KindlED
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments. Powered by Prenda, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle curiosity, motivation, and well-being in young learners. Do you have a question, topic, or story you'd like to share with us? Get in touch at podcast@prenda.com.
KindlED
Episode 40: 3 Hidden Threats. A Conversation with Matt Barnes.
This week, Kaity and Adriane chat with Matt Barnes, who works to help parents defend their children from hidden threats that are unique to the 21st century. In this episode, Matt uncovers three of those threats.
Matt also discusses the challenges faced by students in the education system and the importance of empowering parents to take ownership of their children's education. He highlights the impact of technology and AI on children and emphasizes the need for a more flexible and relevant education system. Matt addresses the growing issue of youth loneliness and advises parents and educators on how to support authentic learning and address mental health concerns. He even shares his vision for the future of education and the importance of continuous learning and growth.
Episode 40 also explores:
🔥 the importance of critical thinking and self-leadership in nurturing the next generation
🔥 the specific educational barriers faced by black boys
🔥 how we can overturn a system that too often leaves black youth behind
🔥 and so much more!
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
🔑 The education system needs to adapt to the changing needs of students and provide more flexibility and relevance.
🔑 Technology and AI can have both positive and negative impacts on children, and parents need to be aware of the potential dangers.
🔑 Youth loneliness is a growing concern we need to address by fostering meaningful connections and relationships.
ABOUT THE GUEST:
Matt is the husband of one wife, three kids, and a rescue dog. Over the last 25 years, Matt has run an $18m hospital department, distributed $500m in philanthropy, led an education reform nonprofit, served on 10 educational boards, including a public and private college, started three companies, and has coached thousands of parents on how to grow learners in the 21st century. Matt's current project is an employee-owned bread company with formerly homeless residents at a local group home in Houston, Texas. Matt sits on several boards and is an Elder in his church.
LINKS:
🔗 Subscribe to Matt's YouTube channel
🔗 Follow Matt on LinkedIn
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Got a story to share or question you want us to answer? Send us a message!
About the podcast:
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments.
Powered by Prenda Microschools, each episode offers actionable insights to help you ignite your child's love of learning. We'll dive into evidence-based tools and techniques that kindle young learners' curiosity, motivation, and well-being.
Got a burning question?
We're all ears! If you have a question or topic you'd love our hosts to tackle, please send it to podcast@prenda.com. Let's dive into the conversation together!
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The model of school we have today. It never was built to give the child decision making right. The curriculum is designed without any conversation with the child, usually years in advance, and usually in a state house 1,000 miles from the child. That never, at any point, is the question given to the child. Okay, how would you like to proceed? How would you like to build this learning journey? So what it does is it disempowers the child and that's why you see so much learning disengagement by kids. They know, heck, I don't have any control on this thing. I'm just going to sit back and wait for someone to tell me what to do, and we do not have time for that in a world that's breaking.
Speaker 2:Hi and welcome to the Kindle Podcast where we dig into the art and science behind kindling the motivation, curiosity and mental well-being of the young humans in our lives.
Speaker 3:Together, we'll discover practical tools and strategies you can use to help kids unlock their full potential and become the strongest version of their future selves.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Kindle Podcast everybody. I'm Katie and this is my beautiful co-host, adrienne. We're excited to talk to you today about some exciting things that are happening in the education world, as we always do. Adrienne, I was wondering the other day. I was just kind of thinking I know we share a lot about our kids on the podcast, but, like, what is and what was your main driver for doing something different with your kids?
Speaker 3:If I would have read that question and had time to think of an answer, I think it would be different than you just asking me that question, because the immediate thing that popped up was curiosity. I just got curious about what was the best fit for my kids, curious about how their brains were wired, how they learn, and curious about if this traditional system is the box that they fit in. And so when it came time to send my oldest to kindergarten, there were way too many options, very different than where I grew up. In Pennsylvania, where you live in a district, you send your child to that school or you go to a parochial school or a private school. There aren't many options. In Arizona we had, I think, six or seven charter schools to pick from, and this is just in our city, and then our cities are so close to other cities. So I think if I wrote down every single option I had from my son to go to kindergarten, it was like trying to pick a college, it was ridiculous. And so I think it got to the point where so okay, this is funny, but I knew that the red, yellow, green charts weren't going to work for him, that he would probably be on bread all the time because he needed to move his body, and so I picked a school that did not use those charts and it was a very, very traditional school and it was not the right box for him.
Speaker 3:So, just, and then, when the next child enters school, I just was curious. I was learning a lot about the way they were wired, learning about neurodivergence, because that was brand new to me. Wow, why isn't this working the way it worked for me or worked for, like you know? It works for other kids that I know. And then I, honestly, someone just told me about micro schools and it seemed really cool, and so we just decided to try it and we never looked back. What about you? I'm super curious because I know you started out as a homeschooler before this whole micro school thing was a thing. How, or did you always want to homeschool, did you know? Okay, this is the path I'm going to have for my kids, for education.
Speaker 2:No, not at all. I was in. I was a speech-telling pathologist in public schools and saw a lot of good things happening there, but mostly just saw like wow, the very, very vast majority of kids do not want to be here. And I remember going to school, like you know that like moment, that's like Sunday night and you remember like school tomorrow and you feel like this, like stomachy feeling, like oh, it's like that every Sunday night feeling, and then you realize that it's like Columbus Day or something like that, and you have Monday school off and you're like, yes, like this is the best feeling in the world, like I wanted my kids to have that feeling instead about going to school, instead of about not going to school. And so that's the number one reason I choose to do something different is that I just feel like there's a more joyful way to live and that it's not healthy for kids to live under this like crushing weight of anxiety all the time, and I just didn't want to have that have fighting against learning be a big part of our family culture.
Speaker 2:And so when I started homeschooling, I that's when I like dug into all this like psychology of motivation and things like that, to figure out like what, what makes you want to do something? How can we turn learning into a thing that you want to do? It is a very natural, enjoyable human like I love learning now and I remember going to school and being like man. I would love just going to school if I didn't have homework and like grades and all these things. Like I love learning. Right, it's not the learning, it's like everything we do to the learning to make it into this terrible like 13 year long grind. Right, it's like maybe we could just enjoy learning and not ruin the rest of the child's life. Sorry that's, that's maybe extreme, but that's how I felt when I was little. So I just wanted to try something different.
Speaker 2:And yeah, but our guest today, matt Barnes, has a lot to say about this and he actually helps parents figure this out for themselves, like what do they want out of their child's education and how can they create that? So super excited to tell you guys more about Matt Barnes. Matt is the husband of one wife, three kids and a rescue dog. Over the last 25 years he has run a hospital department, distributed millions of dollars in philanthropy, led an education reform nonprofit, served on 10 educational boards, including a public and private college. He started three companies and he's coached thousands of parents on how to grow learners in the 21st century. So we're excited to talk to Matt Barnes. Let's do it. Matt Barnes, welcome to the Kindle podcast. We're super excited to have you on today.
Speaker 1:Thank you for having me. It's so great to be here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so take us back, like give us the full long story, your background. What work are you doing in the world today, like what's the change you're seeking to make? What brought you to this work? What's your kind of your big why?
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. So thanks again for having me on. I'll start with the shortest answer. The change I'm trying to seek, or the reason I'm in this space, is because education will not work without parents, without parents playing a ridiculously different role than they have historically. And it's not not involvement, it's not even engagement, it's ownership. That's where we actually have to move in education and so that's where I. That's the change I'm trying to seek, because I have seen over and over again that young people are not doing well, and the more we rely on that system the educational system was built 150 years ago the less confident I am that our kids are going to do well.
Speaker 1:How I got into this work? It was completely accidental. I'm a healthcare administrator background and I spent time in philanthropy. I was invited to be on the board of a couple of universities, one a public, selected public college and one a private college, and in both circumstances I saw kids that were just ill prepared for the 21st century in just so many different ways. They didn't know how to think. They were really good at answering fact questions like yes or no questions. They were not very good at seeing nuance and understanding the gray. They were really weak in problem solving and self leadership and as I was in again in these different professional spaces, I kept seeing this gap between what kids actually need and what they're being prepared for in the traditional educational structure and I began to speak about what I was seeing. Parents started to say, well, can you help me with my child? And I started to get into coaching kind of accidentally, and that's what I've been doing for the last 15 years.
Speaker 3:Wow, I would like to talk a little bit about your own kids education too. I know that's a big piece like this.
Speaker 1:Have any Tie into this work that you're doing and seeing their own education journeys, of course, yeah, if anybody watches LinkedIn or reads LinkedIn, you'll probably stumble upon me. But I, I Every parent experiments on their kids All right, let's just be clear about that, right. And so I, I pushed the. I pushed the envelope a little bit on that experimentation. Some of it was accidental, like my, my son, who's the oldest, as we were just about to enter the traditional public school.
Speaker 1:There was this crisis that happened literally the week before school started. That caused us to say we can't put our child in that school and again, raising a black boy. There's a whole conversation we could have about how Concerned I am about black boys in our educational system. They just are. They're cratering and have been doing so for years. But we ended up pulling our son out and we stumbled into Microschooling and university model schooling and other structures that were really clear. They said that if this child is going to succeed or fail, it's going to be because of you parent operating one way or the other, and they were very good about helping me understand what that role I should play was.
Speaker 1:But as I began to feel the power of Knowing that I can influence my child dramatically and might, once my kids started to realize their own ability to influence themselves. There's no way I could go back to that Of that other model where kids voices are really sidelined. So that's kind of how I got into this. My kids have been so amazing and and they're all different to another hugely important dynamic every kid is different. We should not expect them to go through the same structure, even if there's, you know, a little bit of, you know, diversity around the edges of that structure. Our kids are my kids. Three of them are like three separate humans. Weird, huh.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so weird.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, yeah. So one is, you know, at a university. One I Almost said she quit school. She didn't. She walked out as a as a freshman. At the end of her freshman year straight-A student, she walked out and said I don't want to go back, I can learn this a lot faster. There's stuff I want to learn about that I don't get a chance to study, and she started taking college courses at 15. She wrote a book at 17. She's been working professionally since 18 with no diploma or degree, and Actually next week we're dropping her off in San Diego for a new job that she just Just landed. And so the world has changed. Anybody who believes that you have to get a degree in order to have a middle-class lifestyle, that's just old thinking, and so I could go on and on about this, but let me shut up and let you ask me more questions.
Speaker 2:I would love to hear more about what you see is going on with black students in the schooling system and your perspective on that.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah, well, again, let me tell you the story of our own experience. So, and this is just, it was so painful but it turned out to be this wonderful blessing. The week before school started the principle of our Elementary school an elementary school that we worked hard to get our child into its public school, magnet school it came out in the news. The principal was asking the staff to make sure her grandson Was in a class with and this is a direct quote other good white neighborhood kids. This is the principal of the elementary school being like transparent about her desire to shield her son or grandson from, you know, kids that look like my son. And this was 2008, right, this is not 1968 right, yeah, it's ridiculous but that's a rare circumstance, I think, where the person articulated a bias.
Speaker 1:If we look at the outcomes for black boys, they're so consistently horrible that if this was any other population, we would have a full stop on the educational system and say, all right, we're gonna stop everything, we're gonna figure out what's happening, we're gonna restart with something dramatically different. Um, and in my community the community I work and have served the most I'm just tired of seeing black boys who think they're stupid Because they've been told that for several years in the traditional system and who realize or believe that there is no traditional learning or traditional work opportunity that they will have access to because they they, they haven't persisted in the model that Oftentimes works against them. And so I'm just, I'm angry, I'm frustrated and I am tired of seeing outcomes so consistently poor without any real serious consideration about maybe the system is broken.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Well, it seems like you've done a lot from that experience and background, a lot of those frustrations You've obviously channeled into very productive and like you've helped thousands of families Think about this differently, take ownership over their, their students lives. So tell us a little bit more about that, about parent coaching.
Speaker 1:Yeah, again, it started accidentally, when people just started to approach me Because I was on these university boards and they were saying well, how can I get my child a great education? And initially my response to them was Pressure your child and push on them to get good grades, like if they don't? If they're not getting good grades, then you remove the things that they love from their environment. So they then realize that this matters, and I have come 180 degrees from that. That doesn't work.
Speaker 3:And say where did that paradigm come from? Super curious.
Speaker 1:Well, that paradigm came from. That's the model that I grew up in, but it has, it's, never worked like. I can't think of a single kid that by you know putting the screws to them. Somehow they're gonna love learning, they're gonna somehow magically Love learning. But again, as I went through this with my own kids, I watched parents and coach them again in ways that I'm horrified that I was giving that coaching. I began to see the patterns that it doesn't work, and I began to then meet people that said wait a second, matt, there's a different way, and that different way is generally the almost the exact opposite of what I was coaching parents on. And that different way is Asking the what I call the killer question, asking the child what do you want to learn about? It's such a simple question.
Speaker 3:Imagine that if we ask kids what they actually want to learn, it's ridiculous like how simple that is.
Speaker 1:But if you ask a child, what do you want to learn about what you're doing and there's a whole bunch of science that backs us up what you're doing is you're saying to the child you lead and because you have an interest, the child is, because the child has an interest, the child is going to be more motivated to learn. Others have taught me and now I coach parents and have coach parents for user on this around self-directed learning. If the child says they're interested in anything video games, basketball, dogs, whatever it is we can easily create with the child a learning plan that covers all the subjects that matter and many more that are never touched in education. The child's own motivations, the driver, not a parent, put in the screws to the child. That's how I got there.
Speaker 2:True Learning really is a natural human behavior. When we take all of the constructs that we push into school off, people tell me kids will never learn if you don't force them too. I'm like, well, probably if you keep everything else the same in their life and then suddenly just don't force them yeah, because they're going to push back against all of that and they're going to experience that. But if you change the culture of their relationships in their life, if you change the family culture, if you remove a lot of the constructs that they're fighting against, they can find their love for learning again. It feels risky to parents to do that.
Speaker 1:Exactly that's one of the biggest barriers Parents who say, well, I know it worked for me and my generation. I'm worried if I change that, I'm going to somehow injure my child and my child's future. What I say to them is ask yourself what has changed in the world since you graduated high school. Inevitably, they list a thousand things that are transformational. We are talking. I don't even know where you are in the world. You might be in, I don't know where are you. Or in Arizona, arizona, okay, you could have been in Spain, you could have been in Singapore.
Speaker 1:We are in such a different world and we keep hammering the same thinking that was literally built and structured in 1893 or 4, plus or minus. The idea that we keep doing the same thing because it worked in previous generations is lunacy today. That's the most risky thing you can actually do nowadays. Getting parents to understand that is really tricky, but what I'm finding is that the more people like my kids and so many other kids I've met, I'm sure you've got a bunch in your programs who have completely turned the system upside down and are just killing it. That's the message that's going to get parents to go. Wait a second, there is a different way and beating up a child not fun for me and certainly not fun for them. There's a different way to skin this cat, so I'm excited to have more opportunities for young people to take the stage and talk about their own journeys.
Speaker 3:What are those different ways?
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh. It starts to me with the first conversation of what do you want to learn about, son or daughter or child, and then the child articulating that. One of the ways that I actually talk to parents about is what we call a dream map or a mission map. And so another killer question is if you could do anything or achieve one thing in the next months or years and you knew you couldn't fail, what would that thing be? And that phrase of you knew you couldn't fail or you wouldn't fail can begin to free the child up to actually dream.
Speaker 1:And so some kids will say I'd love to fix air pollution or water pollution. Some might say I would love to find a new way to communicate online, and others might say I want to be a professional basketball player. Whatever, the issue is that's the beginning of a journey, and that journey is one that empowers the child to learn how to research, how to network, how to create, how to solve their own problems, and ultimately, that's the skill set that a 21st century adult needs to have. The world is changing so fast. We have no idea what the world's going to look like in 10 years, but giving the children the opportunity to build their own ability to solve their own problems and to network and to learn from a thousand different ways. That is the solution to get them ready for a world that's changing rapidly.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. We talked about all of the constraints of normal school kind of killing a child's love of learning, and then if you just pull them out of school and do nothing, you probably aren't going to see this like miraculous change in them, right? But what you're saying is that we have to take a proactive stance here and introduce the child. It's essentially because we've undone a lot of natural processes and a natural love for learning. Now we have to learn how to promote that what should be a natural love of learning. We kind of have to scaffold that, and I loved how you said this gives the child permission to dream and create something, because they've literally never had that opportunity.
Speaker 2:From the time they are five and they're in kindergarten, they're supposed to be having this like creative, fun childhood. It's like nope, constraints, constrictions. There's one right answer, there's one right path. We don't have time for your questions. So that part of their brain that is creative and dreams and imagines and thinks of what they want their life to be has really died, and so I love that you are recommending to parents that we start with questions to help like reawaken that in the child. That's huge, yeah, I think about that too.
Speaker 3:We just had a retreat and two of our staff members had their babies with them, and the one Addy's what 13 months, not walking yet, and I just sat there just watching her. She was so curious, right, and she would just get inside my backpack, crawl over to a little baby, hit him on the back, crawl over, lay down a little bit. I was just watching her behaviors and thinking to myself. So many kids, as soon as they hit five, are then forced into the system where that curiosity is no longer celebrated.
Speaker 1:It's actively discouraged.
Speaker 3:And this is not in every single environment, obviously, like we love all teachers we love you know but we do have to look at this and say, okay, there is a problem here, what can we do about it? And then I love that we're starting with the child and starting with their interest and, like Katie said, like reigniting that passion and curiosity that has been there since they were born. And we talk about self-determination theory a lot around here. So you know, what I'm hearing you say as well is you're giving them autonomy. Autonomy which leads to agency competency. If they're interested in something, they're going to be competent and feel like, okay, I can do this, I can achieve this because they're interested in there, they have a passion. And then that relatedness and that connection piece, that what you're talking about is the parent, not just parent involvement or parent engagement, but this parent ownership, and it's like this collaboration piece that I think is so interesting.
Speaker 1:That's right, and let me clarify one piece on this conversation of parent ownership is a tricky language here, and so what I describe is a transition that begins the moment the child is crowning in the birth canal.
Speaker 3:That's when the transition. Thank you for the illustration, matt.
Speaker 1:The imagery here is probably not great, but the point I'm trying to make is, when the child is born, the parent is 100% in control of that child's everything that happens right. And by the time that child is, we'll make a number up 13,. We want that child to absolutely be able to lead and to control their own destinies and their own kind of path. And so, the minute the child's born, the parent's job is to consistently remove control from the parent and give it to the child, and over many years of increasing the level of responsibility and ownership that the child can handle, they will soon start to realize that they can do so much more than any of their peers can believe that they can do, and that transition is a parent's responsibility. And what I've seen, having been in a bunch of educational structures Again, I don't know if I mentioned this, but I've been on 10 educational boards. I ran an education reform nonprofit as well.
Speaker 1:The model of school we have today it never was built to give the child decision making Right. The curriculum is designed without any conversation with the child, usually years in advance and usually in a state house 1,000 miles from the child. That never at any point is the question given to the child. Okay, how would you like to proceed? How would you like to build this learning journey? So what it does is it disempowers the child, and that's why you see so much learning disengagement by kids. They know heck, I don't have any control on this thing. I'm just going to sit back and wait for someone to tell me what to do, and we do not have time for that in a world that's breaking.
Speaker 3:We don't have time for that in a world that's breaking. I just wanted to say that again, and so your work really helps parents to defend their children from hidden threats that are unique to the 24th century, as we've been talking about. So I really want to dive into these threats, and so the first one is the encroachment of tech, especially AI, and I've been reading on your LinkedIn. You've been posting about this a lot and how it's encroaching into the family structure, so I want to read. This is from is it okay to read this post from your LinkedIn about Ursula? Okay, so Ursula from the Little Mermaid took Ariel's tongue. Ai and most tech once your child's heart. That's why it will never say no, it will never say enough, it will never seek counsel from those who love the child most. So the best defense to this is slow. Can we talk about this? And, as you can see, I'm really passionate about this topic too. I could feel it in my body right now.
Speaker 1:If you're not passionate about this, then you have no soul. That's kind of how I would answer that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I have a soul though.
Speaker 1:You have a soul, congratulations. No, but like, let's kind of unpack that. So social media was our first dance, with technology directly given to our kids. How that worked out Huge spikes in mental health disorders, depression, huge spikes in loneliness. These all came as they were. They were beginning before tech, but once tech hit and social media hit, spikes right Depression, suicide, self harm, etc. Like serious stuff. Now we see the second generation of tech going directly to children, and this is AI, and I've been studying this for the better part of the last year and a half.
Speaker 1:And here's what parents don't understand. Social media was trying to get your child's attention. Ai is trying to be intimate with your child. So one was about attention. Ai is really about intimacy and the tech that's coming online now and you all may know some of this will allow a child to interact with a tech, with a computer, with silica, as if they're having a conversation with a human being.
Speaker 1:The danger here is two fold for parents, maybe three fold. The first is parent, what values do you want to transmit to your child? Do you have any sense that there's alignment between your values and the values that child may pick up through AI? If you think there's alignment, then you're horribly mistaken. So that's the first one. The second one is this relational dynamic Like I grew up when my kids were still asking me questions about how the world works right, oftentimes I didn't know, but we would then go and learn about them together and then I could impart my values on the child about what and how we operate as the barn's household, the barn's family and our legacy and why it matters to us that we do certain things, why we serve people, why we offer help to folks that are like.
Speaker 3:These are values that are unique to us, and sure, yeah, to interject really quick on prendocom, you can go on a blog post. We have it all about family values. We even have a free principal to help your family. This is a little plug to define what your values are, because values are so important. No, that's huge. That's really great.
Speaker 1:I'll take a look today. That's huge. So the second one, though, is this question of relationship, where your child may actually look at you and you're seeing that already, the child looking at you earlier and earlier as an old, funny duddie who has nothing to add, nothing to provide me. I can get every answer through AI, in fact. Ai will never tell me no. Ai will always be there for me. Ai will never argue with me. Ai will never, you know, be disappointed with me. Whatever the case may be, these are threats that humanity has never had to deal with before, and parents are walking in blind and trusting that this technology that somehow marks Zuckerberg is, you know, has intentions to help your children. I don't know him personally, but we can just look at the patterns that suggest otherwise.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really interesting. I've never thought of it like that before. I've investigated AI with kids. There's like Conmeagow and lots of other things out there that you can talk to, chat to me, and it's been interesting. Like I think with any advance there's going to be like a huge pro to it and then all of these cons, and I think what you're calling us to is not walking into the cotton's blind, and I think that's so important and learning. I mean you're totally right, like humanity has never faced this before and just like when social media hit, we had no idea like the anxiety, depression, like addiction that was going to happen, the way that it's going to change the developing brain, all sorts of things. So, yeah, I think you're so right to call us out right now.
Speaker 1:AI has wonderful opportunity, right, it is an amazing technology, but it is a dangerous tool, just like a chainsaw or a gun. And so we have to think about operating with that same mindset that we want to be make sure, if our child is going to use that tool, they have the responsibility, the maturity to know how to use it well. That's my point.
Speaker 3:Yes, and when you said the best defense is slow, can you just touch on that real briefly before?
Speaker 1:we get to the second threat. So tech promises speed, it promises connection, it promises entertainment and it delivers on all those things. But what it can never deliver on is true human to human contact and relationship and trust or trust. That's eyeball to eyeball. At least, tech hasn't figured out how to do that quite yet. It may be coming, and so how do you defend against tech that's pushing towards speed, pushing towards entertainment, pushing towards relationship, or at least these loose connections it's to do? I think it's the opposite, which is very traditional kind of relationship building, things like sitting on the couch with your child reading a book.
Speaker 1:Slow, it is a slow process. It is. It is painfully slow at times, but if it's done with regularity, the child and the parent now have a common language that they can share. They have a common experience. The child also is going to begin to build the skills of concentration which AI and tech generally undermine, and so that's an example of like we got to slow the roll on this thing. We got to push back on tech's intrusion into the household and do the things that we used to do 100 years ago cook a meal together, go on a walk together in a park, have extended conversations over coffee. These are the things that make us human. If we forget these things and we will we will lose a battle that we already, I feel we're losing to technology.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's. That's a really important call out there. Thank you so much. So the second threat that you talk about is the antiquated and flexible and increasingly irrelevant system of education. We've touched on this a little bit, but what does that really mean and what do we do about it? How can parents support authentic learning in their kids?
Speaker 1:Yeah. So parents who might be listening again. I talked to so many parents. I'm trying to remember how they may be thinking when they're hearing some of the things that are coming out of my mouth. In fact, I just had a conversation with folks around calculus, calculus.
Speaker 1:Many defend calculus as this essential element of the learning experience. Yet I'm working right now with several adults who don't know the first thing about personal finance. They're sitting ducks when they walk into a bank, when they haven't, forbid, filled out a credit card application, when they go into a car dealership, and every single day of our lives we deal with finances. Every single day we deal with money, numbers, etc. Only a small fraction of us will ever touch calculus again after high school, myself being one of them. So relevance is you're learning stuff that you're going to desperately need, and the things that kids desperately need is not calculus, it's personal finance, it's the ability to communicate verbally, verbally in written form and visually, which, increasingly, as we're moving into this visual world, that's a place where most schools aren't even touching. So these are the kind of disconnects that most parents aren't aware of, and it leads to huge downstream implications and problems for the family. Now, what do we do differently. What is that learning journey is built.
Speaker 1:Again, I can give you a story about it. So many kids I work with who they want to be a professional basketball player. I never argue with them on it, because I know it never works either to argue with them on that. But what I do say is fantastic, now let's get started. So what's the first thing you need to learn if you're going to be a professional basketball player? And they may say free throws, whatever, great.
Speaker 1:How are you going to learn that? What's your plan? Let's put a plan together about how you learn that. How often do you need to study it? How often? So now the child is learning how to develop a plan and a strategy about that plan. High-tech, functioning adults do this all the time. They see what something they want to achieve, they quickly develop a plan, they execute on that plan and then they evaluate it on the back end and go, hmm, that didn't work so well, let me try it again a different way. That is a highly relevant skill that kids almost never learn in education. So these are the kind of disconnects that as parents start to realize, they start to realize they have a choice between the old model and something else, and we can talk about what some of those other things are.
Speaker 3:Choice is huge. My son is playing on a team for the first time ever. He was really resistant to joining a team, but he plays at school every day. He goes to a hybrid school. It's very nontraditional and his teacher kept encouraging him to join a team and I was sitting at probably the first practice.
Speaker 3:I really struggled not to talk to people. I'll even take something and be like okay, you're not going to talk to the other parents, you're going to get this done. So anyways, I started talking to a mom and she's telling me about this awful experience that her son is having. He has an IEP, he has all these learning disabilities and he has bullied terribly. The things that he's been called are just so awful. And I looked at her because she said we're just done Next year, we're just going to homeschool. And I looked at her and I said why are you waiting? And she said I don't know. She's like I didn't know. I had a choice.
Speaker 3:And so I told her about Empyrean scholarship accounts scholarship accounts which are the ESA programs that our states are starting to adopt, and in Arizona we do have an ESA. And I told her I said with his eligibility for autism, do you realize how much funding he can get. I was like, why are you waiting? And so the next practice she had more questions for me than the next practice.
Speaker 3:She's like, oh my gosh, he's so excited we are leaving, we're going to and it's not about like, oh, just leave the school, but looking at his experience that unique individual child who literally has already missed 40 some days this year because of the anxiety and the bullying and the staff not being able to support his needs. So I just feel like this is really important, that this is what you're talking about with that parent ownership, and it's really important for parents to know there is a choice, because a lot of us were in education systems where there were no choices or we didn't realize that there was even worse, which I call it false choice, which is choosing between Raghu and Prego pizza sauce or spaghetti sauce.
Speaker 1:They're the same thing, probably made by the same company. Some kids need something dramatically different. And, by the way, guys, if you were talking to me five, seven years ago, I would have been hostile to the idea of education savings accounts. Again, for those that may not know what this means, it means the money instead of the money going to the institution and then using that money to pay for buildings and staff, et cetera. The money follows the child, so the child and the parent then can make decisions about who they want to educate their child and how and where and when, and that model is transformational in terms of empowering the child and parent, just like you described. I've talked to so many parents who are in the exact same model here in Texas, but they have no real choice. They have to stay in that Prego versus Raghu I can't remember what it's called. It's essentially the same model and they're frustrated and their kids are not thriving at all.
Speaker 2:So what was the impetus for your change? You said you were hostile to this idea, and now you see it differently. Like walk us through that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, it's an evolution. I'm sensitive to parents who are not kind of where I am on this. It took me time and I'm living this all the time. So for me, what happened was I had enough conversations with parents, just like you had Adrian, who said my child is just not doing well, he's getting bullied, he hates going to school, he has anxiety. I mean, this is pretty normal. By the way, he doesn't like the learning. This is a normal occurrence.
Speaker 1:But then when I work with parents about okay, well, let's explore other alternatives, I realized that the alternatives that are out there are all virtually the same. You can roll the dice and maybe you get to another school and maybe that teacher is not overwhelmed and maybe the kids won't bully him, and maybe and maybe and maybe. But nine times out of 10, a year later, the parents calling me again and saying okay, we're in the same situation. Now what? And? And? At a certain point, if they don't have private resources, they're stuck. And for me, most of my work is aimed at families who can't afford to pay. That's why I don't charge anything for my services, because that's the population I'm wanting to serve. But at a certain point I realized that I can't help them unless there are many more options available for them to choose, based on the circumstance of their family and child. That's how I transitioned here.
Speaker 3:Think how this is going to change the trajectory of these children. I think about this child. He loves to learn. He knows every single detail about World War I and World War II. I think I saw that your daughter does civil air patrol. My son does too. I told her about civil air patrol and I said he'll get to fly a plane. He's going to see a UH 60s at what it's called the Black Hawk. My son's going to fly one next week. She's like oh my gosh, this is the type of learning he needs because he loves to learn. But in a traditional setting where he doesn't get to choose his learning, he is just so bored, disengaged. There's really power to putting the reins into our kids' hands, too and allowing them to jump into their interests. The third threat is we talked a little bit about how social media causes loneliness. The third threat is the catastrophic and growing danger of youth loneliness. We talked, too, about this mental health crisis. What do we do as parents and educators?
Speaker 1:Oh my gosh, this is the hardest one, because this is what happens. When everything else doesn't change, you'll get kids that are mentally fragile and increasingly lonely. Again, the vectors for loneliness are incredible, from social media bullying to increasing time in front of a screen and never having face-to-face. The amount of time in school doesn't really facilitate deep connection with people. It's very surface level. There's all sorts of reasons why this doesn't work. The number of kids that are usually in school it means that you don't know anyone deeply. Usually Loneliness is dangerous when a child doesn't feel connected. That's a real risk. How do we fix it? I talked a little bit about the importance of slow. That's one. The second one, though, is again, this is back to this conversation we had about educational savings accounts. What we actually need is we need smaller numbers of kids and families to gather together.
Speaker 1:A quick story my wife. She grew up in a all-black, small Catholic school in a relatively poor part of Houston. But her story about she knew every kid in that school well and they knew her. There was the kid that was a little strange, but he was part of the family because it was small enough where everybody knew each other and the bullying was almost zero. In fact it was zero because everyone was in deep, inconsistent relationship, including the families. That is what's possible when a small group of micro school can gather up Deep, long-term relationships where I know that kid gets anxious about these things. I'm going to be a little careful about going around those things. I know this kid is super excited about World War I. If I read anything about World War I, I'm going to forward it to him and I'm going to have a conversation with him about it. Those are things that happen when people know one another deeply Connection relationship. That is how we insulate a child from loneliness. That's also, frankly, how the best learning happens within a communal environment.
Speaker 2:Absolutely Some thoughts that are coming to my mind right now. Typically what we see in traditional classrooms or large schools is that if you are getting bullied or if you just have a disagreement a little normal as happens in all relationships, a little friend fight there's this opportunity to abandon the relationship because you could just go play. Those kids aren't being nice to you right now. Just go play with other kids. It trains the skill of abandonment instead of repairing a ruptured relationship.
Speaker 2:That is actually a big driver of loneliness, because then you just have to go find a new relationship and then a new relationship and then a new relationship, instead of saying, hey, here's relationships in my life that I'm really committed to and I'm going to develop the skills to maintain and nurture these relationships. Then you take that. When people talk about socialization of traditional school, I'm just like those are not actually transferable skills that I want my kids to take into their adult lives. I want them to understand that when you have a friendship, I'm going to take that seriously and I know how to fix it when it breaks, because it's going to break so wise.
Speaker 1:I have not thought about it in that way before. That is 100% accurate. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 2:My other thought here is that we don't have a suicide problem amongst hungry students. We have a suicide problem amongst lonely students and sometimes it's like oh, you're lonely, get over it. It's like no, no, no, no, no, humans were not meant to be lonely. It is the thing that drives us. It literally drives us to very poor mental health and anxiety and depression, in a way that physical harm or trauma or abuse or starvation does not drive us into these mental spaces like loneliness does Not. Feeling included, feeling belittled, feeling judged, not feeling like you're wanted or accepted, that is truly the most painful thing that a human can go through and it is a huge. Did you see? Just a few months ago there was a Surgeon General's warning around loneliness, the loneliness epidemic.
Speaker 3:This will be the next epidemic. I feel like I've been hearing that for a couple of years now.
Speaker 2:So it is nothing to shake a stick at.
Speaker 1:That's right and to your point, and this is why this is such a great comment. I'm going to really I'm going to probably write about this one. This is good that loneliness epidemic is sourced in a school, where that sort of behavior is okay and, frankly, normal. As we move into adulthood, we're going to have those same dynamics, either with a spouse or with a friend. The race is going to be breaking and with us not having the skills to know how to repair that, we will just separate and we see it in. I see that now in lots of places. So thank you for helping me realize some of the source.
Speaker 2:Yeah, of course. So we're going to wrap up here, but we'd like to give you an opportunity to just leave like one piece of advice to parents who are looking to empower themselves and their students. What would that piece of advice be?
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really hard one. There's so many things I want to tell parents, so what I will do is I will think about the generic parent who, every parent I've met, loves their kids desperately and once. Only the best for their kids. I think the advice I would give them is to thoroughly interrogate the educational experience your child is going through, and I don't mean school experience, I mean educational experience meaning. Are they learning skills of relationship? Are they learning skills of self care? Are they learning skills of adult readiness? And if the answer is no, then, parents, I gotta encourage you to be extraordinarily assertive about this, because the time on this, the danger is real and you don't want to slow walk something that is dangerous for your kids. You love them too much to do that. So that's my poorly worded advice.
Speaker 2:I love it. Rapid fire. Follow up question. What's your prediction for how educational looking 10 years oh?
Speaker 1:there's no doubt in my mind it is going to be a bunch of micro schools, a bunch of independent learning and then some large structural, traditional structure schools as well, but it's going to be ridiculously diverse and every child will be able to find a home that fits.
Speaker 2:I love that. Let's build that future together.
Speaker 3:Okay, so this is a question we ask all of our guests. So who is someone who has kindled your love of learning, curiosity, motivation or your passion?
Speaker 1:That's easy. It's coming from my kids. Having sat next to them as they went on this learning journey, I started to realize, my goodness, what my life could have been like had I had a similar learning journey that was open, that was honoring of the things I was interested in. I could tell you stories about how it was actively dishonored. I began to get inspired by the process of learning because I was watching my kids and watching their lights shine. My light started to shine again at the age of 40-something years old or I guess was 30-something years old and now I am 52 and I am super excited about all the things I'm learning about and wish I could go back in time, but now I just can't do that. So I'm trying to help parents avoid the errors.
Speaker 2:I've made. Yeah, it's never too late. That's awesome, and how can listeners find out more about your work?
Speaker 1:Yeah, again, all the things that I do for families are free. This is part of my own kind of giving back, but the best way to get a hold of me is at Matt C, the letter C, barnes, b-a-r-n-e-s, mattcbarnscom or LinkedIn, and that's Matthew C Barnes. I do a lot of writing and comments on LinkedIn. If you want to understand and kind of track how I'm thinking, that's probably the best place to start. If you want individual help or group help, start at MattCBarnscom.
Speaker 2:I love it Awesome. Well, thank you so much for your time. We've learned so much from you and thanks for coming on the Kindle Podcast.
Speaker 1:It's been great. Thanks so much.
Speaker 3:That's it for today. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Kindle Podcast. If this episode was helpful to you, could you please go and subscribe and like and star and whatever app that you're using, and don't forget to follow us on social at PrendaLearn. If you have a question you'd like us to address, all you need to do is email us at podcast at prendacom. You can also join our Facebook group, the Kindle Collective, and subscribe to our weekly newsletter. This.
Speaker 2:Sunday Spark because it's amazing. All right, so the Kindle Podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda is a company that makes it easy for you to start and run an amazing micro school based on all the ideas and principles that we talk about here on the Kindle Podcast. If you want more information about becoming a Prenda guide, just go to prendacom. Thanks for listening today and remember to keep kindling.
