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
Season 1 Top 10 | #1 Embracing Individuality. A Conversation with Todd Rose.
It's the moment you've been waiting for all summer break... Introducing our #1 Top Season 1 episode:
Embracing Individuality. A Conversation with Todd Rose.
On this episode of The KindlED Podcast, Kaity and Adriane chat with Todd Rose, co-founder and CEO of Populace. They delve into the myth of the "average person" and the power of personalized learning.
This episode also explores:
- the evolution of the "average" concept in education;
- the challenges posed by conventional teaching methods;
- insights into Benjamin Bloom's work on mastery learning and its impact on academic growth;
- strategies for teaching self-determination and the critical role of parents in this process;
- and so much more!
Join us as we envision a future where personalized education leads to optimal outcomes in both health and learning.
ABOUT THE GUEST:
Todd Rose is the Co-Founder and CEO of Populace. Previously, he was a professor at Harvard, where he founded the Laboratory for the Science of Individuality and served as the director of the Mind, Brain, and Education program. Todd is the author of three best-selling books, Collective Illusions, Dark Horse, and The End of Average. He earned his Bachelors from Weber State University and his Masters and Doctorate from Harvard.
RELEVANT LINKS:
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!
Important links:
• Connect with us on social
• Subscribe to The Sunday Spark
• Get our free literacy curriculum
Interested in starting a microschool?
Prenda provides all the tools and support you need to start and run an amazing microschool. Create a free Prenda World account to start designing your future microschool today. More info at ➡️ Prenda.com or if you're ready to get going ➡️ Start My Microschool
Welcome to the Kindle podcast, Adrian. How's it going? How's your summer?
Speaker 2:Well it's, my kids have been in school now for a couple of weeks. Well, my third one. He has a late start this year, so he doesn't start until next week and he's going to a micro school. So he's super excited and but yeah, it's been good just getting back into the swing of things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's so funny. Here in Arizona, where Adrian and I are, school actually starts like the end of July, which seems so crazy, but they kind of do modified year round here because it's so hot or like why don't we take breaks when the weather's nicer? So we have been in school for a little while now, but for most of you all it's still summertime and that's wonderful and beautiful. And this is our very last summer re-release. So in our number one spot, our favorite episode and again, we can't really pick favorites or put them in an actual order, but this episode was so, so great. This is episode 25, Embracing Individuality with Todd Rose. Adrienne, what did you like about this episode?
Speaker 2:rose, adrienne, what did you like about this episode? Every single word that came out of his mouth. I still remember, katie, like when he left, we both were just like we weren't talking and that is abnormal for the two of us. I feel like our mouths were like, oh my gosh, what just happened? That was incredible. Yes, like everyone needs to read all of his books, everyone needs to like listen to this episode to understand that there is no average.
Speaker 1:Yes, totally. I think that this, the concepts that he talks about in the end of average and in this heat I mean he talks about all of his books on this podcast. It's a great overview. But the main like driving factor here is that we have this idea that there is a normal course of development or learning and we have all of the standardized based education like built up around that and from that comes the idea that you can be behind and from that comes the idea that if you're behind, you're less intelligent and then we can label you. You know, all of these negative things kind of stem from that. The idea that if you're behind, you're less intelligent and then we can label you. All of these negative things kind of stem from that.
Speaker 1:And so when you actually understand that humans, he talks about the concept of jaggedness and I think that everyone's strengths and weaknesses and talents and intelligence they're all. It's not a straight line, it's not easy to measure and it's very diverse and jagged. And once you kind of have that idea, you go into looking at a child's strengths and their opportunities for growth in a very different way. That isn't comparing their like I'll say like false or imaginary, like straight line of growth to someone else's line of growth. It's just like you. That really is frankly impossible and I think that this episode and all of Todd Rose's work really kind of like blows the cover off of that whole idea, which, once we don't believe that like a whole, like litany of other things, have to change. So those were kind of my highlights and I can't wait, yeah, and his personal story.
Speaker 2:If you're not familiar with Todd Rose's work, you listen to the episode, but dive deep into his work. His personal story is pretty phenomenal because, yes, he ended up going to Harvard after failing out of high school, but it's not even that, it's just like the little details. And then he was able to take them and I saw so much grit. He just kept pushing forward, even though he was treated in a way that was lesser than because he learns in a different way. So I love that he's taking his personal story and he's making a really big impact in the world.
Speaker 1:Yeah, 100%. All right, this is episode 25, embracing Individuality, with Todd Rose and our very last summer re-release. So we will be back with our first episode of season two next week and we are super, super excited. But enjoy episode 25 this week, can't?
Speaker 2:wait.
Speaker 3:A child's uniqueness is not something to be ignored. It is something to cultivate, because we know over and over again from our research a person's individuality is the greatest source of their fulfillment, but also their highest contribution to society. Highest contribution to society. Imagine your child coming out of an environment prepared, but also confident and happy, and able to contribute to society.
Speaker 1:Hi and welcome to the Kindled 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 2: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 1:Hi and welcome to the Kindle podcast, adrienne. It's good to see you today. How's it going?
Speaker 2:Good, it's so great to see you too. Katie, how are you doing today? Super good. What's going on at your house?
Speaker 2:We have been doing some parent-teacher conferences with my middle schooler and I get to meet with all of his teachers individually. They've done it different ways in the past. It's like you show up and you just kind of get like a little snippets of time. Last year I sat down with all of them at a table and that was really interesting because, you know, my student isn't the most model student as far as behavior goes, but with some teachers he is and some teachers he's not, and it's all about relationship, which really with any child right. And so I went in this time we actually got 20 minutes with each teacher and I sat down brand new teacher. She actually hasn't even finished her degree yet.
Speaker 2:In Arizona you can teach without an education degree, but she is getting it and she will complete it at the end of this year. So anyway, she's like you know, I'm a new teacher and she's older, she has children. And she said you know, I'm completing my degree this year. And the school kept telling me master base, like we're doing master base. However, they're doing it in the system. It is a charter school, there are certain things that they have to follow, and it's a hybrid school. Do you know what a hybrid school is? Tell me. It is basically part-time in-person instruction and part-time virtual learning.
Speaker 2:And so, brand new teacher, I mean, she's going to school right now and it's interesting, she's going to school and has never heard the concept of mastery-based learning, which is, she thought, was kind of funny too. And so she told me, because she sat down and just was showing us all these very, very creative ways, that she is making it mastery based within this system. That is not meant, you know, to be individualized for the student. And so I asked her I was like, so how did you like come up with this? And she looks at me and said TikTok, she's in school, katie, she's in school to become a teacher and she's learning how to individualize learning on TikTok, which I thought was pretty awesome.
Speaker 1:That actually doesn't make me mad, because we're on TikTok and if someone that was in teaching school found our content and figured out how they could empower kids with mastery-based learning and inquiry-based learning, more power to them, right, it'll keep them on in teachers' colleges, it'll get there.
Speaker 2:It's pretty amazing, though, because they she basically like has them take this quick quiz just to see where they are like without any, they have no idea what they're going to be learning like a new topic and just to see what they already know so that they can have a measure. As soon as we sat down, she asked him. She said what do you think you got in the pre-test? And he's like oh, like a 60%. And she said okay, what do you think you got after we learned the content? And he was like oh, probably like an 80%. And she wrote it down on a sticky and she slid it across the table.
Speaker 2:His face was amazing, because he started at 38% and he ended up after he learned it and they were collaborating and doing projects and things like this based around the topic. He had a 90 percent and his face was like whoa, look how much. So, even just seeing his confidence of look how much I learn, versus if he would just take that test and fail it, oh, I'm stupid, let's just move on, you know, because that's kind of how it was when he was in just a traditional learning environment. So it's really I'm just amazed at these teachers and educators that are finding ways to truly personalize learning, which leads us to who we're kind of talking to today. He's done a lot of research, on average, and what that means. So, katie, can you tell us who we're talking to today?
Speaker 1:Yes, I definitely can. Todd Rose is the co-founder and CEO of Populous, a think tank committed to a positive, some world where all people have the opportunity to live fulfilling lives in a thriving society. Prior to Populous, dr Rose was a professor at Harvard University, where he served as the faculty director at the Mind, brain and Education program, as well as led the laboratory for the Science of Individuality. Todd is the author of three bestselling books the End of Average, dark Horse and Collective Illusions. He lives in Burlington, massachusetts. We're so excited to talk to Dr Todd Rose today. Todd Rose, welcome to the Kindle podcast. We're so excited to have you today.
Speaker 3:Excited to be here.
Speaker 1:So tell us a little bit about you and your background and how you came to do the work that you're doing today, and kind of give us a little insight into how that might relate to education.
Speaker 3:Sure, okay. So I would first ask like how far back you want me to go. But I'll give you the professional stuff and then we can see how far you want to go. But my original work research has been in. I was a professor for over a decade. I led the MindBrain education program at Harvard.
Speaker 3:My obsession has been around this idea of the science of individuality, which is related to education, as we'll see, but not specific to it, which is for most of our history, especially the last 100, 200 years, we've basically just studied groups and averages, and so my work has been part of the new field that gets away from that and studies individuals on their own terms and same methodologies leading to, like personalized medicine, nutrition, education. So I'm obsessed about that, and I'm particularly obsessed about the way we structure learning environments, because I feel like this is the place where either we amplify individuality and potential or we absolutely just squash it. And I think you know it's not just about batch processing kids to prepare them for pre-existing jobs. It's quite literally the cultivation of an entire generation of potential and fulfillment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I love that framing. Take us a little further back to some of your own personal history and relationships with growing up and being labeled Sure sure I have a mixed track record in education.
Speaker 3:I guess that'd be fair. So I like to lead with you. Know, at some point I was reasonably smart. I grew up, though, like school did not work. I grew up in rural America. In the place I was at, everything was about conformity and that was just not going to work for me. But I also am just like a curious person and my personality did not fit very well with this sit down, shut up, like you're going to learn what we tell you when we tell you. And. And it culminated where I like to say I dropped out of high school, but really they just kicked me out. It just feels better Like I had some control.
Speaker 3:We mutually agreed that I would leave with a 0.9 GPA. I say that because I actually think you have to work really hard to do that poorly. Like I didn't even get socially promoted, right, um so, and it was an interesting sort of rock bottom because shortly thereafter my girlfriend at the time found out she was pregnant. Uh, we ended up having two kids by the time we were 21. Like, I had had like a string of minimum wage jobs. It was bad, we were on welfare, and that was sort of the time when I realized education was going to play a much more positive role in my life. I was really fortunate. My dad was the first high school graduate in our family and decided he was a mechanic, decided when I was in middle school to go to college at night and he became a mechanical engineer and he just retired. He's. He's one of the highest achieving. He designed airbags and he's invented so many things that have saved so many people's lives. And so I watched education change our lives and life circumstances and realized, okay, well, I mean maybe that right, which was funny given my past record. So I took the GED, I enrolled at Weber State University open enrollment school in Ogden, utah, and we had just enough money that my family had cobbled together that I could get through one year and if I couldn't do well enough to get some kind of scholarship, that was going to be it.
Speaker 3:And I have to say, just for context, this is no kidding. I mean the last job I had before I did that, it was just almost out of desperation. My job was I was a home health care aide who traveled around and gave people enemas. That was my job. So I knew what I didn't want and I knew that I had to do right by my kids and you know. But I didn't know where I was going. I just knew I something had to change.
Speaker 3:And I got to Weber State and, again out of desperation, I knew that if I did the same things I'd done, tried learning the same way that I'd tried before, it wasn't going to work. That was my first encounter with well, maybe I need to know more about myself and make choices there. I actually thought it was because something was wrong with me and I just had to get workarounds. Do you know what I mean? Like everybody else could succeed the standardized way. For sort of dumb people like me, we got to do extra stuff. This is the thing that makes me so angry about education. So a kid goes into a standardized experience that has no respect for their individuality and if they got through it, we call that success. Right Like it's. It's amplifying nobody, but they got through it. So I keep failing, failing, failing. Why wouldn't I assume that it's me Like what? What kid's going to be like? The system is structured wrong. Right Like, so you internalize a view of yourself that will-.
Speaker 2:I'm bad, I'm not good. Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and it's like you're just not worthy, you're not smart, and then that's going to affect the choices you make the rest of your life. You are going to rule out opportunities because you don't believe you are capable. It makes me, when we talk about things like personalized learning and these new models of education, we can sometimes get caught up in the mechanics of it, as if that's a no. This is about like what we owe our children, like these institutions have the ability to uplift or just crush, and so it's more at stake than just whether we get higher test scores. So back for me. I'm making my way through it.
Speaker 3:I had some good experiences. I'm learning that like context really matters. I kind of knew the classes that were working for me. I was doing the best I could, and I'll tell you there's one defining moment that completely changes my life, and it was. I was sitting in a history class in a big auditorium. I couldn't get out of it. That's not a good environment for me to learn, but I couldn't get out of it. It was just it. And I'm sitting next to my buddy, steve, and the class ends and I'm like this is so boring, like I, this is so bad. And he says, oh, this is nothing compared to what he got himself into in honors program. And I was like I don't, I don't know what honors is Like, I thought it was just more work or whatever. And he's like no, no, no, no, no, no, you got it wrong. It's so much worse than that. He said there aren't lectures, there's just like these small groups of no more than 12 students, so you can't skip because everybody knows your name. Okay, he's like we don't take tests, we just write essays and come up with ideas. And he goes I don't even think there are right answers, we just debate all the time. And I'm like Whoa that's, I'd never heard of anything like that. Right, I literally took my bags, skip.
Speaker 3:My next class, went right to the honors program, went in and and the secretary, a woman named Marilyn Diamond, who who's one most important people ever to me I said I want to be in the honors program and she says, okay, okay, like, let's see if I can get you in. Talk to the director. So they just let me in. They're excited because it's an open enrollment school. They're trying to beef up this special program they've got. So the director's really excited. Come sit in front of me, I sit down in front of his desk and he's like okay, I'm excited, you want to be in the honors program.
Speaker 3:Just a few questions what's your high school GPA? And I said 0.9. And this is no kidding. He actually said what 0.9? Like I left off kind of the most important piece. And then I am just like mortified where I'm like 0.9. And he's like like he was really nice about it. He wasn't mean, he just was like. And he's like like he was really nice about it. He wasn't mean, he just was like you can't be in the honors program, like, and I just I'd been. Just I just rushed there because it sounded amazing.
Speaker 3:And now I'm sitting there just like wishing I could crawl under a rock right Like this is just the worst. So I'm just grabbing my stuff, I apologize, I shake his hand Sorry for wasting your time and I just want to get out. And as I'm leaving the office, marilyn Diamond's desk is just right outside the door. And as I'm walking out, she reached out and grabbed my arm and she said listen, I overheard the conversation. If you want this, don't take no for an answer. And I was like I didn't know you could right. So in my mind the authority was the authority, like there was no wiggle room, and I was like I didn't know you could, right. So in my mind the authority was the authority, like there was no wiggle room. And I'm like what do you mean? And she's just sit here on the couch and don't leave until he lets you in.
Speaker 3:So I sat there for at least three hours as he came in and out, he went and taught a class, came back and he kept saying what are you doing? You know like I'm like I want to be on the honors program and he's like you can't. So finally, what felt like the entire day, but it was just a few hours, he pokes his head out and he says come in. And he sat me and he said look, why do you want to be in the honors program? Because on paper it makes no sense. It makes no sense. And so I explained to him like yeah, despite failing algebra three times in high school and not doing very well, like I know, it looks like it should be this linear thing, but I know enough about myself now, about the environments where I think I do well and where I don't, and this seems like perfect. And he said okay, I can't let you in permanently, but I'll let you in provisionally, pick a class and if you do well, I'll let you pick another class and we'll go from there. So I, I, I.
Speaker 3:This was, like I thought, the most important decision of my life. I went through Cal. I looked at every class they offered and I picked plagues of the modern era because I was like, well, that scares the heck out of me, like this should keep my attention. And it was everything I ever imagined and I just thrived and flash forward. I graduated with a 397 GPA in psychology, pre-med on my way to Harvard for my doctorate, but also as the honor student of the year for my doctorate, but also as the honor student of the year.
Speaker 3:And I say that for two reasons. One is it absolutely taught me the importance of individuality and good fit. It is about fit between the individual and their learning environment and there's just no two ways about that. How can the same kid fail remedial math and succeed in honors right, if not, for it's contextualized, it's about fit. But second and I never want to lose sight of this is this is like the story of my life, like I've worked really hard to get where I am and I'm proud of that effort I put in. None of it would have mattered without Marilyn Diamond. None of it.
Speaker 3:And here's what's funny about Marilyn Diamond I was just back at Weber State a few years ago to get an award for alum of the year kind of thing, and she was retiring that same time. I thought what a great opportunity to tell some version of this story while she's in the audience. So I tell it more or less like I told you. The dean gets excited. He's like Marilyn, why don't you come up? They all applaud for her.
Speaker 3:She gets to the microphone. She gives me a hug and she gets to the microphone. She says well, look, I'm kind of embarrassed. She said, todd, I don't remember this and I thought she was saying I was lying right and I'm like no, it happened. She's like no, I know, I just don't remember it. And for me, I remember it as this most important event of my life up to that time. And what turns out is everyone had a Marilyn story. This was how she was and I never forgot this because it was so life-changing for me. But it was minimal effort for her from her own mission and I think this is how it works, right, like, really getting the most out of our potential is not a solo exercise, and sometimes we think that it requires massive amounts of our potential is not a solo exercise, and sometimes we think that it requires massive amounts of our investment in other people to truly help them, when it's not really true. Right, showing up in these small moments can make all the difference in the world.
Speaker 2:Wow, so much to unpack there. As you're talking, my brain was going in all many different directions. I was thinking, though, about like the motivation for it to even matter to you is like once there was skin in the game and you were like I don't want to keep giving NMS and, and I have a family and so there's accountability there too. It's like, okay, I have skin in the game, but you still were like this isn't working for me. How can I get it to work for me? I am just I mean, that's incredible that she was there and gate and that's I can't believe like she can't even remember that and she just was probably just doing her thing Like you go and you know and probably communicates that with a lot of people. But then a few things that you said that I found that really resonated with me. So conformity totally worked for me. I loved the school system. It was a reprieve from not the best what was happening at home, and I performed really well. However, even instead of thinking I was a bad kid or something was wrong with me, I was obsessed with the grades and obsessed with performing well. So it was kind of the opposite. But then I had a child who conformity does not work for him at all. And every time I got a call from that school in kindergarten I remember feeling like I was the one getting in trouble and then he would come home and I remember these conversations I was having with him you have to do better, you have to care. And because it was about me in that moment, it wasn't even about him. And then, year after year, so we ended up finding Prenda when he was middle of fourth grade. So we went five and a half years before we finally left that system and I got calls constantly and I mean I do have to say he had quite a few teachers that were really good and could see like there was something more in him. And but that fourth grade year I remember sitting in the principal's office, going over his 504 plan, sitting with an OT and with the teacher and this is the principal and the occupational therapist was like look at the way his brain works. This is incredible. He's able to do these things I've never seen a child be able to do in the 20 years I've been doing this work. And the teacher's like he's disruptive, he's not, you know, like just was focusing so much on the behavior Like I don't care about what his brain can do he but I get it. I can give her a little bit of grace because she had 36 students and he equates about 20 himself. His behaviors were very big but what's incredible is he did Prenda for a little while and then he wanted more friends and more of a regular environment. But the traditional system just does not work for him.
Speaker 2:We found this school and it's a hybrid. I talked about this in our intro and even though they're in the system and they're in a charter, they are so creative and innovative in how they can do mastery-based learning. And when he gets in trouble he comes home. He's like mom. He's like I got.
Speaker 2:You know I was behaving not in the greatest way Like he just gets really big and lots of you know behaviors. He's like the principal walks around the campus with me. We went and pulled weeds together and he was like asking me how I felt. He's like in my other school, you know, like I had to go and stand against the wall and be shamed pretty much for having to move my body. So so much of your story really resonates with me. There's so many kids out there that do start to develop this very limiting belief system at such a young age. These five and six-year-olds already thinking they're a bad kid because they can't sit still or because they can't. I mean, they're doing timed math tests. You know kindergarten and first grade, and these kids can't keep up. I mean they're just learning how to write their numbers. So so much of what you say I think is so important that we look at what we're doing in the system, right.
Speaker 3:Well, that's the thing, and we can talk more about some of my work in the science, because it'll be relevant, but just we can have respect for public education, and our ability to commit to educating the masses is one of the greatest accomplishments, probably in human history, right Off of the high school movement, where it really peaks.
Speaker 3:I mean, no one had ever done that, and back then, with our technologies and our resources, you chose between giving a standardized experience to everyone or a bespoke experience to a privileged few, and so if we were having this conversation back then, I would have been the biggest advocate for standardized education, because I want everyone to get something, rather than a few to get everything. What we have to recognize, though and it's of its parents and, as teachers, and just the general public is that we tend to think, because we went through something, it must be the way it should be done and that it's the right way, when, in reality, our technologies, our understanding of how learning happens, our appreciation for human uniqueness and even our economy and what it needs and values has so fundamentally changed that we don't have to live with the constraints of the past like and and and.
Speaker 1:It won't be good enough to say we're abandoning that system wholesale for another one-size-fits-all model right the pluralism, the ability to are, and the slower you go. That's lack of intelligence. Where did that idea come from? Give us the history of. Where did this idea that there is an average, a perfect, a thing that we should all be attaining to? How did that happen to society?
Speaker 3:Yeah Well, that's what's funny is like in the book the End of Average. That's why I was like people don't realize that we're living in a society that believes there's such a thing as an average person and in fact most people hear that go right, there has to be obviously right. And you almost imagine a bell curve and there's like something in the middle and first of all it turns out that's not true and we can get to that. But I thought, before we show that scientifically, I thought we should probably explain how did we get here? How did we ever think that this would be true? And it turns out it's just this arc of you know 1835, this Belgian astronomer, adolf Ketelet. Like, seriously in astronomy, when your biggest problem is that, let's say, we're all trying to measure the same thing and we're in different locations, well, look, you're going to measure it slightly different than I am. The instrument could be different, just human error. And the biggest problem they had in astronomy was which of these measurements is true. And it turns out as long as they're just sort of random errors. If you just average all of the measurements, the average is way closer to the truth and that is true. Okay, so Ketelay, he's running this observatory in Belgium and he knows how to do that.
Speaker 3:The rise of the first big data, where we started doing demographic surveys because it was also like revolution and we're getting rid of Kings and we got okay. Well, how does someone govern? So he's getting a lot of big data for the first time and every time he plots it he sees this bell curve and he's like huh, well, wait a minute. If the average in astronomy is what's true, what if there's this? What if, like the average of the human being stuff, what if that's actually what God meant? That's his view. What if it's like actually the truth and the rest of it's just kind of error, right? So he coins the term the average person and people were like this is so dumb. At first, like really, really mocked him. But it took off because of insurance. So it turns out I don't need for insurance, I'm just amortizing risk across everybody. So knowing averages was really helpful. And now as a person whether it's life insurance or I want to insure a shipment as an entrepreneur or I want to ensure a shipment as an entrepreneur this was valuable to me and so it starts to just seep into society. And that's the first one, now.
Speaker 3:Ketelay thought averages were perfection. He loved them. He thought the whole goal of society was to shave off the edges, get everyone to the average. He didn't think being above average was better. He called them, both sides of the curve, monstrosities. So, yeah, he wanted everyone to be average.
Speaker 3:The second guy you got to know about, though, and Ketelay was a decent guy. He just was genuinely trying to improve society. But then this guy, who was a guy named Francis Galton he was truly a bad guy. So he's in England and he reads Ketelay and he's like this is this is amazing. Just one problem Averages aren't good. It's above average that you want to be.
Speaker 3:Because he was an aristocrat and he was watching it. His in his time, in like the 1860s and stuff. A lot of working class people wanting to be able to vote wanted to participate, and he was like this is bad, and his cousin was Charles Darwin. And so you get evolution comes on the scene. He's like well, but what about this? So he's trying to find ways to start selecting the best from the rest. He actually is the father of eugenics. That would be about that, but he needs a tool. How do I know who's best? And he knew it was people like him.
Speaker 3:So what's really funny is he invents a bunch of mathematics off of Ketelay stuff that we still use today. So he invented the idea of percentiles, because if the curve isn't just error, I've got to be able to measure how far away from the curve. So basically, he invented, he contributed to correlation, regression, all these things we use, all in the name of like how do we find the smartest people and then, like you know, get the dumb people to not breathe really. So these ideas of average and rank is the way he thought about it get pulled into America in this age of standardization that most people don't know about. This is the last person I'll tell you. This is getting.
Speaker 3:This is probably too wonky, but there's an approach called the efficiency movement that started by Frederick Taylor. This guy decides wait a minute, yeah, there's. If we standardized everything, we could be more efficient, which is true you can. He was obsessed with the ideas, puts them into practice, but he puts them into practice at work. So he he completely changes how businesses are run. He invents the term manager, like he says why are employees having a say in what they do? This doesn't make any sense. So anyway. Basically, the drudgery of work that most people experience is directly thanks to this guy, right, frederick Taylor. And then it just seeps. So the last step of this and how we got to where we are today it seeps into education. Not surprisingly, right. If work is standardized and factorized, then how do you prepare people for that standardized environment?
Speaker 3:So we deploy the same ideas of standardization and rank and selection, and the guy that does the most for that is Edward Thorndike, the father of educational psychology. Ironically, this is a guy who's a eugenicist as well, who didn't believe everyone should go to school. They weren't smart enough. So he's the one that comes up with. He realizes that what it meant to be smart. This is the longest answer to your question ever, probably, but your question of how did we get to this idea of like fast equals smart and slow equals dumb? So Thorndike believed that your brain had a speed to it and smart was just how fast you could form memories. And so he was like well, obviously fast is smart and slow is dumb.
Speaker 3:So we actually still follow this in a standardized education system when we come up with, for example, how long we should give you to take a standardized test, things like the SAT. This is how long it takes the average person to finish, under the assumption that if you're slower than that, you're too stupid, have a disability to get it, and so we locked that in. And now we now have so much research that shows it was complete garbage. Like, actually, speed and ability have nothing in common nothing. And once you realize that, then you realize fixed time learning may be the greatest destroyer of talent and potential that you could have ever devised. My good friend, sal Khan, right, he sees this in spades in the self-paced learning environments he has where it's like someone will look like they don't understand it, and then just pop right and you're like, wow, if we would have stopped their learning, you know, two days earlier, they would look like the worst performing kid in the class.
Speaker 1:Or if we interject right there and shame them or make them feel like they're not winning. We don't have to do anything, because they'll quit on their own.
Speaker 3:That's right. And one of my intellectual idols would be Benjamin Bloom. You know who's the father of mastery, learning and what he does and just proves I still think it's the most underappreciated educational research out there. So he basically says, well, if we just stop for a second and think, what would be like literally the best education you could have? And he's like, wouldn't it be like a one-to-one tutor that knew you really well? And like, knew the material and could respond? And he's like you know, I mean, look, alexander the Great had you know, he had Aristotle right. Like this is, you know, not a bad tutor, right. And so he says, well, let's just see, right, like, because he was pushing back against this standardized model. That said, there's a bell curve of talent and some kids are just innately smart and some kids aren't.
Speaker 3:So he does this random assignment, uh like, not with just like everyday kids, and puts one group in this same material in, uh, the normal classroom fixed time right, one to many and other kids in self-paced same total amount of time, by the way, just self-paced in this one and with tutor. And what he finds is it becomes what's called the two sigma challenge, which is the it was so overwhelmingly better in the tutoring condition that the typical kid was performing in the 98th percentile of this standardized group. Like, it is just like, and what he takes away from it is what one kid can do academically most any kid could do under highly favorable conditions. And so he gets excited. But then he's like well, wait a minute, what would it mean to give everybody that kind of personalized learning? He gets his economist friends at the University of Chicago to run the numbers and it's something like 40 times whatever any country's ever spent on education at the time. So he's like well, that's just not possible. So he instead invents mastery learning, which is how could we get most of this effect in a classroom environment? Right, and it is most of the time in science, ideas die because they get falsified, because you just, you know, they just don't work right.
Speaker 3:This might be the only example that I know of where it went away, not because it was not true, but because the government became disinterested in it. It was that nation at risk, it was all these things where we're like oh, the Russians are getting ahead of us, we just got to get more engineers and more, and they just stopped caring about the cultivation of kids. And then we went obsessive on these high stakes tests and all these things, and in part because we still didn't really have the technology to do that in a, in a, in a very like cost-effective way. But we do now. And there may be the least controversial statement I'll probably say all day today is that mastery-based learning is so ridiculously superior to anything else that it's almost immoral that we don't provide that for every single kid in this country, especially when we can do it at not, it doesn't cost more than what we're spending right now.
Speaker 3:And so I feel, like you know, in my work on the science of individuality, the places that made the change fastest, when they realized there's no such thing as an average person, were in medicine, where there's a moral imperative right. But how is the cultivation of a child's personality and potential any less moral? As an imperative, we compel parents to send their kids to school. And you know what? John Dewey, who no one would think is center right he was the most progressive educational philosopher at the time wrote a book I probably will butcher the name. I think it was Individuality in Education. But he said the only justification for compulsory education in a democracy is the full development of a child's individuality, anything else. How do you justify having the government force parents to drop kids off at this school, like in Israel, unless you are committed to the development of their individuality?
Speaker 2:Wow, that's really powerful, Very powerful Again. My brain's going in all the different directions. So much of what you say resonate because my second child is getting a one-to-one education thanks to we have ESA here in Arizona, and so he has a private tutor and it's incredible the education, just how rich the education he's getting. He doesn't do worksheets, they just read this really incredible like literature, and he loves diving into history I think he does like four or five different histories and sciences, and you know but he has this one-to-one education. My mind goes, though, that's not available to every kid. So what you're saying is then okay, we have mastery base, let's do this so that we can provide that to more kids. So if average does not exist, then how do we move forward, like what's next for humanity? And I guess another question I have is like why do we keep doing things the way we're doing if the research is so sticking clear?
Speaker 3:That one's easy, right. Like our brains care about stability and predictability, not flourishing. The good news is is that, with respect to education, the pandemic took away status quo, and this is why we'll talk about later the private opinion, research we have on where Americans really are, and parents. It's pretty shocking, so we need to talk about that. But let me tell you, when I say so, what do you do and say there's no average? Let me give you an example, because sometimes when people hear it, you're like, come on, like there has to be an average, maybe exaggerating. Let me give you an example outside of education and show you why it matters and what we do instead.
Speaker 3:So my colleagues in Israel applied the same science of individuality to the study of nutrition and particularly the metabolic problems, right? So metabolic disorders is like it's basically the biggest burden on our healthcare system diabetes, prediabetes, these kinds of things. So the way you normally deal with this is you use the glycemic index, right? Which is supposed to tell you right, this food elevates your blood sugar this much. Okay, glycemic index is about averages. This is what happens on average. Well, they're assuming then it must work for most people. So they asked a simple question how many people? They studied hundreds of thousands of individuals. How many people actually respond the way the glycemic index says they should? So far, zero, not a single person zero I really because, like, like and I can.
Speaker 3:That's one example. I can give you so many. It's it's comical, but here's the good news. Okay, you're like well, wait a minute, wait a minute if. If nobody responds that way, well, first of all, it seems like a really stupid thing to force people to do. But here's's what's cool, and this is what's possible once we get our head out of the age of standardization, out of this idea that the only way to scale is by creating one size fits all. Right. Our technologies make that an irrelevant thing now. So here's what they did. They were able to use technology, a basic app. They are able to create, with machine learning and some AI, individual level predictions of how I will respond, based on blood work, gut biome, all this stuff.
Speaker 3:So I did it right, because in my family, by the way, I was always worried about diabetes because it just runs in my family, and I went to a nutritionist early in my adult life and they told me oh, you need to eat grapefruit because actually, on average, grapefruit is pretty remarkable as a stabilizer for blood sugar on average. So I had been eating half a grapefruit for breakfast every morning for most of my adult life. So I do this. I'm just intrigued by, by the science. Get my results back and for me, grapefruit is the single worst food I can possibly eat. It actually spikes my blood sugar more than chocolate cake.
Speaker 2:Wow. So does that mean, that you should then replace your everyday meal with chocolate cake?
Speaker 3:With chocolate cake, right, I like that, I like how you think my friend that did it. Completely opposite, right. But what was amazing is it looks like chaos. If the average doesn't work, what are we indexing against? Well, we don't have to. So with our technologies, we were able to meet you exactly where you are and give you real-time recommendations about how this food will affect you, even if it affects nobody else the same way, and in that way we can actually get population-level optimal health, one person at a time, whereas if you rely on average, you are guaranteeing diabetes, guaranteeing it to people. Meanwhile they're doing it because their insurance company says you have to. You know you're doing all this stuff. This is what I mean when not only is there no average, but the opposite of that is not chaos, it is.
Speaker 3:We can actually scale population level solutions this way, and that's the science that I've been a part of, that's in nutrition, that's in nutrition, that's in medicine and, by the way, everybody that's listening to this, you know you're already past averages, because if I told you, god forbid, you got cancer and I said you could choose between gold standard, average based treatment, or you can have personalized treatment, molecular fingerprinting, customized response to you, which one are you choosing? And you can have personalized treatment, molecular fingerprinting, customized response to you. Which one are you choosing? And you know the answer. You know it because there's something inside of you that appreciates that your distinctiveness actually matters. It's not error, right? It's not something to ignore. It is valuable. So that's true in nutrition, that's true in medicine, it is absolutely true in education.
Speaker 3:A child's uniqueness is not something to be ignored, it's not something to put on a bell curve and call it error or select off of it. It is something to cultivate, because we know over and over again from our research, a person's individuality is the greatest source of their fulfillment, but also their highest contribution to society. And so when I think about individualized, personalized kinds of learning environments yes, they consistently do better academically, but I don't actually care we're missing the point I'm talking about. Imagine your child coming out of an environment prepared, but also confident and happy, and able to contribute to society. I mean, that's what we're talking about, right? And what frustrates me, when we talk about the distinction between these kinds of models, is we often revert to allowing us to be judged by the incumbent system's metrics, which, if you think about it, are actually bell curve tests most of the time. Like don't do it, like those are garbage assessments, like you know what I mean. Like don't let the fight be had at that level.
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of parents feel like there's a trade-off between strong academics and like mental wellbeing and happiness. And when they look at the average and what they believe to be the only path forward to success for their child, they think I have to choose this average path, even if it's mediocre, it's safer, Right. And what they don't realize is that we've got the psychology of this all switched up. In traditional schools In Prendo we follow something called self-determination theory.
Speaker 3:Autonomy, connectedness, competency these basic psychological needs that everybody has, and we often think that these things are somehow at odds. They're not. They're not. You can build deeply autonomy-promoting environments that are even more connected and that allow kids to consistently master things and grow and improve.
Speaker 1:Yes, and we see that in our data. We're talking about scaling these ideas. We've helped over a thousand people start these really small schools and we watch all of the data and we care deeply about. We call it the child's empowerment score, where it's like the kid is telling us are you feeling in control? Do you feel like the pacing is right for you? Do you feel like you have a purpose in learning? We're tracking their internal locus of control and things like this and caring more about that than their math score. When you care about that, the math score goes up.
Speaker 3:Let's punch down on this for just a second. And I well actually I want to put this into bigger context and why this is so important. Okay, so at Populous, my think tank, we have we do what's called private opinion research. So, and no one's telling the truth about their views right now. It's just like ridiculous. And so we can get around all those distorting effects.
Speaker 3:And we've been studying a lot of things. We study what you want for the country, what do you want out of life? What do you want out of life? What do you want out of education? What do you want in criminal justice? You know these kinds of things to try to understand what do people want, because that's what the institution should do, not the other way around. You are not a cog in the institution. In democracies, institutions should serve people and so, but you got to know what they want.
Speaker 3:Well, here's the overarching theme in America today is it is the end of compliance culture, this idea of paternalism that came from Frederick Taylor and the scientific management which is there's a few smart people who get to make the decisions for everybody else. That is so fundamentally un-American at its core. That is literally a country born out of self-determination and the commitment to individuals being able to live the lives they want to live. We took a left turn in Albuquerque there, like we went the wrong way down this path where we were promised. We were promised more material goods through efficiency if we gave up any hope of self-determination. Now they gave it. That we did, we got it and now we're sick of it. And so the thing is is, if you see this over and over again, people want control of their lives back. They want it back, and you're seeing that in education. When man I remember in Virginia when Terry McAuliffe put the teachers union head on stage at the very end and said parents shouldn't have more of a say. This is I'm like we have a lot of private opinion data that says even like even left leaning parents aren't saying it out loud right now, but privately they absolutely want more of a say. And so it's like this shift, this end of compliance culture.
Speaker 3:We're also seeing people are deeply resentful of it. They hate that people are controlling them. The reason I say that is that resentment around being controlled can go one of two ways. You're seeing it manifest in some terribly destructive ways right now where you get so mad, just burn it down, that kind of thing right, and that's what will happen if we don't make this more constructive.
Speaker 3:So when people listening right now think about something like a scientific theory of human flourishing, like self-determination theory, and realizing it's more than this academic concept. It is literally the gift to your child of the thing that was robbed from you. Imagine a child developing with that innate sense that they are in charge of their lives and that their effects matter in the world. There is no greater gift that you could give a kid and I would trade every academic metric there is for a kid that actually has this because you can learn anything now. You can do anything. So realize what's really at stake there and don't just default to the way it's been done, because this is our way out. This is how you make the end of compliance culture constructive is that it's channeled into self-determination.
Speaker 1:I love that we touched on this, but I want to dig into it a little bit more. The concept of jaggedness, and can you just kind of round that We've touched on it but just like define it for?
Speaker 3:us. You might ask so why is no one average? And I'll give you a quick story, and I did it in end of average, but I think it's worth repeating the first time we ever figured out there's no such thing as an average person. It was actually the United States Air Force, weirdly right. So the way you design a cockpit for a fighter jet, how do I create one cockpit that fits as many pilots as possible? So someone had thought well, you know what you do is you take the average of body dimensions like height, weight, chest circumference, and they just build a cockpit for that. And they thought, well, it won't fit everyone, but it'll fit most people. And when we went to jet powered aviation, they knew there was a problem. Someone thought, well, maybe we've gotten bigger, so we need a better average. So they sent this guy, gilbert Daniels, who I got to know he just passed away, but he was just out of college. His job was literally to go around to thousands and thousands of pilots and measure them on a bunch of dimensions of size, because he's the only guy doing it. He's starting to see this thing where he's like man, people are pretty variable and so he's like I wonder how many people are actually average, like this says so he's like, are actually average, like this says so he's like let's just take the five dimensions of size, the top five height, weight. How many people are average of these pilots who are picked because they can fit in the cockpit? Mind you, he tallies the numbers and, just like our nutrition friends, figures out zero. None of these white male pilots who are picked because they fit in the cockpit were actually average on any of these dimensions of size. So he's like wait, I think we have. I think we got the problem wrong. And so off of that research comes the field of ergonomics and human factors, where it's like maybe it's about designing flexibility to fit right. Right Turns out the fighter jet didn't have adjustable seats at all, didn't have any movement at all, and they implement very simple solutions. The military actually banned the use of averages in design. You cannot design on average in the military, even though in education we literally incentivize designing on average right now, and so so why they weren't?
Speaker 3:What he did is he plotted it. It's really cool. It was declassified research right before I wrote my book, so I was able to show it in there. He plots it and he shows.
Speaker 3:If you just take 10 dimensions of size, in our minds we kind of think of sizes like big, medium, small, as if it's just miniaturized versions of the same thing. But he's like, if you think about it it's not really true, like the tallest person you know isn't necessarily the heaviest person, you know right. And so what he found was that that, basically, if you said height, that's one dimension and there would be an average and that average would be meaningful. But size is multiple dimensions and it turns out those dimensions don't correlate with each other like you think they do. So every single person is on the high end on some dimensions, in the middle on others and on the low on others, everybody. So when you plot it and design it, it creates this sort of jagged profile like everybody has that.
Speaker 3:And that turns out to be true not just in body size. It's true of IQ, which I don't really believe in. But whatever you know, iq scores character, like you name it. Human beings have multiple dimensions and those dimensions don't correlate like you think. So if you start with that, you realize, well then the average could never represent anybody. It's flawed from the beginning and so that's the core of that and it's like every student does. I guarantee you, when you look at this on any kind of performance, this is what you're always going to see. So when we collapse performance into a single score, you erase all the information. That's truly valuable.
Speaker 2:Then, what do you think about the phrase developmentally appropriate?
Speaker 3:I think it is code, for this is a really bad idea and because think about it all that is is a fancy way of saying what does the average kid at this age know or can do. Same problem applies right, and we know this when you look at development that is actually my background it's tons of individuality in how kids develop and the rate, the pace, but also the way things sequence and integrate, and so it really makes no sense and it drives me nuts. What's funny about like, say, age appropriate, development appropriate or grade level kinds of things? First of all, no one knows what that means. What's funny about, like, say, age appropriate, development appropriate or grade level kinds of things? First of all, no one knows what that means. There's a bunch of different measures of it. They don't actually agree because it's not a thing. And so if you're going to say what does the average kid in third grade know about math, and if you don't know that, you're behind, it's like it's not true. Now, by the way, are there telltale signs when some kid is genuinely in trouble? Yeah, right, but being off by like 10 percentage points from the average of a representative sample of third graders is decidedly not that Right. And here's the problem with that.
Speaker 3:I'll give you an example specifically to reading my mentor, kurt Fisher. He was one of the pioneers of the science of individuality and he applied this individual level modeling to how kids learn to read at an early age. And there was one theory. It was like how you build from sight, sound, integration and single word reading and all of the education stuff was built around this theory. What he found was that there were actually three stable pathways to reading. One was the average pathway, but it only covered about 30% of the kids. The other one was different, but it led to the same kind of outcomes good outcomes. The third was actually a dead end. It was bad. So the way you knew if a kid was in trouble was not how they were doing compared to the average, it was which pathway were they on. You knew if a kid was in trouble was not how they were doing compared to the average, it was which pathway were they on.
Speaker 3:And the sad part was that so many times, if we're only teaching on this one average pathway, the kid only has a couple of options You're ahead, you're on track or you're behind. And so kids get behind. And what do we do we double down on remediation, assuming there's one pathway and when in reality they were pursuing a completely different pathway which was every bit as viable and you couldn't see it. And I believe we've actually created reading disorders because of our inability to recognize how reading really happens, and this is true for every academic subject. So one of the telltale signs that I look at when I'm like this is not a good environment is when you are locked into one size fits all. There's one right way to do everything and there's no flexibility embedded in any learning material or any sequencing of learning outcomes.
Speaker 2:Where I use the phrase developmentally appropriate whenever a parent is treating like a two or three-year-old as if they're an adult. You know, I'm like well, they should be throwing a toy right now. They should be yelling and screaming. So do you agree that there is some room for that phrase?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think, if you are because that's a flipped around version, right, it's not an ideal.
Speaker 3:You are because that's a flipped around version, right, it's not an ideal. It is actually saying there's a range of behavior that is appropriate to the development of this kid, right so, and that makes tons of sense. And when you look at things like Piagetian kind of development, where you will see qualitative changes roughly in certain age range, which is largely about biological maturation, meeting, you know, environment, as long as what we're doing is saying don't force a kid in into an expectation of certain kinds of behavior that is just so wildly inappropriate to the range of it, like that kid should not be expected to be like an adult, they do not have the cognitive or neurological facilities to do that, and you were expecting something that they cannot do, then I think that's a perfect use of it. When we flip it around and make it an ideal at a narrow, specific, literally, like this thing is what all kids should do in third grade, we bastardize that to the point where it doesn't mean what we think it means.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's a really important differentiation because we we coach a lot of parents and educators on having those expectations and in like, a framing of like, let's be, let's be overly compassionate here and realize that this behavior and you talk a lot about this context um, in end of average, you talk about how you were labeled as aggressive. Right, it's like wow, or maybe we're just being. Your story goes I mean, you can tell it better than I can, probably, but you were being bullied, essentially, and you were creating coping mechanisms that seemed aggressive to the adults that were, that were observing you and that really changed your life trajectory and your perception of yourself. And when, really, if someone had been able to look at that situation and say, huh, what a logical and appropriate response to that context.
Speaker 3:And I think that's right. The compassion aspect of, like you know, look, parents do this all the time. Right, you've got a young kid, a toddler, and you've been taking them out all day. You've been shopping yourself and they didn't get their nap. You are more compassionate about behavior than you would be if, in a different context, you're like, no, they have their nap. You are more compassionate about behavior than you would be if, in a different context, you're like, no, they have their nap. This is just unacceptable behavior because you know there are certain things out. So same is true when we expect certain behaviors that are just developmentally inappropriate to expect. Same is true when we think about the context of a kid in an environment.
Speaker 3:I tend to think whenever I think about this because, look, sometimes kids need discipline, sometimes they make bad choices and they need to be held to the logical consequences of that. Whenever I think of a behavior, I always think the first thing I want to know is can I think of a scenario where this behavior makes a lot of sense? And then I want to rule out that. That's the thing right. Like, is this just an adaptive thing? That would make a ton of sense if I were experiencing that, and if it is, then I have a different problem to solve than immediately going to the kid. And what's nice about that is it doesn't excuse it, because I can go find out whether that's actually the problem. But we never start with compassion, right. We start with blame, we start with it's just immediately, and we have a bias toward this sort of naturalism that it's the kid. It's the kid that's the problem. Notice how we never start with the environment's the problem.
Speaker 1:The cockpit story you tell how they first blamed the pilot and then they blamed the flight instructors and they never blamed the cockpit. And I think it's so important to realize that, because when we're doing to kids in schools, when they are maybe cheating, or if they're not applying themselves or something like that, it's like, wow, that kid must have some sort of moral defect. They're dishonest, they're lazy. When reality, the world that we've created for them and we do a whole episode on this, the world that we've created for them, and we do a whole episode on this, the world that we've created for them makes that behavior completely logical and that's not their fault.
Speaker 3:That's right. I think that, like you, gotta, it's just. Things are more complex than that, and if you start with that compassion and you start by ruling out, the funny thing is, though, is people don't like the the other answer, because it means they have to put work in Right, like I'll tell you. Remember the marshmallow study, like one of my colleagues did what I think is the best version of this, because that's always interpreted as some innate attribute of self-control, and we can plot it on a kid and kids that have higher levels, and it ignores the context completely. My colleague did a version of the study, which I think should be the definitive one, where she put kids in this. You know, you know they time it's like up to 15 minutes, and you know how long you wait. Well, randomly put kids in two different groups One, uh, and what they did was they varied something before.
Speaker 3:Rather than do the marshmallow test first, they had them first, they got crayons and they got to draw on a mug, and in one of the groups, the adult said oh, we get to do this, and they brought in amazing crayons, and they got to do it. The other group the adult, didn't keep their word, and it was accidental. They came back and said I'm sorry, we didn't have them, here's some of the things you can do. And then they put them into the marshmallow test and in the environment where the adult kept their word, when you are promised more treats if you don't eat the marshmallow almost every kid looks like a rock star of self-control. Almost literally, most of them went the entire 15 minutes In the group where the adult hadn't kept their word. Nobody did.
Speaker 3:And so then the question is what is self-control? Why in the world would I delay gratification on the thing I can see right here in the hopes that you will be honest with me when I have evidence that I cannot trust you? And I think, do we spend any time creating the conditions of trust in an environment where the kid can believe that what we tell them is true, that we actually have their interest in mind? And no, here we go, we're going to give you a test and we're going to assume that this is something about you, and because it correlates with some things, we start to pretend like maybe we know, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the sad part is is that, like, like the trust in the environment is something that's fully within the control. Of the honors program was like, and in that description.
Speaker 1:I just heard you say like this is how we treat kids when we trust them. If you're an honors kid, that's a label that you have. If you've played the game well enough to get adults to trust you, we treat you this way. And for the rest of you that we don't trust, this is how we're going to treat you and that becomes the self-fulfilling. You become an honors kid and you become a not honors kid, right?
Speaker 3:It is so self-fulfilling, it's unbelievable and like, if you think about it, learning is almost entirely about motivation and relevance and, like boy, when a kid cares and knows why they care, it's pretty remarkable what they'll push through and what they'll do and it's like, yeah, you can try to guess what will be relevant all the time, or you can help them acquire that genuine self-determination and have an environment for which their wishes and interests and things actually matter. Right, and a kid that is self-determined has constant relevance, like they do. They just they can generate that and so it's just it's. It's such a funny thing because it's like I do. I appreciate the education system we've had. I know why we had it that way. I would have advocated for it at the time, but I know of no other institution that is so far behind the science, the insights, the things we actually know. It is the equivalent in my mind is medicine was still teaching the four humors or letting people's blood and using leeches. It's like we thought that was good at the time.
Speaker 3:We know it's not and we know a lot more. We have made so much progress in understanding the environments that foster not only learning. We also know that we can accomplish more than academic mastery in these environments and that kids need more than that simply to be prepared for our modern society, right? So it's funny that we spend most of our time in the incumbent system getting them to grade level not even that, frankly on a bunch of stuff, and we ignore everything else that matters. And meanwhile you go to these other places that commit to mastery learning, because here's the thing, it's not just mastery learning, and then we're done. It is so much more efficient, so much more effective that it frees up time to do the things that we actually want, like who are you, what are your passions? How do we teach you how to convert that into a productive contribution, like the stuff that you actually want, right? So it's, it's anyway.
Speaker 2:I'm preaching to the choir, I'm sure, but yeah, and you had said that a lot of adults don't want to admit that it's an environment or that they are the ones that have to change. But why is that and you said this earlier too is they didn't get it as a child, and so, but what a gift for us to recognize. Wow, we can change the trajectory for these kids and give them such a gift that we didn't get as kids, Because when we know better, we do better.
Speaker 3:And think about this, like we're entering a world where our technologies have moved ahead of things so fast AI, all this stuff. It could be better, but it's going to be bumpy for a while and throughout history. Every time a new transformative technology emerges, there's upside and downside, and it is always that it requires some new skill or mindset to get the upside of the technology and until you figure out what it is and get it to people, it's almost pure downside. For example, all the way back to the shift from spoken word to written word, it's pretty obvious that it should be better if we can write stuff down right. If you trusted Socrates, he hated it, right. He thought we're going to lose our memory, which you know kind of. But you can see the upside. What didn't dawn on people was that to get that upside, you had to learn this completely artificial skill called literacy. You actually had that taught. It's not natural, not like language that you just pick up. You have to be taught, and the elites hoarded that skill for arguably until the Reformation took an act of God to democratize access and then finally, we unleashed the full potential of literacy in terms of the written word right and its ability to spread.
Speaker 3:I will wager right now which is always a dangerous thing about predicting the future. I will wager right now which is always a dangerous thing, about predicting the future. But when you think about the technologies that we face, we are facing technologies for the first time that are trying to convince you that they are human. They are trying to be human. We've never had that before. The single most important skill that a child could acquire, that will be the most equivalent of literacy, that'll be so practical you can't believe in it is this gift of self-determination, because it's not just words, it's practice, it's habit, it's a complete orientation to how I deal with uncertainty, how I set goals, my ability to thrive in the world. And I don't know how you survive in a world where our technologies are human. In a way, they do almost everything, except for the last edge of what it means to be a human being.
Speaker 3:If I am still trapped in the mindset of the age of standardization, where I have been taught to be a cog, I've been taught that some other paternalists are the ones that make decisions for me, it might be the worst thing you could ever do to a kid. You are so thoroughly unprepared for the world, and so this gift of self-determination is not a luxury, it's an absolute necessity, and the people that have to hear that and know that right now are parents that when you get nervous that your kid is doing things different than how it was done, that should be the best sign that you've ever seen, because how it was done is an intellectual death sentence for your kid. They are so thoroughly unprepared for the world. If all you want is I can't risk my kid being unprepared, right, we don't have the resources, we don't have the social resources they need to have the best shot at life. This is their best shot at life. It's not luxury, it is necessity.
Speaker 2:Wow. Well, on that note we are going to wrap up, and this is a question that we and I fully agree. Katie and I are both on the same exact page as you and, like you said, you are definitely preaching to the choir and we're so thankful for all the work that you're doing with Populous and just love this research. So, okay, let's catch up and let's figure how to actually implement these things in school. So we are in the same fight as you. So we ask this question to all of our guests who is someone who has kindled your love of learning, curiosity, motivation or passion?
Speaker 3:This is going to be the most wonky answer it's the only philosopher I ever care about, which is Karl Popper. And the reason being is he changed how I thought about being a scientist, because I think, and I actually think, the way we teach science to kids is a disaster. We teach science is fact. Science is not fact. Science is provisional knowledge. That that is the best explanation we have right now.
Speaker 3:And Karl Popper came up with. He answered the question which was funny, but it puzzled people for a long time is what's the difference between science and non-science? And he was like well, it's data. Well, no, astrology uses the exact same data as astronomy, so it can't be data right. And he said what makes it science is that it's falsifiable and that your job is to try to falsify theories, not prove them. And he came up with the idea that if I had a theory that all sheep were white, I can keep seeing white sheep till I'm blue in the face. It doesn't prove it right, it makes me a little more confident. But one black sheep and I know that the theory is false.
Speaker 3:And so he came up with this brilliant insight, which is you get to truth through the elimination of error. You don't have to know what the truth is when you start, you just eliminate error, and so there's a humility and a power to science that I don't think we actually impart on people, right. We want them to swallow it as if it's just fact and it's not, and as soon as you believe that it is that progress stops. So it taught me not to just take at face value just because you're famous, still gotta have evidence right. And the idea that we're constantly challenging things and that that's progress was music to my ears, and so it changed how I operate as a scientist and how I think about the world.
Speaker 1:I love that. That's so powerful. Thank you for sharing everything you've shared with us today. I've learned so much. How can listeners learn more about your work?
Speaker 3:You know you can just go to populistorg and we publish all of our research on private opinion there. Or you know just toddrosecom if you want to see some of my commercial books and stuff like that.
Speaker 1:Awesome, well, thank you so much. It's been a true pleasure to get to know you and to learn from you today. Thanks so much for coming on the Kindle podcast.
Speaker 3:Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:Thanks, todd. That's it for today. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the Kindle podcast. If this episode was helpful to you, please like, subscribe and follow us on social at Prenda Learn. If you have a question that you would like to ask, all you have to do is email us at podcast at prendacom. You can also join our Facebook group, which is called the Kindled Collective, and we have a weekly newsletter called the Sunday Spark.
Speaker 1:The Kindled Podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy for you to start and run an amazing micro school based on all the things that we talk about here on the Kindled Podcast. If you want more information about guiding a Prenda micro school, go to prendacom. Thanks for listening and remember to keep kindling.
