together and developing a community and remove every language of jobs from school.
01:28:15
Speaker
And the thought I had was, would we still innovate and would we still be competitive at the global scale?
01:28:22
Speaker
And I think the answer is yes.
01:28:24
Speaker
I think that if you focus solely on well-being and happiness, you might not output as much.
01:28:31
Speaker
But as a whole, I think you would just be simply as innovative as any other kind of developed country.
01:28:40
Speaker
The reason being that human beings naturally want to learn things.
01:28:44
Speaker
It is a natural state for us to want to explore the world around us and to build better communities and to make better and better things.
01:28:55
Speaker
So if you sit a bunch of people down in the room and focus on their mental health first and make them happier and more content and solve their problems, when they are just like, hey, we got eight hours, what are we going to do?
01:29:05
Speaker
They're not just going to watch like
01:29:08
Speaker
I don't know, the entire trilogy of Star Wars, right?
01:29:11
Speaker
They're going to... Maybe one day.
01:29:13
Speaker
They're going to go do something with it.
01:29:14
Speaker
Yeah.
01:29:15
Speaker
And kind of going off of that idea, the reason why people are so susceptible in current systems to consume, so like watch TV, play video games, all the things people critique kids for, just get off that video game and you'll learn something.
Identity, Work, and Fulfillment in Education and Society
01:29:30
Speaker
Yeah, kids these days.
01:29:31
Speaker
The reason why many people do that is to escape
01:29:36
Speaker
many portions of reality and to deal with their own mental health uh like i play video games because i'm either uh bored or anxious or like stressed etc like that's it to me is a way to to chill and relax in spite of all of the adversity that goes on day to day uh it's it's fun right it's a fun thing to do uh if you made school its primary purpose
01:30:02
Speaker
to focus on emotional well-being, you would open up more spaces for kids to make a difference.
01:30:07
Speaker
Now, obviously, that's a pie-in-the-sky idea.
01:30:10
Speaker
I don't think it was going to do that anytime soon.
01:30:12
Speaker
But if that's the mindset you went in with, you would then move that pendulum somewhere in between where you would have both some job readiness while simultaneously focusing on contentment and happiness.
01:30:24
Speaker
Yeah.
01:30:26
Speaker
Man, I think part of what is so interesting about this framing and this conversation is it's like there's not going to be a one-size-fits-all solution to any of these problems.
01:30:35
Speaker
There's not going to be the silver bullet, right?
01:30:37
Speaker
Because what we're talking, the process of humanizing something, right?
01:30:42
Speaker
And the process of compromising between these values is going to have multiple situated contextual solutions.
01:30:51
Speaker
The problem is that we're so bought into...
01:30:56
Speaker
one of several premises that we can't see those potential solutions.
01:31:00
Speaker
So like maybe what you're proposing and swinging the pendulum all the way over there is part of a potential solution to some of the other ills that we're seeing there.
01:31:07
Speaker
And like in there is probably a compromise, right?
01:31:11
Speaker
Knowing that kids are probably going to have to go and get a job at some point while realizing that education should not just be done in the service of job preparation, which is like the extreme end of the thing.
01:31:22
Speaker
Well, it's like, well, hold on, right?
01:31:24
Speaker
We're a country that has the highest GDP in the world.
01:31:29
Speaker
Some might call us the wealthiest country, but data released yesterday just says that the bottom 50% GDP
01:31:38
Speaker
of the wealth belongs to, uh, no, the bottom 50% of the population rather has only 2% of the wealth.
01:31:46
Speaker
I got the flip flop to my head.
01:31:47
Speaker
So it's like, does work solve that?
01:31:50
Speaker
I probably don't think so.
01:31:52
Speaker
You know, you're not going to work your way, uh, you know, into becoming, uh, a member of that top 50%, most likely, you know, the hardest working people probably are in that bottom 50% of the population that have only 2% of the
01:32:06
Speaker
So, you know, there are just those big structural things that we that we have to overcome, which kind of gets to my number one.
01:32:13
Speaker
And I think really, I got to add it really quick.
01:32:17
Speaker
One more thing on this is the way that this mentality warps a student's experience of school.
01:32:25
Speaker
And we see this whenever we talk to students in our classrooms or whenever we go and work with schools.
01:32:31
Speaker
if you ask kids, what's the purpose of school, they're going to tell you to get a good job.
01:32:35
Speaker
That is the almost number one answer.
01:32:37
Speaker
You hear that all the time.
01:32:38
Speaker
And the issue with that is, is that,
01:32:42
Speaker
Well, one, schools don't actually prepare you to get a good job.
01:32:45
Speaker
I think that's just a misnomer to begin with.
01:32:49
Speaker
We've likened it to Amazon warehouses.
01:32:51
Speaker
It's training you to have manual labor, which is also should be unionized and fixed, where you have limited bathroom breaks and you just regurgitate information.
01:33:00
Speaker
The problem is that there should not be bad jobs is the flip side of this too.
01:33:04
Speaker
There shouldn't be bad jobs.
01:33:06
Speaker
But the other concern with that is that, and this is like,
01:33:12
Speaker
huge, like 50,000 feet, is people over time are becoming more and more obsessed with identifying their job with their identity.
01:33:23
Speaker
And in a time where kids are going through identity formation, so think like, you know, eight to 21 years old, especially adolescents, their identity is being manufactured around what job they want to have
01:33:39
Speaker
and how much money it's going to make them and how that equivocates to their future, in quotes, success.
01:33:47
Speaker
And as a result, as grownups, as big boys, when we go out and talk to people, the first question you tend to ask people is like, well, what do you do for a living?
01:33:58
Speaker
And then you talk about your jobs for 10 minutes, and then you end your conversation.
01:34:03
Speaker
What about everything else?
01:34:04
Speaker
Like, who are you as a person, really?
01:34:06
Speaker
And I think a lot of adults struggle
01:34:09
Speaker
with answering that question because the only thing they've ever identified, because that's how school has treated it and how our society at large has is I am what I do.
01:34:18
Speaker
And that's it.
01:34:20
Speaker
When education is just the means to the end and you achieve that end, then you're just left with the problem of, well, now what?
01:34:27
Speaker
You made it to college.
01:34:30
Speaker
Okay, what are you going to do in college?
01:34:31
Speaker
Okay, well, then I'm going to major in this thing.
01:34:33
Speaker
Okay, well, then what are you going to do with that?
01:34:35
Speaker
Then I'm going to get this job.
01:34:37
Speaker
Okay, you're 24.
01:34:38
Speaker
What do you do for the other 60 years of your life that you might have ahead of you?
01:34:44
Speaker
How do you live it?
01:34:46
Speaker
What are you going to do to make a...
01:34:49
Speaker
the question of legacy, right?
01:34:50
Speaker
Like the question of family, the question of like all of those things.
01:34:55
Speaker
Like if education doesn't prepare us to really do that, then we're not, we're failing that primary mission that every school has to create lifelong learners.
01:35:04
Speaker
If it's just education as a means to an end, well then...
01:35:08
Speaker
Throw that lifelong learning crap out the window because really that's not what it's about.
01:35:12
Speaker
It's about getting a job and then you figure it out.
01:35:14
Speaker
Right.
01:35:15
Speaker
But then what happens, I think, is probably what ends up happening is that then when you get a job, well, what is communicated like so socially and culturally about what you do?
01:35:25
Speaker
Well, it's like you consume.
01:35:27
Speaker
Right.
01:35:27
Speaker
We have a consumer society.
01:35:28
Speaker
So it's like, OK, cool.
01:35:30
Speaker
Then I just want the, I want that big truck.
01:35:32
Speaker
Right.
01:35:32
Speaker
And then I want that.
01:35:33
Speaker
I want the next big house.
01:35:35
Speaker
And then I want that next thing.
01:35:36
Speaker
And then like you, you use consumption to fill like the void that is there that lacks purpose.
01:35:43
Speaker
Cause you're like, Oh, I got this job.
01:35:44
Speaker
Well, do I like the job?
01:35:46
Speaker
Sure.
01:35:46
Speaker
It gets me money.
01:35:47
Speaker
I get to spend the money on these things.
01:35:50
Speaker
And then,
01:35:50
Speaker
right?
01:35:51
Speaker
The biggest regret that people have on their deathbed documented by the way, is like, man, I wish I wouldn't have spent so much time working, man.
01:35:58
Speaker
I would have wished I would have spent more time valuing the things that are actually important to me, man.
01:36:02
Speaker
I wish, cause you can't bring any of that crap with you.
01:36:04
Speaker
You know, you can't, you can't take, uh, your house and your car and, uh, you know, your gaming consoles and everything else.
01:36:11
Speaker
It's the, uh, it's like that gaping void of existential dread.
01:36:15
Speaker
Yeah.
01:36:16
Speaker
It's the reason why also documented we have a rising number of midlife crises because what is a midlife crisis?
01:36:23
Speaker
It's where you spent your entire time going through that zombification process of next step, next step, next step, next step.
01:36:31
Speaker
Now you made it and you got the exactly what you wanted and then you get divorced and change your job and change countries and you have a complete midlife crisis because you realized, oh, I wasn't in control of any of that narrative.
01:36:46
Speaker
and you're trying then to find purpose and greater meaning.
01:36:49
Speaker
Last thing I'll say on this is that we have the data surrounding how purposeful people are.
01:36:55
Speaker
It's been studied numerous times, the biggest one by Dr. William Damon, showing that adults and young people, only 20% of people are aligned to some kind of greater calling in life.
01:37:05
Speaker
That could be religious, like a classical religious interpretation of that towards a god or greater power.
01:37:11
Speaker
But it's also like
01:37:13
Speaker
having a set of value statements, things that you care about, leading that legacy.
01:37:17
Speaker
Maybe your goal in life is just to have a good time.
01:37:21
Speaker
Maybe you don't want to make any grandiose changes in society.
01:37:23
Speaker
You just want to go out and have fun.
01:37:24
Speaker
I'm here for a long time.
01:37:25
Speaker
I'm here for a good time.
01:37:27
Speaker
Yeah, exactly.
01:37:28
Speaker
YOLO.
01:37:29
Speaker
So maybe that's your goal.
01:37:31
Speaker
But you understand that day to day.
01:37:33
Speaker
80% of people aren't there.
01:37:34
Speaker
And 40% of people are in the world of
01:37:43
Speaker
I don't even know where to start.
01:37:46
Speaker
And that's where you start to see a lot of folks turn to kind of like antisocial behavior.
01:37:53
Speaker
So like driving drunk, engaging in hard drug use, committing crimes,
01:37:59
Speaker
people that are very bigoted, racist, ignorant, etc.
01:38:03
Speaker
A lot of folks are in that category where the way that they fulfilled their purpose in life is to find greater identity through movements that target others.
01:38:12
Speaker
Because next to like, I feel like I'm starting to get into like a self-help podcast here.
01:38:17
Speaker
But our greatest two emotions, right, are love and hate.
01:38:21
Speaker
And it's pretty difficult to love something when you don't find any outlet to focus your love towards a certain thing, right?
01:38:30
Speaker
So instead, it's very easy for someone just to tell you, oh, don't like this.
01:38:34
Speaker
Like, okay, cool.
01:38:34
Speaker
And then I'm just going to dedicate my life to that.
01:38:37
Speaker
without really focusing on who I am.
01:38:41
Speaker
I think, well, I think what this gets at, right, is we've seen this data for a couple of years now, but we've seen, we saw a tremendous decline in life expectancy as a result of the pandemic, obviously, but there were declines in U.S. life expectancy preceding the pandemic that are largely attributed to what we would call those deaths of despair, right?
01:38:59
Speaker
right?
01:38:59
Speaker
Suicide is a huge one, particularly, you know, amongst young people, amongst, you know, I would call them like disaffected, but it really is like, again, is that atomized, right?
01:39:10
Speaker
Like young white men in particular, right?
01:39:12
Speaker
Have this sensation being disconnected from society.
01:39:15
Speaker
And if that doesn't lead to
01:39:18
Speaker
You mentioned those antisocial or even just like actively destructive.
01:39:22
Speaker
You know, they're more likely to be radicalized into violent political ideologies or destroy themselves through, you know, drug use and abuse.
01:39:31
Speaker
Those are the other halves of it, too, right, is an increase in drug abuse leading to early death or overdose, you know.
01:39:39
Speaker
And alcohol related incidents, all of those things are categorized under that deaths of despair because because of a crisis of meaning.
01:39:46
Speaker
Right.
01:39:46
Speaker
There's a reason why there is so much snake oil and so many grifters in that space, right, trying to sell you the.
01:39:55
Speaker
the magic bullet for the thing that's going to turn your life around, right?
01:39:57
Speaker
To sell you, you're going to find meaning on the marketplace because you get to a certain point in your life and you realize, right, that your job isn't actually what you thought it was going to be or you find that crisis.
01:40:10
Speaker
I'll be real transparent.
01:40:11
Speaker
Like I...
01:40:12
Speaker
I've been going to therapy since I left my teaching job because of burnout.
01:40:19
Speaker
Like I didn't realize it.
01:40:20
Speaker
I was like in the clinical burnout phase.
01:40:22
Speaker
And so I had attended these group therapy sessions where people are talking about how they're feeling and everything else.
01:40:28
Speaker
And I'm like, hey, that's me.
01:40:29
Speaker
Hey, that's me.
01:40:29
Speaker
Hey, that's me.
01:40:30
Speaker
And then the therapist was like, yeah, you're clinically burnt out.
01:40:34
Speaker
And I was like, I had no idea.
01:40:36
Speaker
What I was really shocked to see in those meetings is a lot of those people actually are in those STEM fields that we're pushing kids into.
01:40:45
Speaker
A lot of them are software engineers.
01:40:47
Speaker
A lot of them are coders.
01:40:49
Speaker
A lot of them are in these fields.
01:40:51
Speaker
You'd be like, hey, you could be successful.
01:40:53
Speaker
You can carve your own path and everything else, not realizing that those are actually very precarious positions.
01:40:59
Speaker
where you don't work on the same project or for the same company, and you're constantly on the lookout, and you're working huge hours in very physically strenuous environments in front of a computer screen where the work is incredibly high stakes.
01:41:15
Speaker
You probably don't have a lot of rights as an employee and a worker.
01:41:17
Speaker
So you might have individual capital, but you're switching jobs.
01:41:22
Speaker
You don't think the position's
01:41:24
Speaker
Are what they are, right?
01:41:25
Speaker
A lot of times they're in abusive environments.
01:41:27
Speaker
Like those are the things that I heard from people where I was just like, oh man, like the grass must be greener in software engineering.
01:41:33
Speaker
The grass must be greener in coding or in marketing, right?
01:41:36
Speaker
I talked to marketing people too.
01:41:40
Speaker
And, you know, you realize that, like, it's a huge systemic crisis of meaning and the investment of our identities in our work and the need to sever those things.
01:41:52
Speaker
I just finished watching Severance, not in an anatomical, physical way, but, right, in a healthy and, right, in a healthy way.
01:42:00
Speaker
I'll use the word agentic, like meaning you have control over your work-life balance.
01:42:08
Speaker
Yeah.
01:42:08
Speaker
So, man, this is a great conversation.
01:42:11
Speaker
My goal is just to make this go into a two-hour conversation.
01:42:13
Speaker
Yeah, let's do it.
01:42:14
Speaker
One more thing regarding that, which I think is an important thing to note.
01:42:18
Speaker
I thought you were 30 seconds.
01:42:22
Speaker
I think a question we have to ask ourselves is that is there any purpose in
01:42:28
Speaker
to bolstering STEM fields other than making a lot of money.
01:42:34
Speaker
Like, like what if there weren't any STEM fields?
01:42:39
Speaker
That's it.
01:42:39
Speaker
I'll just say it there.
01:42:40
Speaker
I'm not going to, I'm not going to elaborate.
01:42:41
Speaker
I'm just going to stop there.
01:42:42
Speaker
That's someone who taught digital design.
01:42:44
Speaker
Uh, it's in my world, but yeah.
01:42:46
Speaker
And I won't, I won't take that bait because otherwise the conversation will go even further.
01:42:51
Speaker
Okay.
01:42:52
Speaker
My number one, um, um,
01:42:55
Speaker
But this really gets to the core of things, I think.
01:42:58
Speaker
And maybe in an inadvertent way, mine actually is a hierarchy.
01:43:01
Speaker
Because I had mentioned behaviorism as like a driving system behind grades and grading.
01:43:07
Speaker
We kind of talked about that atomization of the social versus the individual.
01:43:14
Speaker
There's the interdisciplinary versus the disciplinary.
01:43:17
Speaker
There's the whole policy and the dual revolution idea.
01:43:20
Speaker
But really like the structure of school
01:43:22
Speaker
The fundamental problem, in my opinion here, is childism on the one hand.
01:43:27
Speaker
So that is to say validating, growing, practicing, challenging children in the process of constructing their own world rather than merely just taking a place in it.
Empowering Students and Collaborative Educational Structures
01:43:40
Speaker
And, of course, on the other side, adultism.
01:43:43
Speaker
That's to say adult-ordered, constructed, and normed environments.
01:43:47
Speaker
They're controlled.
01:43:48
Speaker
They're guaranteed.
01:43:50
Speaker
They have their measures and their outcomes, etc.
01:43:52
Speaker
So those two things have got to be in fundamental contradiction of each other.
01:43:57
Speaker
And I just don't know if there is a way to...
01:44:02
Speaker
Do you compromise on the childism side and really get to an issue of fundamental human rights?
01:44:09
Speaker
What rights do kids have towards autonomy and agency, control over their bodies, control over their minds, control of their own self-directed development and realization as human beings versus the measures of school achievement, which kids don't care about, right?
01:44:31
Speaker
Adults care about those things.
01:44:33
Speaker
And then the ends justifying the means of those things to say, well, we are going to control your body, limit when you go to the bathroom, when you socialize with your friends.
01:44:43
Speaker
We're going to control what you learn, how you learn it, when you learn it, how you show that you've learned it, et cetera, et cetera.
01:44:49
Speaker
Oh, why are kids sad, right?
01:44:52
Speaker
Why are kids stressed out?
01:44:54
Speaker
We heard from a middle schooler very recently who said that
01:45:00
Speaker
You know, I'm on the computer all day.
01:45:02
Speaker
Like I'm on my Chromebook at school doing my work all day.
01:45:06
Speaker
And then I go home and tell my mom that I have a headache.
01:45:08
Speaker
My mom says, that's because you're on the damn phone all the time.
01:45:12
Speaker
And she gets frustrated because it's like, no, that's because I was on, I was at, my phone was in my locker.
01:45:17
Speaker
Like I was doing everything right.
01:45:19
Speaker
And God, like, here's a student who can't even feel like they, they, they can, they can talk about the circumstances affecting them without the blame being diverted back on them.
01:45:29
Speaker
You have a headache because of the decisions that you made.
01:45:31
Speaker
No, it's because I was doing the things that school wanted me to do.
01:45:35
Speaker
but I'm disempowered as an adolescent, I can't even make the case for this.
01:45:44
Speaker
I don't have control over my learning environment, my work environment, as it were.
01:45:49
Speaker
So it really just is like the most fundamental tension of policy, practice, pedagogy, all of those things embedded in this tension between childism on the one hand and adultism on the other.
01:46:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think that that gets back into that pendulum idea.
01:46:06
Speaker
And I can't help but think about this.
01:46:08
Speaker
I promise this will go somewhere.
01:46:10
Speaker
But through the lens of feminism.
01:46:12
Speaker
So, as you know, big bell hooks fan.
01:46:14
Speaker
Sure, feminism is for everyone.
01:46:16
Speaker
And in that book, a lot of it is dissecting for men why feminism is important and recognizing that it's a partnership.
01:46:27
Speaker
And many folks will view feminism as being like,
01:46:31
Speaker
oh man, if the feminists get their way, the women are going to make all the decisions or some ridiculous point like that.
01:46:37
Speaker
Whereas there are a lot of benefits for men in feminism, especially like childcare, social emotional stuff.
01:46:43
Speaker
I mean, there's various things, but it doesn't matter right now.
01:46:46
Speaker
The purpose being that in this childism, adultism framework, by empowering young people
01:46:53
Speaker
you are making adults' lives better.
01:46:56
Speaker
That partnership there in the classroom leads to better solutions and better vibes for all people, not just for kids.
01:47:08
Speaker
So when you're lessening your own power in the classroom and moving away from that lens that the teacher makes all the decisions, that the teacher is the one that's in control, that parents know best and that kids can never be right, if you move away from that positioning,
01:47:23
Speaker
and let kids speak up and give them an equal partnership in the decisions that they make throughout their day.
01:47:29
Speaker
Not only are kids obviously going to be happier, but adults will be happier as well because kids have a lot of important things to say.
01:47:37
Speaker
And the way that kids view the world is –
01:47:41
Speaker
just as valid as how adults view the world uh like imagine if society were operated by eight-year-olds there'd be a lot of intriguing decisions to be made but would it be more peaceful like would it be would people be like it would they be more peaceful would they be more validated would they care about each other more i think they would kids do a lot of terrible things don't get me wrong like kids do a lot of things that are like yo that ain't right um but
01:48:06
Speaker
Adults, I think, do way worse in terms of the decisions that they make and the things that they'll say to other people and the decisions, like the rationalizations they'll go through in order to do the things, the outcomes.
01:48:19
Speaker
We're much better at rationalizing it.
01:48:22
Speaker
Yes.
01:48:22
Speaker
Kids will do very imaginative, provocative things because they don't
01:48:28
Speaker
have the same worldly knowledge, I guess.
01:48:30
Speaker
They're not as wise.
01:48:34
Speaker
But that's the point.
01:48:36
Speaker
That's an equally valid perspective.
01:48:37
Speaker
And also there's kids that are just, if not more wise than some adults are.
01:48:42
Speaker
It's recognizing advantages and disadvantages to everyone so that way we can become partners in the learning process.
01:48:49
Speaker
This is very important right now in the cultural zeitgeist where politicians are starting to say,
01:48:57
Speaker
The narrative surrounding LGBT rights explicitly, but also some racial tension stuff, is on the idea of we just need to trust parents.
01:49:08
Speaker
Parents' rights.
01:49:10
Speaker
Yeah, we need to get into parents' rights.
01:49:12
Speaker
And, I mean, there were many instances when I was teaching where a kid would go by different pronouns and they didn't want their parents to know about it.
01:49:22
Speaker
And that's federally protected.
01:49:24
Speaker
Like you can't like tell right now you can't go.
01:49:27
Speaker
If a kid says, you know, I go by she, her pronouns, you can't go and call up the parents and say, guess what?
01:49:33
Speaker
And just like start like, like, like exposing them.
01:49:36
Speaker
It's a, it's a federally protected, right?
01:49:38
Speaker
That's trying to be overturned right now because of the, the parents rights movement, which says that ostensibly parents own their kids and they know what's best for their kids.
01:49:50
Speaker
Right.
01:49:51
Speaker
Don't think from a childist slash adultist perspective.
01:49:54
Speaker
If you're looking at it from that framework, that's right.
01:49:57
Speaker
Parents don't always know what's best.
01:49:59
Speaker
My parents made many mistakes.
01:50:01
Speaker
I love them, but there is no denying that my parents did not know what was best for me at every single moment.
01:50:08
Speaker
My mom used to take me to a martial arts class.
01:50:10
Speaker
Bad idea.
01:50:11
Speaker
I would have never done that.
01:50:12
Speaker
She forced me to go.
01:50:13
Speaker
It didn't work.
01:50:15
Speaker
That's a silly example, but of course,
01:50:18
Speaker
at like a more theoretical level and big picture, you can learn a lot from kids, their voices matter.
01:50:25
Speaker
Yeah.
01:50:26
Speaker
And I want to say there's a connection there, too, between what I had said earlier about one justification for the universal design for learning is that it actually improves the situation for all learners.
01:50:39
Speaker
You don't need a slip of paper with a legal thing, a diagnosis, this patchwork of documentation to make accommodations for all these people.
01:50:48
Speaker
Certainly, those need to be validated and
01:50:51
Speaker
like recognized, right?
01:50:53
Speaker
I'm not saying do away with that, but a universal design thing like improves the learning environment for everybody.
01:50:58
Speaker
Just like we would say the universal design for access to a building is better for everyone too.
01:51:04
Speaker
If you have a ramp, you know, that makes it accessible for somebody in a wheelchair.
01:51:07
Speaker
Well, that also makes it accessible for somebody who's pushing a stroller.
01:51:13
Speaker
Right.
01:51:13
Speaker
It's stroller accessible in the same way.
01:51:15
Speaker
If you have an elevator, you know, that makes it more mobile for somebody with just mobility issues because of age and stamina.
01:51:22
Speaker
Right.
01:51:23
Speaker
As opposed to taking the stairs up.
01:51:24
Speaker
It's not just about someone with a diagnosed diagnosable disability.
01:51:29
Speaker
And so in the same way, too, here, childism is the same thing as what you're saying, is that by partnering with students, with children, both in the way that they're being raised and engaged in their environments and the way that they engage in the environment of school, you improve it for everybody.
01:51:46
Speaker
And I think that's something that we've talked about as progressive educators.
01:51:50
Speaker
for a long time too, is that progressive practice just doesn't benefit students.
01:51:54
Speaker
It actively like helped me be like a more happy, joyful, you know, educator connecting with kids.
01:52:00
Speaker
Like my classroom environment was just happier and healthier as a result of the changes that I was making.
01:52:05
Speaker
Like giving up some of that control that I was like, it's not that I wanted to have all that control, but that's how I felt like I was being a good teacher.
01:52:13
Speaker
Cause that's what the system, you know, communicated to me.
01:52:16
Speaker
It's how it rewarded me.
01:52:17
Speaker
Like the teachers who are the best have the most control.
01:52:20
Speaker
And for me, it was, it was no, I need to ask my kids like, Hey, what is it that you want to be doing?
01:52:24
Speaker
Give me some feedback on, uh, on this.
01:52:27
Speaker
Is this working?
01:52:27
Speaker
Is this not working?
01:52:29
Speaker
Like once it was doing that, oh man, it was, it wasn't smooth sailing all the time, but man, like you said, the vibes were better.
01:52:35
Speaker
Kids loved being in my classroom.
01:52:37
Speaker
Kids, you know, I still talk to former students.
01:52:40
Speaker
I'm not even in the classroom teaching right now.
01:52:42
Speaker
And former students have emailed me.
01:52:44
Speaker
talking about things.
01:52:45
Speaker
So obviously that relationship part is there too.
01:52:47
Speaker
But, and what is going to have a more lasting, what is going to have a more lasting impact, right?
01:52:53
Speaker
That long-term relationship where they're still coming to me, even though I'm not even teaching anymore, or like some, some thing that I tried to put on the multiple choice test back in September 20, when I had that student back in September, 2021, you know, like what is the most impactful thing in that, in that student's life right now?
01:53:13
Speaker
yeah final note i'll say is that when you frame things in this way uh it helps you also unpack a lot of the judgment and anger that comes from controlling spaces so teachers when you're tasked i remember this in teacher training and like my first couple years teaching when you have this set idea from your adultest lens this is how a classroom should behave if you're not doing that there's something wrong with you
01:53:40
Speaker
because that is the message that's kind of being sent there through the hidden curriculum, you start to judge kids.
01:53:45
Speaker
You start to say, like, these kids, all they want to do is be on their phones.
01:53:49
Speaker
Or you'll say, like, you know, if these kids just did all their homework, then they would be doing just fine.
01:53:55
Speaker
And why can't we just do school like how it used to be, where you would just do this?
01:53:59
Speaker
You start to say a lot of things that you yourself do not do.
01:54:05
Speaker
There's nothing funnier than going into a staff meeting where –
01:54:09
Speaker
When it was virtual, all the people would have their cameras off.
01:54:12
Speaker
When it was in person, they'd all be on their phones.
01:54:15
Speaker
When teachers would talk to each other the entire time when someone's trying to say something, no one's paying attention or no one even does what the administrator is telling you to do.
01:54:26
Speaker
You know why?
01:54:27
Speaker
Because it's the same thing.
01:54:28
Speaker
As an adult, you end up doing a lot of the exact same stuff.
01:54:31
Speaker
And how many teachers go home every single day and turn on the TV and just watch all day just as soon as they're done?
01:54:40
Speaker
That's not to say that teachers are bad people.
01:54:44
Speaker
It's just that the systems that we find ourselves in through that lens makes us act that way.
01:54:50
Speaker
If we change those underlying systems and make partnerships with students, we start to decompress a lot of that anger and go like, hey, we probably shouldn't be on our phones the entire time, but I get it.
01:55:00
Speaker
And we can have conversations about that and make myself better too, not just kids.
01:55:05
Speaker
Right.
01:55:06
Speaker
It's the notion that...
01:55:08
Speaker
Like, let's bring it around to policies, right?
01:55:10
Speaker
Like, let's take a prison, for example, right?
01:55:15
Speaker
A prison is the most restrictive environment, you know, ostensibly that you could be in, right?
01:55:20
Speaker
In terms of controlling your movement, your body, the way that you're able to express yourself, who you're able to interact with, everything else, right?
01:55:28
Speaker
You're imprisoning a human person in that environment.
01:55:31
Speaker
Are those spaces any less violent or are those people less, are they the people that you would want to hang around with, right?
01:55:42
Speaker
Is that an environment that you would want to raise your children in?
01:55:45
Speaker
Is that, you know what I'm saying?
01:55:46
Speaker
So we could ostensibly turn any space into a prison, right?
01:55:50
Speaker
With the most structure, the most hierarchy, the most restrictive spaces imaginable.
01:55:56
Speaker
And that's not going to solve any of the root of the problem.
01:55:58
Speaker
But what is, is going to be the relational parts of those things, right?
01:56:01
Speaker
Relationships, partnerships, feeling empowered, feeling like you have, you know, some amount of agency and control over your life, you know, over your circumstances.
01:56:10
Speaker
Those are going to be the things that are going to do it, not this, you know, the pendulum swinging all the way back.
01:56:16
Speaker
you know, from chaos, perceived chaos or whatever it is to, you know, to this prison like environment, which is, again, another piece that you hear very often from students, where kids were not prisoners.
01:56:29
Speaker
They run this place like a prison, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
01:56:32
Speaker
Um,
01:56:33
Speaker
Rather than just approaching it as like, hey, I'm an adult.
01:56:36
Speaker
Here's the institutional goals and some of the agenda.
01:56:40
Speaker
Here's what we have in mind for you.
01:56:44
Speaker
How can we best partner with you in having some voice and choice of these options and how your body is physically positioned in this space?
01:56:54
Speaker
Like,
01:56:54
Speaker
What is the best learning environment for you?
01:56:57
Speaker
How do you want to approach this content?
01:56:59
Speaker
What is it?
01:56:59
Speaker
Give them some space to decide what they want to learn.
01:57:02
Speaker
How do you want to express that learning to adults?
01:57:05
Speaker
So it's just like, hey, here are some of the institutional non-negotiables that I think I'm going to stand on.
01:57:11
Speaker
What are kids non-negotiables, right?
01:57:13
Speaker
How often do we bring them to the table and be like, what is it that you most want out of this institution?
01:57:18
Speaker
How can we help you get there?
01:57:20
Speaker
And...
01:57:22
Speaker
Yeah, it's not doubling down on the things that are going to turn schools into prisons in the name of adultism.
01:57:29
Speaker
It's really just going to be that partnership and that relationship that we have with kids that's going to make any part of it work.
01:57:36
Speaker
That's a great point.
01:57:37
Speaker
And so with that, thanks for joining us for Mind Food.
01:57:42
Speaker
Of course, the goal with Mind Food is to make a series of more casual content.
01:57:49
Speaker
more casual content that's easily digestible.
01:57:52
Speaker
And of course, that could only be in the context of like a five course meal doled out over the course of two hours.
01:57:59
Speaker
So if you've listened this long, thank you so much.
01:58:01
Speaker
You can find us on our website, humanrestorationproject.org or on social media, Twitter at HumResPro.
01:58:08
Speaker
You can find me at CovingtonEDU and Chris at McNuttEDU.
01:58:14
Speaker
And thanks so much for taking the time to listen and watch today.
01:58:19
Speaker
Take care.