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KindlED | The Prenda Podcast
The KindlED Podcast explores the science of nurturing children's potential and creating empowering learning environments through microschooling. 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 | The Prenda Podcast
Episode 69: What School Could Be. A Conversation with Ted Dintersmith and Garrett Smiley.
The rapidly accelerating capabilities of artificial intelligence are creating an urgent need to rethink how we prepare young people for a world where machines will soon outperform humans in many cognitive tasks.
• Schools train students in what ChatGPT already does best
• AI power doubles yearly, reshaping the workforce
• The “school-to-career” escalator model is collapsing
• Content delivery dominates, but agency and values matter most
• Don’t trade kids’ mental health and relationships for small GPA gains
• Students need entrepreneurial skills to solve real problems
• Hands-on, career-focused learning deserves equal respect with academics
• Families should explore AI tools as “curiosity machines”
• Future success depends more on AI collaboration than college prestige
About our guests
Ted Dintersmith is a change agent focused on the impact of education and innovation. His professional background spans technology, entrepreneurship, and public policy. He has been the executive producer of several films that have premiered at Sundance, including the acclaimed Most Likely to Succeed. Ted’s most recent book What School Could Be: Insights and Inspiration from Teachers Across America is based on a trip he took to all 50 U.S. states during a single school year. In 2018, he received NEA’s prestigious “Friend of Education” Award.
Garrett Smiley is the Co-Founder of Sora Schools, an education startup. Sora is a virtual, project-based high school where students explore their interests, learn however is best for them, and gain exposure to future careers and fields of work. Prior to Sora, Garrett co-founded a charity which built wells in developing nations called Drops of Love. Garret also directed a university startup incubator called Core Founders at Georgia Tech, and started an education non-profit that worked with foster kids to develop financial literacy called Flip. Garrett worked as a Venture Partner at Contrary Capital where he scouted, invested in, and mentored startups in the Atlanta area.
Connect with Ted and Garrett
Sora Schools
Ted Dintersmith
Most Likely to Succeed
What School Could Be
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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.
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The bad news and I think it's quite bad is that school trains that out of kids. If you think about the high watermark in education, we push kids to be good at exactly what chat GPT does perfectly. So I think simply marching along and trusting it will all work out is a huge mistake.
Speaker 2:Hello, welcome to the Kindled Podcast. I'm your host, kelly Smith. Today we're going to be talking to Ted Denturesmith and Garrett Smiley. These two have been involved in rethinking education in a number of ways, both within and without the system. Today, we're going to be focusing on advice we'd give to kids and parents as they think about the end of high school and moving on to the great beyond, in the real world. It's an exciting conversation. We'll have talking about all kinds of things, from the role of AI and transforming the future, what types of jobs are available, what skills and abilities kids should be working on and developing, and how school as we know it and the institutions themselves are trying to and, in some cases, falling short from succeeding in meeting these needs. So I'm excited for the conversation. Before we jump in, let me tell you a little bit about Ted and Garrett.
Speaker 2:Ted Dintersmith is a change agent focused on the impact of education and innovation in the future of civil society. His professional background spans technology, entrepreneurship and public policy. He was ranked by Business 2.0 as the top performing us venture capitalist for 1995 through 1999. In 2012, president obama appointed him to represent our country at the united nations general assembly. He's been the executive producer of several films that have premiered at sundance, including the acclaimed most likely to succeed. Ted's most recent book, what school could be? Insights and inspiration from Teachers Across America, is based on an immersive trip he took to all 50 states during a single school year. In 2018, he received NEA's prestigious Friend of Education Award. Ted earned a PhD in engineering from Stanford and an undergraduate degree from the College of William Mary, with high honors in physics and English. When he's not visiting schools, he lives in Charleston, south Carolina, and Garrett Smiley.
Speaker 2:Garrett Smiley is the co-founder of Sora Schools, an education startup based in Atlanta. Sora is a virtual project-based high school where students explore their interests learn, however, is best for them and gain exposure to future careers and fields of work. Prior to Sora, garrett co-founded a charity which built wells in developing nations, called Drops of Love. Garrett also directed a university startup incubator called Core Founders at Georgia Tech and started an education nonprofit that worked with foster children to develop financial literacy, called Flip. Garrett studied computer science at Georgia Tech. Garrett also worked as a venture partner at Contrary Capital, where he scouted, invested in and mentored startups in the Atlantic area. Okay, I'm excited to start. Let's jump in. Okay, welcome to the Prenda podcast. We're excited to be talking here with Garrett Smiley and Ted Dintersmith. Thanks guys for being here.
Speaker 1:Fantastic to be here, yeah thanks.
Speaker 2:Well, I want to just dive right in. So we're going to be talking today about people women at roughly the age 17. At this moment in the history of the world, I mean, you're experiencing a you know, a vastly different beyond as you leave what we've known as high school. Many kids are experiencing a pretty similar past right up until that point, and so now you're in this moment where I think there's lots of really good questions and really good discussions we can have. Ted, I pulled this off your website and I just want to read this back to you. I have insights into the world our children will live in as adults and how education priorities can foster or diminish the skills and mindsets kids will need as adults. So can you talk a little bit about those insights and just share thoughts about what are you seeing in the world beyond?
Speaker 1:Well, first I'd say I'd credit the insights to the people I was surrounded with for 25, 30 years in my technology business, and that was really bold entrepreneurs, and the lesson they taught me is there is an unlimited number of paths forward.
Speaker 1:Is there is an unlimited number of paths forward If you have an entrepreneurial mindset, keen motivation to learn what you need to learn and just incredible determination to accomplish something. I'd say everything going on today works in the favor of bold, entrepreneurial young adults and when they read about or hear about jobs going away and I talk a lot about that they should understand that there is no shortage of jobs fulfilling paths they can create. That's the good news. The bad news and I think it's quite bad is that school trains that out of kids. If you think about the high watermark in education, we push kids to be good at exactly what chat GPT does perfectly. So I think simply marching along and trusting it will all work out is a huge mistake. So I think it's really that path A versus path B, and everything I do is directed toward the goal of opening people's eyes up Students, you know, kids, parents, teachers to path A, because path A is not even a dead end, far worse than a dead end.
Speaker 2:Garrett, you talk to a lot of parents. I mean, path A sounds terrifying. Can you talk a little bit about just what I know Ted's kind of giving this? There's sort of a tried and true Path B that everybody's become accustomed to and Path A really says be this some sort of entity and then go out and solve the problems or identify your own curriculum and make your own. You know, can you talk a little bit about you? Guys are doing this at a younger age with SOAR schools and I just want to share what you're seeing from parents and how they're facing that reality as they think about this.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely. I think parents are in various stages of waking up to this insight. Ted and I were talking a couple of weeks ago. Just look at the perfect example of people who followed the prescribed path in front of them, went all the way to Harvard Business School in this case and they're. They have the it's at least a local minima, historically low job placement rates, right. And if these students who who trusted that path, that social contract we thought we had, and are not getting anywhere close to what they thought was promised them, imagine the student who is a couple degrees from that level of academic success. And I think a lot of parents are realizing this. We're hearing with our own students the importance they find of just going and creating your own opportunities, your own internships, your own whatever it may be. Just go find opportunities locally. They're really starting to feel the essential nature of this, as the jobs that they used to work in the summer or the opportunities they thought they had locally are just drying up in front of their very eyes.
Speaker 2:It's interesting because I've been watching this as well and I'm reminded, by the way, of just to throw a book recommendation in here I don't know if you guys have read. It's called the Startup of you. This is Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn founder, and Ben Kuznetsha, and together they said look, there's this idea that you get on this escalator when you're five years old and the escalator takes you to not only you know high school graduation, but college graduation, job placement and a stable, steady career. That's sort of like all of it's handed to you. You just have to get on the escalator and people fight. I mean, you heard these stories a few years ago parents sort of jockeying in position and paying hefty down payments at age two to get their kid into the right prep you know, preschool in Manhattan at age four, so that then that leads to the right.
Speaker 2:I mean it's very much an escalator mentality and it does, by the way, seem to be I don't know if you agree with this. It seems to be particularly bad for the people who are in like are better off, like the way you're talking about Garrett, where you need these Harvard MBA types. You know, sometimes you would think that those would be maybe the most willing to take risks or the most willing to do things differently. But you know, you almost see the opposite. You see those people kind of doubling down on the status and safety of the safety net of these escalators. Any thoughts about who these people are and who are the people? Ted, that will do what you're talking about. That will look at path A and say, sure, there's some uncertainty there, but let's do it. You know, let's go for it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, gary, you want to go first. You want me to?
Speaker 4:Go ahead.
Speaker 1:Okay. Well, you know, if you want to look for inspiring points, you know, just look at Montessori schools. And there was an article this goes back a ways, but it was in the Wall Street Journal, probably quite Google-able. But the Montessori mafia, you know it was Jimmy Wales and Sergi, you know Brennan, larry Page, and you know I don't know I mean like, and they all said, despite years of formal education, by far the best experience was Montessori, where they were supported to go deep with their passions and learn, retain what they're learning, master skills. I mean, this isn't a mystery. I mean, maria Montessori goes back quite some time.
Speaker 1:I think that two things. One is parents often look at what worked for them and assume that that's what will work for their kids. And everything that I said about jumping through hoops I would not have said that 40 years ago. 40 years ago, jumping through hoops was really a good way to move forward. It's not that it was bad forever in time. It worked for a long period, but that period is over and what's hard for parents to do is to say wait a minute. It's a totally different world, because not only is that period over, but the stakes we put on hoop jumping have actually escalated, and so you find parents just obsessing about you know which.
Speaker 1:You know you look at the Varsity Blues scandal.
Speaker 1:I mean like parents going to crazy lengths to try to get their kid into USC or something you know it's like what are you doing? Have you totally lost your mind? And I give a lot of talks to parents and I always say to them you can, you know like you can do this. You can wage a 12-, 14-, 16-year war with your kid to get them to be the perfect kid and what you're going to end up with is a kid with a lot of mental health challenges, a broken parent-child relationship and, most likely these days, a kid that walks into a dead end. Do you still want to do that, just to be able to go to the cocktail party and say, well, my kid got into X and I don't think their kid did so well. In that it's like the competition breeds competition, right, the people that are investment bankers and consultants and everything. It's an uber competitive group, and so they gravitate toward competing on whatever is at their fingertips and kids and their success in school is a very compelling and attractive competitive metric for that crowd.
Speaker 2:Well, we've put it on a single dimensional track right, which we love, and given it a scorecard, which we also love, and so then it's very easy, easy to see. Now, what's interesting is I think you made this point already, ted that not only does school, as the traditional structures and institutional I know there are great people trying to push back on this but the traditional structures not only don't, you know, encourage people to develop the path, a sort of approach, but it almost hampers it. I'm reminded of this researcher from Boston College that did a longitudinal study over decades and she tracked valedictorians and salutatorians from high school and what like. I cracked up because I was the salutatorian of my high school, I definitely like, played the game, you know, and I did it with cynicism but nevertheless right. What I was being trained to do was exactly what you're saying. I jumped through hoops and I was really, really good at jumping through hoops. She said those people aren't the ones that make life, you know, world altering contributions like they do find, like, demographically, their incomes are high, they're able to, kind of, and this, you may argue, is going away, right, but they've had stable, steady lives. But they, you know, as you look at the people who you know start some sort of social cause and change lives for thousands and millions of people, and entrepreneurs and the people who are kind of shaping the world. It oftentimes that crowd is absent is what she found in this research, and I thought that was. It's an interesting kind of touch on what you're saying and how you're approaching this.
Speaker 2:I want, before we dive into what do we give people as far as recommendations, I want to talk a little bit about the pace of change, the speed. So this is again from your website, ted, and sorry to be such a website stalker. Here we need this is what you say. We need to equip our children with skill sets and mindsets that are essential in a world of innovation. I can't overstate how fast machine intelligence is accelerating and you say something about please don't be complacent about this. The world is changing faster and faster and faster. Can you just elaborate on this a little bit for our listeners?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I feel like I've broken record on this for quite some time. Let's take two different waves of disruption. So robotics and outsourcing evolved relatively slowly, I'd say the improvement rate was, you know, 10, 15% a year and over three to four decades it wiped out thousands of communities and displaced millions of people. Really, they had no fallback, you know, I mean, they don't just sit at home and they'll scramble to try to keep food on the table. But the impact of that which we're living with right now was considerable, widespread and very consequential. Ai it's exploding, right. Things are happening, and you experts will say I knew this would happen. I thought and these are the experts, these are the people closest to it will say I anticipated this happening, but I thought it would be 10 years from now, not today. And I don't think Sam Altman's right when he says 10x per year in improvement.
Speaker 1:I mean that's, that's stunning but, I think, it would be fair to say it's kind of doubling per year and you know, if you double per year you're a thousand times more capable in a decade.
Speaker 1:So back to what a 17 year old is going to deal with. Without any doubt I mean like I am not going out on a limb when I say that when a 17 year old is 27 years old, machines will be smarter than the smartest human. So I look at that and I say is this not something of a signal to schools that say maybe we should do something different, that maybe preparing kids for the industrial age might not be our best move, but I think that's fair to say. Doubling every year our best move? But I think that's fair to say doubling every year. And you just look at it. I mean like you know two years. You know if we want to get it we can.
Speaker 1:But I started writing a book two years ago on math which I'm almost done with. Two years ago, chat GPT, you give it like add four plus six plus seven. You know it didn't often didn't get that right. It sort of begged for an interface to Wolfram Alpha of photomath or something. Now you can invoke mathematical reasoning and you know I can show it a complex proof and it will critique that proof or offer something better. You know like that's in two years. In four months, it went from being the bottom 10% on the universal bar to the top 10%. That test was done two years ago.
Speaker 1:If they did that benchmark today, it would be better than essentially any human on the universal bar exam given to people after four years of high school, four years of college, three years of law school, often 750K or so of expenses and a machine's better than what they were told they needed to be good at. And I think that's the key thing. When we hold schools and students and teachers accountable to something that's what they will do in school, we hold them accountable to these high-stakes exams that are expressly designed to be graded by a computer, and if a computer can grade it, a computer can do it. So essentially, we're futilely chasing what machine intelligence already does better than any human and crushing out of kids' creativity, curiosity, audacity, leadership agency. I look at this. I say why is it? You know, like it's a podcast, so I will tone down my language, but this ought to be so unbelievably obvious that schools would change today as fast as they did in March of 2020. When COVID hit. This is way more disruptive than COVID and they're not.
Speaker 2:Do you get a response that's like no, we disagree. Or do you just get sort of a blank stare? I mean, so you've worked with the late Sir Ken Robinson who's like famous for this right. He's been saying these messages, and I think he's like schools would show his video, right? They would say here, this is what should matter, and yet you know the big changes don't happen. So what is it?
Speaker 1:It's actually worse than blank stares or disagreement. I actually wish that they were disagreeing, then we'd have the basis for a discussion. They nod their heads, they say, oh, you're so right, but they don't change. Right If I've taken away a few things from all this time in the world of education. But I feel like people in the world of education and that's teachers and administrators and legislators, and you know, on and on and on they love to talk about change. They love to say, yeah, this would be really great.
Speaker 1:It's very difficult to change and there's just a whole set of constraints, including college admissions, including the high stakes exams that states use to determine who can graduate from high school, including parent expectations, teacher training, embedded lessons, purchase textbooks. All these things are like one gigantic black hole, sucking the whole system back into something that I think has quite tragic ramifications.
Speaker 2:Fascinating, garrett, let's talk about. You know it wasn't that long ago you were in high school and college and in this age group Will you talk about just? You know what you see as the real world and even you know you could make comparisons between how that world has changed since the world that you encountered. I would also love you don't talk publicly very much about your sort of pre-Sora story, but you've. You've been entrepreneurial, you've been this you know, go out, figure it out. I think you studied computer science. You've done these things that you know. I think Ted would have said be like Garrett, you know that that's one example of how to approach life after high school. Can you just kind of talk a little bit about your path and then maybe reflect on how that's? You know, that world that you encountered is changing around you?
Speaker 4:Okay deal, you give me too much credit, but I'll share a few thoughts. I went to high school in a really interesting moment in the twenties, right when laptops were entering the classroom. We were the first kids to get you know all of our textbooks online. But what came with that is a realization that, oh my goodness, I have YouTube and Khan Academy and Coursera and all these things at my fingertips and for some reason, the teachers and the administrators and everyone are showing up and doing the exact same thing they did for the last 30, 40 years in some case. But to me, even as a young person, it was unbelievably clear Okay, if the world's best lectures are online, what is the purpose of school? Like, my teacher is clearly acting as if education was a content problem, but I have a proof right here that it's not right. So what is the purpose of education? And as a young person, this radicalized me in interesting directions. I've certainly evolved since then, but the immediate takeaway of this was was so now I move schools a lot and I did not respect my high school much, so I just said, okay, I'm going to completely blow this off, and they're silly enough to give me a laptop in the classroom, so I'm just going to do whatever the heck I want on that. That was mostly coding and studying physics when I was a teenager. I'm going to do whatever the heck I want during the school day because I'm just going to cram Khan Academy and stuff right before midterms, whatever right. So I fell into this cadence and I absolutely could study much, much, much faster using these tools, and you can imagine how a student like Garrett would feel with these AI tools.
Speaker 4:And then this continued at Georgia Tech. I went to this tech school. I was told it was an amazing program. I thought I finally made it out of the old world education system and I was greeted with perhaps an even I love Georgia Tech, I love, you know but perhaps even less thoughtful system. Pedagogically. They, despite being a tech school, were not leveraging any of these tools. Professors were showing up lecturing, and it was that right. So I just had this realization.
Speaker 4:I was always this sci-fi kid. I was always, you know, very bookish. I love thinking about how the world ought to move, and this just kind of disillusioned me, if I, you know, there's no secret sauce here that I don't already have in my back pocket that I need to wait to acquire before I really make the changes that I want to see in the world. So I started treating college like I was on scholarship, so like a free room and free, amazing friends and lifestyle and as long as I got good enough grades to keep my scholarship. This is kind of my junior and senior year.
Speaker 4:I was just going to try to make a change. I was going to try to do these things and treat this as a socially acceptable on-ramp to doing things, and I was quickly confronted with the reality that it's kind of like that joke no one knows that you're a dog on the internet Like that's kind of how solving problems feels. So I was this super small, skinny, 19 year old, 20 year old, showing up talking about education. I first did this education non-profit and parents if you really try to understand their problem, leverage technology, lead with a lot of empathy. They don't.
Speaker 4:You are also a child. You just solve a problem and you'll see the world kind of open up to you. Long story short, that's what led to Sora and I think that sort of mindset. You already have all the tools that you need to become top 0.01% in whatever interests you. What you now need is agency right. So cultivating agency is a question about motivation and accountability and value systems and worldview, and that's the question that I really think we ought to be talking about as educators, not content delivery, which is important and those things are imbued in content delivery but it is a consequence of much more important questions ahead of that.
Speaker 2:So I expected you to go in a modern direction with that agency. I mean you're talking this is ancient wisdom kind of stuff. I mean I quote Plutarch all the time right, and this idea that if you take a paradigm of lighting a fire and the paradigm of pouring water into a cup, the actions that you would do for each of those paradigms are like mutually exclusive. Like pouring water on the fire kills the fire, it's the worst thing you could possibly do and that's basically you know systemically happening. And I think what you're saying is, if you want kids to take agency, definitely don't like make them sit down quietly and still and just keep talking at them and giving them homework assignments that they don't care about, like for years and years and years. I mean you talk about radicalization. I mean it sounds like you saw this really as a student, first in high school and then and then in college.
Speaker 4:Yeah, absolutely, and we still see this with. I was actually having this conversation with some entrepreneur friends last night, but it feels like there is this subtle change in your mind becoming an entrepreneur and, honestly, this is what this is kind of. What separates a lot of the successful kind of pre-seed stage founders and the unsuccessful. There's a lot of market forces and luck, to be clear, but what seems to be a difference is this like rubric mentality that people bring, rather than this authenticity, and I certainly had to unlearn this in my first few years of entrepreneurship. But what I mean by rubric following, it's almost like you are like what would an entrepreneur do in this moment? Right, it's like you're trying to get a four out of four on the rubric.
Speaker 4:Oh, I think they would. You know, what would Zuckerberg do, right Versus what is the real problem in front of me? It's like it's like a bar, the real world, like a bar fight, right. Like what do I grab this chair leg? Do I? I don't know, but like what should I actually do in this moment that helps the person in front of me? That's the mindset and that's something that kids just simply do not practice in traditional schools.
Speaker 2:Do you think it's because they don't feel like they're allowed to, or is it because they don't know how to? Or some combination of those two things?
Speaker 4:I'm curious what Tess say about this, but I just think it's a total, a totally different frame from what students feel. The project of education is like you alluded to this, this hopping through the hoops or whatever you said, versus make something awesome, right, follow instructions. Jump through hoops because adults said so and it's the broccoli you need to eat. Versus here's a nebulous problem in front of you and do something cool with it. It's just a totally different approach and mentality.
Speaker 1:We expressly train kids to be followers. I mean that's the whole point of the education model. I mean in the industrial era what you wanted was a workforce of followers, and so think about it. I mean that's the entirety of school. Here is your assignment, do it. And that's why educators are so paranoid about AI is because you can take that assignment and put it in ChatGPT and you'll get something. But you look at deep research with chat GPT. I mean if anybody hasn't played around with that, you know you can take any assignment of school, give it to chat GPT and it will in, you know, no longer 12 seconds. I mean deep research can take 10 minutes or so, but it'll come back with something better than than an Ivy League magna cum laude could produce, right, and and so. So think about it. Put yourself in the shoes of a kid. So the teacher says here's your assignment. How does it go for the kid that says you know, I don't think that makes any sense. Here's what I think we should do. I mean that's not going to give you an A, that's going to be a troublemaker, right, and it's not. I want to be sympathetic to the plight of the teacher.
Speaker 1:I think teachers, given trust and support, would actually love to have more kids. That would say, you know, I don't really, tactfully, politely, I think we could do something more interesting. The problem is when you're held accountable to test scores. You know, think about teaching an AP course, right, you want those kids to take that exam and to get the highest possible scores. And so you'll see things like you know, the sprint through AP US history, where these teachers, you know, not by their choice essentially say no time for questions in this course. You know, if we have I mean, you know, I wish I were laughing this is true. You know, we don't have time for questions. We can't go down anything you're really interested in, because we've got to get from 1491 to the present day in 180 class periods. And if we don't, not only might the kids score worse, I actually think they would probably score better if they were occasionally taking deep dives into things.
Speaker 1:But if they don't cover everything I've seen this too many times if I don't cover everything and the kid gets a bad score, what do they say to their parents? There were things on the test we didn't cover. What do the parents do? They go to the school and say how can you let my kid down? You didn't cover what was on the test, so they're caught in this vicious trap that says cover content, sprint through it. Knowing that kids won't retain it. Knowing kids will find it immensely boring. Knowing it's the most superficial of all courses and in the process, it is. Here's what you need to study. Here's what you need to memorize. Here are the formulaic essays you need to be able to write to get a good grade to get a four, get a five, and so it's just baked in.
Speaker 1:But as I say, I mean think about the people you've worked with, people in your family, people in your community. We admire the people who will say you know, here's what I think we could do. I mean, that's who you want to work with. I mean, assuming that they lay out something sensible, here's what I think we should do and it's really well thought out. That is 0% of school. And when we create an entire generation of give me my assignment and I will carry it out, and at the same time, machine intelligence is already better than the best human at that, and getting better by the minute. To me that spells titanic level catastrophe.
Speaker 2:I'm reminded of. Maybe we take a historical detour for just a minute, but for me, you know, garrett had Khan Academy, I had calculators, right. The TI-85 calculator was this like powerhouse thing that could graph, you know complex functions and you could even program it a little bit. There were things you could do, but I mean, I would say 90% of what I was given on tests and of course the tests were no calculator and I'm an honest person, so I like obeyed the rules, but it was like you're just asking me to like be a better calculator and it seemed kind of pointless to you know, if it really is about computing things, I'm really thrilled to see math evolving over time.
Speaker 2:Like, I think the response to that, that insight, was that, okay, what should we be asking? And you know, I think you see this over decades Maybe we could ask the student to think about the logical steps or apply these concepts, mathematical concepts, to the world around them, maybe get some deeper understanding. I know parents complain about this and you know that all happens, but I think overall, if you're asking a human to be better than a machine, uh, you know it's, it's like kind of a losing battle for everybody and pointless, I think we, we just feel that in our bones. So I'd love to hear yeah, I don't know if you guys, you know, had insights from the, the calculator days, or you could even go to the oh, I, I can, I can one-up everybody, because I go back to the slide rule days.
Speaker 1:Oh, let's do it. You know, but education when I went to school was relatively low stakes. There was less of an obsession and chase for colleges. The acceptance rates at even the most exclusive colleges were often more than 50%. You know, like we had no test prep.
Speaker 1:I don't even remember doing much homework in high school, but we did have slide rules and the slide rules weren't baked into high stakes exams. Had they been, kids would probably still be using slide rules today, but the problem with it, you know, it's really. I think it's fair to say the story of US education is we teach what's easy to test, not what's important to learn. And so these one right answer, little math micro tidbits are like the perfect questions for an ABCD exam. And if you let somebody use photo math on their phone, you know game over, right. You just show your camera over every problem in the SAT and it gives you the answer. Or put it into chat GPT, it gives you the answer. So we keep testing this stuff because it can be scored by a computer and ignore the fact that it can be done by a computer. So I've got this new book. I'll be brief on it, but this book on the math ideas that matter, comma, which are never taught in school, and over and over again I'll talk to these people.
Speaker 1:How many people really understand the difference between correlation and causation? How many people really understand the difference between correlation and causation? How many people really understand what a margin of error is and when it's grossly overstated. So today, good example. I'll date this a bit, but the jobs report came out. It was like 229,000 jobs. I have a section in my book it wasn't quite 229,000. I picked another, more recent jobs report. But let's just stick with that 229,000 plus or minus 1.2 million. But nobody writes a story that says the error bars on this are massive, right, because you know, think about that, this massive sprawling US economy. And they're reporting the number of jobs, the net jobs, by the way, right? So millions of new jobs created, millions of jobs go away. You're subtracting them and now you're presenting the nearest 1,000. Yeah, you know it's preposterous, right, but the markets you know like, and these are not dumb people, these are financial traders, these are reporters who lock in and assume 229,000 must be fairly precise because it's reported to the nearest 1,000. That sounds precise.
Speaker 1:When you actually look for the story behind the number, you realize the error bars are gigantic Wow.
Speaker 1:And I just look at this and I say the ideas are. You know every single chapter has something done with elementary school kids. If young kids, old kids, you know age 10 to 100, you can understand. The ideas Define our lives and they're used to manipulate and persuade us, take us in the wrong directions. We spend 0% of our time on the ideas in school and 100% on the low-level rope crap that your phone does perfectly in a way that punishes millions. I think math is a poster child for failed priorities in the United States of America.
Speaker 2:Well, ted, I'm excited to read the book. It sounds fascinating. I know you guys have both kind of done, you've been involved in innovative work and I would say there's two pieces Everybody I've met that's trying to innovate in education whether they do like me and Garrett, where we sort of start something that's an alternative to regular school or they're inside of regular school and they're, you know, fighting the good fight. They're out there, you know, pushing for things. There's kind of two things that you have to deal with, and we've been talking a lot about one of them, which is the actual pedagogy. Like what do you do instead? How do you adapt? How can you make sure that these skills that actually are going to help, you know, are carried forward? And then, how does that? You know, garrett, in my case we don't have to deal with this as much because we're operating privately outside. But how does that interface with what statute says? You know the state legislators and the department of education and these different regulations and the tests that you have to report? So there's the education innovation side of it and that friction. I want to kind of swing it back around and say I don't know what your estimate is on this. My estimate from talking to innovators that are trying to do this from inside. They say as much as they complain about their internal friction and having to convince the assistant superintendent to let them do something innovative. They also have to convince the parents, and it's almost equal in magnitude.
Speaker 2:It really brings me back to this need for a rethink, a change of hearts and minds. Can you talk a little bit about just how do we, how do we do that? How do we change parents' hearts and minds? I mean, you guys are both heavily involved in writing and speaking and communicating. I would love to see your voices amplified and that's part of the goal that we're even having this conversation. But what do we do to help parents? Just shake out of some? I don't think it's malintentioned, I think it's just. This is what I know. Anyway, give me, give me thoughts on that.
Speaker 4:I think just super quickly I'll question the premise a little bit. I think it's an inappropriate grouping of different desires. The traditional education system is, definitionally, one size fits all and there are advantages of that, and you know the importance of securing a high quality education for everyone, extremely sympathetic to this. It's the backbone of our civilization. However, education, especially as you get into the older years, it's downstream values, worldview, community relevance, proclivities of the individual child, relevance proclivities of the individual child, like it's just.
Speaker 4:You cannot design the perfect education on paper because it's the interface of like six different human things. So I think what you're really hearing in these classrooms is the 30% of noisiest families who are against any given decision, and that's not predictably the same 30% of families. And that's because we don't allow parents to have any agency in aligning their educational preferences with funding right. So not to make this a political opinion, you actually would not be able to extrapolate that and probably understand my politics around education. But we have to let parents opt into things that they feel culturally aligned with and willing to valorize it and celebrate success for their child, embodying the values implicit in that education. I think that is hugely missing now and you probably won't fix that problem until we allow more opt-in aspects of education.
Speaker 2:So it all goes back to agency, you're saying, but in this case now we're talking about the parents' agency. Well, it's like learning.
Speaker 4:education is like going to the gym, and if I don't really feel the value of this and this extreme effort, if I just feel like it's something someone told me to do, I'm probably not going to give my all and push through those final three reps of the set. I'm sorry I'm beating the analogy a bit, but I'm not going to do the thing that actually makes me get out what I'm supposed to get out right. Education is very similar, so you have to align it with values. You have to make people feel by it.
Speaker 1:You know, having spent a dozen years throwing my body and a bunch of other things at this to try to convince parents, I now know I can't convince parents. Sir Ken couldn't convince parents. I think the very sobering but powerful thing that will convince parents is that over the next five years, all the kids that did everything right, that jumped through every hoop, that are graduating from selective colleges, are going to find themselves unable to get a job, and it pains me to say that.
Speaker 2:I hope I'm wrong.
Speaker 1:I am completely certain I'm right, and we're already seeing who wants to hire a college graduate to do what Chachi Piti does for $20 a month, and you know it's not that the job goes away entirely, but what used to take 20 interns is now done by a couple people using AI, and know it's not that the job goes away entirely, but what used to take 20 interns is now done by a couple people using AI, and so it's massive. It's like a 10x compression in the class of jobs that college grads used to just flood, and so you're going to see the career services offices having skinnier and skinnier books. You're going to see more and more kids saying I don't get, I did everything. Families say we did everything right. You know, we spent a ton of money, we broke our relationship with our kid, we pushed them to do everything right, and that word gets around.
Speaker 1:Do I wish we had anticipated? Do we wish that we had realized that was going to happen instead of dealt with the fact that it is happening? Absolutely, I've tried, and I'm not the only one. Like Ken bless his heart, you know, as you know, he died in 2020, would share the same thing. You know they all nod. They all think this may.
Speaker 1:Yes, of course schools kill creativity, of course we shouldn't do that. But I think parents and I'm a parent right, and so when we started the school journey years ago, I was risk averse, trusting the system, thinking it would do good things for my kids. And fortunately I came to the realization it's not only not going to do good things, it's going to, it's going to do quite damaging things. And so I was able to, with that perspective, go rogue with them, kind of get the most of the good things out of school. I didn't know, you know SOAR didn't exist.
Speaker 1:Then I have to put in a bit of a plug, because two things here. One, garrett is incredibly, you know, I mean, he's inspiring to me, he's an outlier beyond all outliers, you know, like the number of 26-year-olds that would take on this mission and do the kinds of things he's doing. But also he's thought this through incredibly well. You know, we were trading notes the other day and I said, like Sora is, like you know, a full-featured iPhone 16, and schools are still clunky, landlines with switchboard operators.
Speaker 1:And so I think you're seeing and it's the story of education, it's the story of my book what School Could Be Pockets, you know, nooks and crannies where people are doing incredible things in a universe where too much of what's going on is obsolete, and what I worry about from a civil society point of view is that balance will tell the tale. The more kids that are on the right side of AI, the more educators are following in the footsteps of Sora, the better we have a chance of preserving holding things together, and the more we are playing out in five years what played out in 30 to 40 years, with robots replacing physical labor jobs. It's a chilling prospect.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, let's use that as a chance to change gears here for our last little segment of our conversation. This has been amazing and I'm really impressed with both of you, the passion and energy you bring to this cause and speaking truth. I mean, I think you, you are right that sometimes we're going to say it and say it until we're blue in the face and, um, you know, eventually there might be a sense that you know like, oh, I wish I had listened to Ted, but let's, let's do the, uh, let's do the final segment, which is advice. So I've got kids that are 20, 17, 15, and 13. So those are the ages of my four children, and I want this as practical as you can. I give them my advice, but I want advice from each of you.
Speaker 2:What would you be telling those kids as you look ahead at this rapidly evolving world that's going to help them be? You know, and you don't know them, so it's hard to give anything personal, but I think that's actually useful in this construct, because there's a lot of people listening that you don't know either. And so what are the generalized bits that you can take out of what you would tell a young person that's preparing to enter the world. And, garrett, I'll have you go first on this one, and then, and then ted, and we'll, we'll wrap up sure I'll be intentionally crude and hopefully this doesn't come across as overly cynical.
Speaker 4:I think kids should try to make money.
Speaker 4:I think there's something sobering about you're not just trying to go solve a problem, you are trying to solve a problem. Well enough that another human opens their wallet and gives you their hard-earned money as a show and a sign that you improve their life right. And I think, circling back to my comment about agency, it comes down to looking around the world, leading with your empathy, understanding humans and their plight, and understanding the human condition, especially for those you love, and try to make an impact, whatever tools you have at your disposal. And I like the frame that I read recently, which I think is more accurate than most takes, that what AI is going to let you do is do any job decently well as an individual right. It's going to become like single-player innovation a bit, where you have an infinite deck of mid-stage designers and engineers, yada, yada, at your disposal. So I just encourage people with that mindset, with the mindset of agency just go out there. Try to make a big enough difference that someone wants to give you money to say thank you.
Speaker 2:Such a clear, beautiful frame. I appreciate that.
Speaker 1:You know I build on that. I think America's locked in on this false choice career versus academics. And we have a new film coming out It'll be out in a couple of months called Multiple Choice, where we feature a school, public school that's elevated hands-on skills, elevated career-based education, so that kids at a high school are spending about a third of their time over the four years so not a little bit, but about a third of their time over four years diving into career-based education. Traditional economy of skills, new economy skills, but also in some ways, a mini version of national service, because instead of the AP kids only interacting with the AP kids and the mainstream kids only interacting with the mainstream kids, and the last chance career and technical education kids sent off on a bus, everybody comes together, respects each other's skills.
Speaker 1:So I'm with Garrett. You know like it's. You know we can't look down our nose at the ability to support yourself, doing something you're passionate about and being able to make ends meet. I mean like, is that the only thing? And I know Garrett's not saying that's the only thing, but should that be something about it? You know like I give this.
Speaker 1:I'm a guest lecturer at a well-known college with seniors and every year I ask seniors if schools shut down tomorrow morning and career services offices disappeared everywhere, how many of you are already so good at something you know you could create your own career path, doing something you enjoy and support yourself? Out of 100 kids it's typically two or three, not 70 or 80. And that's after 16 years of school. But back to the advice for parents. The main thing I put in front of any parent is think five times from Sunday before you wage war on your kid to make them try to do whatever it takes to get a slightly better GPA. I see that over and over and over again and I can tell parents the GPA doesn't change. The relationship goes to heck and your kid will feel terrible about what they're doing and you know so. Take a deep breath right.
Speaker 1:You know like sometimes the kid that goes rogue actually is the one who gets into the more selective college, because college admissions officers are pretty darn good at sniffing out the micromanaged kid. So you could be doing the whole thing. I love this one so many times. After I give a talk, parent will come up with a child in the spring. They will say, ted, you know we'd love your advice.
Speaker 1:You know we did everything right. We took 12 AP courses. Our GPA was 4.91. We did all these extracurricular activities, blah, blah, blah, blah blah, and we didn't get into any of our top choice colleges. And I say, you know, I think one of the problems is you were applying to colleges that were just accepting your child and not both of you. You need to look for a college that takes, because clearly you're a team, right. You need a college that takes both the parent and child, and that was your mistake. But that kid is always looking so unhappy. You know. The other thing is just whatever. Push, encourage, co-learn with your kid, dive into artificial intelligence. You know we use this. Will sound crazy, right, but my wife and I, when we have dinner, almost always have chat gpt on the table with the voice activated and we'll just turn and say you know like, instead of debating for 20 minutes. You know when did the vikings first come to north america? You know like, whatever which is hey, by the way you know like, when did this happen? Tell me more about this.
Speaker 1:I had a friend this, I thought, was telling one of my best friends is a total tech tech head. I mean, he's really, really smart. He's on the, the original digital shopping cart patent. He called me one day. He's driving, he grew up in and has family in West Virginia. He calls me going from West Virginia to Boston. He said you know, I just had a seven hour conversation with chat GPT just went on and on Because you know, artificial intelligence is the ultimate curiosity machine.
Speaker 1:Ask it a question, it tells you something. Ask a follow-up, ask a follow-up, ask a follow. You know it will. It brings out so many interesting things. So I just said your kids, you know like you could either do, you know, like this activity you have no interest in doing because somebody thinks it would look better to do a college admissions officer, or do Khan Academy or Kaplan test prep or some other baloney to try to get a better test score. Or, hey, what would you like to create and invent this month Using AI? Do something cool. What would be a great thing to do. And, to Garrett's point, find an organization in your community where you can identify an opportunity to help them be better. Use AI, create something, give it to them, Get them to give you a customer testimonial and then spend your summer being entrepreneurial and approaching other organizations and say I can do this for you for $250.
Speaker 1:Like, that's what I do. You know, like that, if I were a parent I'd be like, hey, school may not change. I could be. I beat my head against that cinder block wall a long time. My head is beaten to smithereens. The cinder block wall doesn't change, unless you're willing to move to Sora, which I'd recommend. You know you've got these extra hours. You can just say to your kid you need to pile more of the same on, hoping they'll have an incrementally better chance to get into college as you destroy their mental health and ruin your relationship. Or you can just take a deep breath and say you know, like 10 years from now people are going to be asking how good are you at AI, not where you went to college.
Speaker 2:Well, you heard it here first. This is amazing insights and advice and I appreciate you both. Thanks for sharing ideas for parents and kids and thanks for the conversation. It's been illuminating to me. Thanks for the great work you guys are doing. We'll put links to Ted's upcoming book and movie in the notes, if I can get them from you, ted, and then Garrett, we'll put a link to Sora School so people know what we're talking about. We'll also link back to the previous episode. This is the Garrett's the first repeat visitor on the Prenda podcast. So congratulations on being back again and, ted, thanks for being here with us.
Speaker 1:By the way, appropriately, it's the first repeat, but also, by the way, thanks for what you're doing. It's really inspiring, so I think we're all grateful for your fantastic work.
Speaker 2:It's a great time to be changing things for kids and just really appreciate knowing you both. So, thank you and, with that, have a great day everybody.
Speaker 3:The Kindled podcast is brought to you by Prenda. Prenda makes it easy to start and run an amazing micro school based on all the ideas we talk about here on the Kindled podcast. Don't forget to follow us on social media at Prenda Learn, and if you'd like more information about starting a micro school, just go to Prendacom.
