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Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning.
Hey everybody this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast and today, well podcast and YouTube as well. So you know, I don't want to sound too much like a boomer. I'm here with, speaking of non boomers, I'm here with my friend, Hannah Frankman of Rebel Educator. And here. Today we're going to talk about education, which is obviously a big thing. And it's a big deal. You know, and I've been through some education, I have children's going through some education. So it's kind of close to the heart. It's not one of those abstract topics for me. But Hannah, can you introduce yourself in a little bit more detail? Because you have an interesting background? And I want the listeners and viewers to know about that?
Yeah, absolutely. So I've been in tge alternative education world basically, my whole life. I grew up homeschooled. So I started at this thing when I was like six, was homeschooled first grade through 12. And then I skipped college to go work for a startup apprenticeship program that was billing itself as a college alternative. So basically, their offer was, instead of going to four years of business school, if you want to go break into the business world, spend a year going to this program, spend six months of that time working in an apprenticeship at a startup, learning the skill set that you need to actually work on a job. So I worked there for a few years became their program manager. So did a bunch of I did everything I did coaching, curriculum development, coaching training, got to have my hands on all different parts of the business. And then, for the past year, I've been running rebel educator, which is an alternative education media brand. So basically, we're a content hub with resources for parents on information on how to pull their kids out of public school and what to do with them insted.
All right, well, so I do have listeners and viewers who are not American. Can you tell them what homeschooling is? You know? Because? I mean, it's like it's illegal in certain countries. My understanding like in Germany, I think, right.
A lot of European countries. Yeah. So homeschooling for those who are not familiar is basically instead of sending you to a local public school, or a private school, your parents teach you at home. So your parents are your primary teacher. And there are it's hard to define very concretely because so many people approach homeschooling in different ways because it is by nature, a very customizable practice. So some people when they're homeschooling their kids, the parents are responsible for the kids education. But the kids are taking online classes are they're taking in person classes with experts in different fields. So they're learning from like a Spanish teacher how to speak Spanish, they're taking drama classes at a local theater. They're taking like Greek and Latin classes at a local school that specializes in classics education, some people are compiling an amalgam of resources to teach their kids outside of the home. Other kids, other families use curricula to teach everything at home and they buy curricula other parents use internet resources to teach there's a thing called unschooling, which is where you don't use a curriculum at all. And you kind of let the kids direct their education experience, which my homeschooling experience was sort of akin to that it was a bit structured, but there was definitely a fair amount of space for me to kind of dictate what I wanted to learn and what I was interested in. But homeschooling is it allows, the parents should develop an education that's very child centric, instead of centered on just the state requirements of what they think every kid should be learning, regardless of where they're at academically or what their, their interests are, which is why a lot of parents gravitate towards it in the US.
Yeah. Okay, so there's a couple of things. Actually, I want to follow up on the homeschooling thing. I mean, I guess the first thing is ideological motives for a lot of homeschoolers. And can you just like talk about the general, you know, distribution of this sort of thing? Because, you know, for example, a lot of people think that all homeschoolers are quote, "religious nuts", and I'm not trying to offend anybody. I'm just trying to like, represent the perspective there.
Yeah, which is absolutely not true. There definitely are quite a number of homeschoolers who are ideologically motivated in a variety of directions. So sometimes they want to give their kids have more Christian education and they don't have the resources to send them to a Christian private school or they don't have a good local Christian, private School. They want to teach their kids you know, they don't want to teach them biology and evolution they want to teach them creationism is like one of the sort of memes about this. But honestly, that's a pretty small subset of homeschoolers. There are a lot of other ideological reasons that people keep their kids out of school. So with the political climate that we have now and have had for the past few years, a lot of parents are choosing to homeschool. Because of that they don't want the conversations that are happening in the classroom to influence the way that their kids perspectives on the world are developing. A lot of parents homeschool for academic reasons. The state standards in public schools are actually pretty terrible. And the academic outcomes are pretty rough. When you start looking into the numbers, it's pretty shocking how little the average person comes out of school learning. And so a lot of parents will keep their kids out of school because they just want to teach them at a more rigorous standard than the public schools are. Sometimes parents pulled our kids out of schools for things like bullying, or socialization. That was one for my parents, I was pretty bullied when I was a little kid. And they didn't really want me exposed to that. And they wanted me to have just like, an education that was a little less colored by pop culture and a little more colored by the things that I was interested in.
Wait wait, we're talking about color. I gotta ask, is the bullying due to your, you know, hair?
Yes, that was actually one of the things that made me stand out and that kids made fun of yeah,
See this the thing - Ginger inclusion people like this is the prejudice that dare not say its name in our age, you know, let's keep it real here. But yeah, you know, we're talking about I mean, there's all sorts of reasons. And, you know, you've alluded to it, but I want to ask something which teachers have asked me, and just, you know, disclosure, quote, unquote, my own daughter was, we did do homeschooling for about a year and a half. A lot of it had to do with issues with whatever principal at the school, the curriculum, whatever, and she's not homeschooled anymore. But, um, so I have a little bit of experience with it. And this is a question that was literally asked by a friend, who was a teacher, and the teacher said, you know, said, 'I'm a professional. Why do you think you can educate your children? When you know, they have a severe illness? You take them to a doctor? You don't... You know' What do you say to that?
Well, first of all, I get this all the time on Twitter, that is a very, very common comparison that people make is like, Well, you wouldn't perform surgery on your kids. So why would you? Why do you think you can teach them at home. And it's really comparing apples to oranges, first of all, very, very different sets of skills and requirements for performing surgery versus teaching a child. So a lot of people don't like if you've been in the system, your entire life, you went through normal school, you went to college, you just sort of default to the assumption that you will also send your kids down the same path. There's this sort of separation in your mind between learner and teacher where, you know, teachers have training and how to how to educate kids, and they, they have some special skill set that allows them to teach kids correctly. But when you take a step back, and you actually look at what's what's happening in the process of learning, it's really not magic. And it's really not rocket science. If you can read a book, and if you can Google a question and find sources to answer a question that your kid might be asking you that you don't know the answer to, you can educate your child, which is a very controversial statement to make a lot of people get really mad at me when I say this, but it's true. And I would say, you know, I'm, look at my life as proof of that, like, that's what my parents did. And I'm relatively articulate and relatively well read and relatively successful. Like I'm supporting myself making a living doing things that I'm passionate about. So clearly, it's working, like where's the gap here? And I think, you know, we, we have this very outdated idea of what education is. The world has completely changed since the invention of our education system. When you look at the original foundations of the university system, the reason they were designed their primary purpose was to be a central locus of information. So it wasn't easy to access books. It wasn't easy to access scholars, so you had to go to the city and you had to go to the university. In order to access information, and our education system, as it has expanded over time has been modeled off of that assumption that you need a central locus of scholars and information in order to learn. And for much of history, that was true, you had to go to the place the books were in order to read them. When the internet went online, it changed everything. It made it easy, almost instantaneous, to be able to access any book that's ever been written any resource you could ever want to access. So teachers no longer have gated in access to information, the way that they historically did. So it's much easier to become the facilitator and the deliverer of information for your children. But even before the invention of the internet, and information access coming online, when you look at the history of education, especially in America, our literacy rates were very high. Before we had a centralized education system, they were actually very comparable to what they are today. And most kids were being taught to read by their parents, most kids were being taught arithmetic and business and history and whatever other skills were being taught in the home because they were useful to kids, when they became adults, were being taught by their parents. And when you look at the historical record, we had a huge number of entrepreneurs, we had a huge number of very successful individuals in the trades. But we also had people who were not only could they read, but they could read at a very high level, like the Federalist Papers are considered challenging college reading today. And those were, those were essays that were written to be distributed in just like the newspaper to be read by the common man to influence their opinions on the formation of a new republic. And today, like people in high school, think that's really hard to read. And so our literacy rates were very high. And our reading comprehension was very high, all without standardized education. So clearly, we know how to do this, we know how to teach our kids. And the argument also kind of falls apart when you think about, you know, if you went through the education system, and you learned all of this stuff, you should be able to teach it to your kids, right. Like, the only thing that's missing is pedagogy. Like knowing how to the art of how to teach it. But that part's really not that hard, like you read to your kids, you explain to them how phonetics work, which by the way, schools often don't teach, which is very backwards. You teach them how to sound out words, you teach them how to read, all of a sudden, you have a reader, like you don't need some very complex degree in the science of reading in order to be able to teach your child the skill that you have and can practice.
Yeah, you know, let me let me decompose some stuff here. Because you, you through a lot of people, I had AP history, you know, which, you know, my teacher was good gonna say that. But um, so I actually know some of this history. And, you know, with universal literacy, a lot of that was driven by, you know, radical Protestantism, and, you know, the demand, especially in the Puritan colonies for reading, reading the Bible, stuff like that. So that's a thing. In the 19th century, we have the emergence of public schooling at Horace Mann. And I don't want to get into the weeds of this. But you know, there's an ideological aspect here, there were a large number of Catholics that showed up at this period, Germans and Irish, and they started demanding their own religious instruction. And the whole idea of public schools, in particular in New England was to create a new citizen, a model American, and inculcate Protestant, you know, Anglo Saxon values in these people. And so there was an ideological motive aside from instruction to do reading, writing, and arithmetic. So when you're talking about education, there's a functional aspect, obviously, in terms of the curriculum of what you're being taught, but in the American system, it's also been important to create citizens. And so that part, you know, there's always been arguments between the state and cultures, parents at the local level, and localities. And so, you know, we just need to keep that in mind, in other nations as it differs the balance but I think that's always there, in terms of socialization, identity formation, and then also learning technical skills. So if I was gonna teach my kids science, I mean, look at the elementary level, I can pretty much teach it all. You know, there's a certain level of math where, you know, I might not be able to teach but, you know, honestly, most kids are not going to get to that level of math. I can obviously teach the stats you know, so everyone varies, but you know, we're talking to elementary schoolers and reasonably educated adults should probably be able to Have the teacher at least the technical skills. And then you're talking about phonetics and pedagogy. And there's all these theories that are going on. And a lot of us, some of us like it, some of us don't. Okay, I'm in the class that doesn't like a lot of those things. And I think the traditional ways probably are the best. They've been around for 1000s of years, even before public schools and universities, obviously pedagogy existed, there's classical education, there was the pre Christian Roman system, the Chinese had their own ways. So others, like a lot of - the menu is large, and we're picking off the menu. And that's, that's where a lot of our arguments are coming from right. Now, you mentioned, I want to jump to this because this is, again, I'm thinking of what my well, quite well educated and I've done surveys, you know, like, half of my listeners here have graduate degrees of some sort. So you, you know, you didn't, you don't have a college degree, and you went straight into the world. And that freaks a lot of people out when Peter Thiel was giving young people money, to not go to college. That triggered a lot of outrage. Really, really emotional outrage. And so when you say something like that, that's going to make a lot of people, especially older people that have put more than a decade of their life sometimes into post, secondary school, post high school, education, whether it's undergraduate, graduate, professional school, it's going to cause a lot of consternation. So can you just like, talk about that a little like, why are you pretty sanguine about the fact that like, more and more people, I mean, college, people going to college is increasing. But I also see another stream of very accomplished successful people that just opt out. Why are you guys doing this? And, you know, why is this possibly a way for the future?
Yeah, that's a really good question. And there are there are a lot of pieces to this. So I think there are some very practical reasons why more and more of us are choosing not to go through the system. And it definitely a rising tide, like I graduated from high school in 2015. And there was I was remember googling what to do if you don't go to college, and almost nothing came up in the search results. And now you Google and every major publication has multiple op eds about stories of people who've done - who've have taken this path. So the resources are definitely expanding for people the movements growing, and I think there are a few reasons. So one is college has become incredibly expensive. The cost is inflated dramatically. And the salaries of graduates have not inflated accordingly. The the unemployment rates of college graduates are pretty low. The the rate of graduates defaulting on their loans is pretty high, like just statistically speaking, it's not a guaranteed good investment. And it's become increasingly easy for people to take alternative paths and derive the same results that they would have been going to college to achieve. Like people told me when I decided I wasn't going to go to college that I really should just go for the college experience. And I really should go for the network, even if I didn't want to go into a field that required a degree by law or by practice. But I've been able to build the same type of network that people told me I needed to go to college to get outside of college through things like Twitter and the internet at large and, you know, going to cities that are hubs for people who are working on interesting things and meeting people in those cities and networking through them. You know, I know people who are affiliated with all of the big universities that people told me I should go to and I met those people and became friends with those people without having to pay the tuition cost of going to the university. So I think that's a factor. It's just becoming easier to take these paths, some of the, the social pressures to take the normal path are starting to dissipate. Like it's just not quite as scandalous to not go to school as it used to be. We sort of had this like accelerated curve where it used to not be that common to go to college used to really mean something in terms of differentiating yourself from the population at large. Like if you had a degree it signaled a set of things that most people weren't signaling. And then it just became really, really common to go to school. And more and more people were doing it too all the way and like until we got to a level where it almost became kind of culturally shocking to not go socially shocking to not go and now that that that wave is starting to break again, where enough people are not going like it's still the average person who's well educated still kind of has a knee jerk reaction to this being an unsafe path, or a strange path or a wreckless path, it kind of depends on their come from, which category, where on the spectrum they fall. But there is there are enough people who understand now these alternative routes, that it's not such a social liability anymore. Like you kind of had to be a renegade when I did this -
Maybe a rebel, maybe a rebel,
Exactly - to be willing to incur the social costs. And I feel like for kids graduating now, it's not that that's not quite as much the case as it was a little under a decade ago.
Okay. Well, you know, I think one thing I want to probe here is, you just said, the average person, you know, The Economist, Tyler Cowen had this idea of averages over and, you know, one thing that I've noticed is there's a certain type of person that goes the entrepreneurial route that skips college, but, I mean, do you still see a, a role for institutions, like universities in the future? Because, you know, one of the things that I wanted to talk to you about is, you're obviously a pro education person, you're devoting your life in a way to education, but you're not really an institutional person. But so, I mean, can we like, Can we walk and chew gum at the same time here, in terms of there's like a narrow, you know, you're talking with things like student default rates, and you know, there's issues like with college completion, to be candid, you can see that the weaker students in the half of the, you know, whatever college age population that is, in a four year university, at some point, are the ones that really seem not to be getting as much of a benefit. And then there's also individuals at the high end where, look, they're selling apps at 16. Do they really need to go to college at 18 sharp and get their general education when they're actually adding to the productive economy? This is just some of the things that I'm thinking, Can you can you expand on a little?
Yeah, so I think, one I don't think college is, is going away in our lifetimes, like, we will not, I will not in my lifetime exist in a world where colleges don't exist and are a relic of the past. Like they're far too entrenched, culturally, if nothing else, but also they do serve a purpose. There are reasons why people want to be in a milieu full of people who share the same interests, as them are intellectually curious are young and ambitious, and trying to figure out their path. Maybe it's still a safe place for people to go, if you take the finances out of the equation. For people to go if they don't really know what they want to do yet, and they're trying to figure it out. Personally, I think that's a really big waste of money. If you don't have a scholarship to take that approach, I think it makes much more sense to go work for a while and figure out what you like and what you don't and then go to school. But, you know, it's it's still a culturally acceptable path for people to take. They don't know what they want to do. But so colleges aren't going away. But also, you know, we need to replace the if, if we're going to change the model, we have to somehow replace these these central hubs for research and for academic pursuit for people who are doing this as a lifelong profession. And we don't really have a viable model yet, to replace those things. Like there's there are other paths people can take, if they want to be, you know, go into different research based fields. I mean, I think you're a great example of that, where you're, you're constantly researching things and stuff, but you're you're working in the private sector, you're not in in a at a university. But you know that there's a lot there that needs to change. And you mentioned the Thiel fellowship to and that's another great example of this, where Peter Thiel wanted to support young people going into STEM fields to go actually build stuff, instead of going to the university systems. But that's not a scalable model, that he was giving away 20 $100,000 grants a year, that's $2 million a year that he's putting into this, that's a lot of money, but that's a very small number of people that it's serving. So I don't think the model is going anywhere. But I do think, you know, you mentioned the young person who is maybe already quite technically talented, or quite entrepreneurially ambitious. And like, you know, does that person need to go to school? Is it more prudent if they don't? I think in a lot of cases, they're sort of it's a case by case thing, but I think there's sort of a an inverse cost benefit analysis that you also have to run is like, well, if you don't go to college, what are you missing out on? But also if you go to college, what are you missing out on? Because one of the things that really surprised me about being a young person who wasn't in school is that I actually feel like I got some, there were some advantages that worked in my favor, by being a young person who was trying to break into the startup world was really intellectually curious, had some academic proclivities, even though she wasn't in school, like people love helping young people. And you can use that to your advantage in your late teens and early 20s. If you want to build something, people are extra excited to talk to the hungry young person who kind of reminds them of themselves when they were young. And by the time I was 22, which is how old I would have been when I was graduating from college. I was like, the program manager at a startup that was getting national media attention, like our CEO was on going on the news, and I was, you know, running their curriculum development. Um, that's a pretty cool position to be in from, like, launching your career standpoint. And, you know, I had I had a big leg up on the average college attende, not somebody who's like, really, you know, academically, like pushing themselves and had like, you can, you can get a lot farther than that in college, you but the average person going to college is not that far along. So I had a really big leg up.
Yeah, I mean, I'll say one thing. So for my startup, I mean, a lot of listeners will know, you can Google me and find out what that is. But we do hire. And I will say, I think. Okay, I think everyone has a college degree, but I'm not sure. Which I think tells you something. So, yeah, the issue is, you know, you know, you know, so I'm in you know, "tech" quote, unquote. And what have you done? What's your work product? You know, what did people say about you? So, obviously, if you have a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon, okay, you know, you're, you know, but that's not necessary for most people are going to have that. And so what I'm, what I'm saying here is, you know, there are many fields where if you are a talented, smart, motivated person, you will do very well, in fact, you know, I know people who did not even graduate high school, who are very successful. Now, this doesn't mean that this is an easy path, you should take drop out at 16, you better have some talent, you better have some hustle, whatever, you have talent and hustle. It's actually a plausible path, and I'm not gonna lie, I mean if I was a teenager, again, I might, I probably would do, I probably would suggest that I do this. I am not sure if I was emotionally ready to go to college at 18. People are different, you know, some people are ready, some people aren't. And so this is the path, this is the way and I don't think that we can ignore it any more. People are different, we're diverse. Some people want that stamp of, of credibility, they want that kind of, you know, conveyor belt, getting the high school degree, getting the college degree, getting a job at Procter and Gamble, going up middle management, you know, and that's fine. And some of the listeners out there like that, and thank you for your service. You know, I mean, you have a good living, and that's super important. But then there's others who want to be entrepreneurs and kind of want to do different things. And college isn't sometimes a little bit of an awkward fit for that, you know, and I, you know, okay, if you're listening to this podcast, or viewing this podcast, you know, that I actually value learning for its own sake, I am not holding it against you, if you want to go to Tufts and get a philosophy degree, and then go into software, you know, but remember, that's a four year opportunity cost, in terms of the experience and the networking that you could get. So you better love philosophy, which is fine if you do. But some people, they just go to college as the thing. And then they major in English, or philosophy or political science, or they do something different. And, you know, I have like, passion for certain things outside of my professional speciality. And I talked to some people and like they majored in history or philosophy, and they don't care. They don't know, they don't want to talk about it. What were you doing for those four years? You know, what were you doing with your life? Were you just partying because, I mean, I don't want to speak out of school, so to speak here, but there's a lot of partying in the tech world. I mean, you don't need to go to college and you could actually be making money. And this is like, I feel like I'm doing like some weird infomercial. But, you know, I've had some learnings in my life. And I've seen people go through, you know, various different alternatives. And, you know, I myself, you know, most listeners, viewers know, I went to graduate school and I loved it. And you know, I learned a lot, but again, there's an opportunity cost there are some people Would I go to graduate school again? I'm actually not sure about that. But I'm not saying that I wouldn't. There are some people, it's quite clear they shouldn't have, it was a waste of time, but they didn't know what to do with their life. So I guess the issue here is, what do you do with your life, you need to kind of decide when you're a teenager, when people used to become adults. And we had a system, especially after World War Two, where it was like, Okay, you will go work at the factory, you go to go to college, like you had a system where as long as you didn't rock the boat, and you showed up for, for work on time, you would eventually be promoted, you know, you could be, you know, working at Ford on the assembly line, and you had a, you know, summer home, you know, on Lake Michigan, I mean, these are the cliche stereotypical things, but they were true, you know, they're not true anymore. You know, this is the 2020s. And, you know, life is, there's a lot more just in time, a lot more adaptation. And this is why I think I'm having this discussion actually, with Hannah, because we have a university system that was designed to the mid 20s 20th century, really, I mean, land grants, other things emerged earlier, but you know, it kind of coalesced after World War Two, and there was a good institutional system there that worked for a couple of generations. And, you know, this is what the boomers know, the baby boomers, you know, and I'm not like saying Boomer in a pejorative way, just like, objectively, you know, my mother in law, she went to university, and I don't know, she was paying like a couple of $100 a semester to go to Berkeley. So it's a, that's a whole different world, in the 1960s, that we live in, and we're talking about the present here. So, you know, obviously, there are problems in higher education. But, you know, higher education and institutional education are just types of education. And, you know, Hannah, you, you, obviously, are passionate about education. Can we talk about some of the ways going forward, like what are you proposing, what are you interested in? What are you learning about?
Yeah, so for for K through 12. The future is here. It's not just not evenly distributed to steal the the good old, the good old tech adage, the future is already here. There are so many different models that have existed for many years and are expanding and new models that are being developed that really offer a range of options, which is part of the the key to this is, you know, we had for a long time, we tried to operate under the assumption that there was a one size fits all model, which really isn't true. But there there's a really diverse range of of schooling options for parents to choose from depending on their kids aptitudes and proclivities. So obviously, homeschooling is a great option for families who can, who can afford to do so who can logistically do so and whose kids are, are excited by the prospect not every kid is excited by being home all day with their parents. But for those who are, it's a great model. And there's a lot of different hybrid options too, with like homeschooling pods, where families get together and homeschool together or different types of co op structures where you're taking classes as a collective as homeschoolers, to like distribute the cost of hiring like a language teacher or something. There are micro schools that's a really a very quickly growing movement, the way I would describe it is think of like a one room schoolhouse for the 21st century, but with the level of information access that the 21st century allows. So you have the the personalization and the custom attention of a one room schoolhouse, that you have access via the Internet to every piece of information ever created by man and uploaded to the internet. So it's kind of a best of both worlds scenario. There are lots of different types of hybrids in person schools that are being developed, the Montessori movement is really expanding. There are different types of models that people are developing with their in person schools, like Acton Academy is really growing. That's a really interesting alternative model of in person school. There are tons of online schools that are expanding and being developed. There's a thing called World schooling, which is really popular among nomadic families, but it's open to families, you know, anywhere in the country as the idea or basically your your kids in online school. And they're taking a class and something that they're interested in with a kid from India and a kid from Austria and a kid in Norway and a kid in in Calgary up in Canada, and then a kid in you know, like the Great Basin desert in Utah. And they're getting to learn not just the course material, but also from the cultural differences of the different kids in the class that they're learning with. Which is a really a really cool way to leverage some of the power over the internet. So there are tons and tons of different models for K through 12 education. And the same is true for college level education too, it's a little less. There, the options are a little less focused on the academic side of things, there are fewer things being built to replicate that it has to be a little bit more self designed. But there are tons of different types of alternative programs, especially boot camps, that are arising to address the career readiness side of college because college does multiple things, right? It's teaching you how to be prepared to go into the professional world, it's also teaching you it's training the mind for a lifetime of grappling with problems and thinking through things. And on the career readiness side, which college actually does a pretty bad job of statistically, there are lots of different types of boot camp programs that are being developed. If you want to learn to program you go to lambda school, you want to learn how to be a sales or marketing professional, you go into like a Marketing Bootcamp. So there's tons of stuff like that that's also being developed to replace. Like on the structural side of things, if you're looking for just a program, you want to you want to defer to someone else to tell you what your next step should be. Because you just don't know yet. Those can be a great option. But again, like for people who are self directed enough for anywhere from like, you know, kindergarten all the way through college age, there's so much information at your fingertips, like you can go down the rabbit hole studying every Warren Buffett video on YouTube, if you want to learn about finance, or you can go into every you find you find a scholar on medieval history, if you're fascinated by that, and you just go listen to every lecture they've ever done, that's uploaded to YouTube. And you can get a world class education doing that plus institutions like MIT and Yale and Harvard, they have free courses, online recordings of entire semesters, online for free, that you can go through, like you could access whatever you want to learn.
So, you know, I feel like, we have the technology, you know, with the new AI, and also, you know, meeting people in other parts of the world. And as you said earlier, you know, the modern system is a modern system, you know, having like, 20 to 40 kids in a school room, whatnot, you know, aristocrats in the past had private tutors, you know, they're educated at home, they don't say homeschooling, if it's a rich aristocrat of the 18th century, they were educated at home, you know?
Yeah, but we're just opening up access to that now because of technology to
Yes, yes
you can have a private tutor via like Khan Academy.
Yes, yes. And, you know, I, you know, I do need to say, there was a thought, you know, I didn't mention, you know, you teach skills, you know, learning blah, blah, blah, you know, don't say blah, blah, blah, but then the whole citizen ideology, part of schooling, and then there's another part, which is much more relevant, probably for university, and you know, Brian Kaplan, who, you know, obviously, has talked about, you know, the signaling theory. And, you know, going to Harvard, Stanford in particular, and going back to tech, and startups, they do open doors, in terms of your networking, the social networks you can break into. So that's the thing, we need to acknowledge that. And, you know, the signaling value varies, if you have an English degree from, I don't want to say any particular university. So let me just say, obscure State University somewhere, you know, we're not talking University of Michigan here, you know, what does that signaling? I mean, honestly, for a lot of people, they don't think you're that smart. And they just assume you didn't know what you were going to do with your life. You know, now, if you went to Harvard, and majored in English, okay, well, you went to Harvard, like, You got to be good, kinda smart, kinda connected or very charming, you got some skills, you know, you got a good personality, you know, if you're not Asian, you know. So, you know, you got this signaling aspect, and I think we are gonna have to confront it. And I think you made a plausible case, and I've seen it in my own life, you know, so I want to, I want to editorialize a little bit just warning for viewers and listeners, you can like, go forward if you don't want to hear Razib talk, you know, but that because like, you know, I'm obviously like interviewing Hannah here, but I just want to like, I need to get in my - say my peace here. I got kids. I got three kids. They're the elementary school system. A lot of the things Hannah is talking about, I kind of know about personally, I have skin in the game. And a lot of the technologies that she's talking about, you know, are just, I've actually we've had to make recourse to. So for example, the schools that these are good public schools, you know, top 2% in the state. They don't really teach real math, or they do but it's a very low level. It's called math equity. And so everyone is equally mediocre, you know, and so, you know, I have to get ir do things like Russian math, or various math camps Berkeley math camp, some of you guys might know, actually not too many. Because, you know, we see the number of kids and although like one of the kids is actually the kid of an old friend of mine from 20 years ago, and he lives in California, so it's like, I don't know, that's weird. So you know, we have to, like, do these things to enrich, quote, unquote, "enrich". And that means they are financial transfer for me to them, and I can afford it. Obviously, not rich, but you know, I can enrich them, you know, that way. But most people can't do that. So this is serious, in terms of public school should be for the public. And what if you can't afford this? What if you don't know what if both your parents are working, and they're busy, or they're immigrants, and they don't have the social networks to understand, to really teach your kids math, you know, you gotta get Singapore math curriculum, or Russian math and not the school's you know, you don't do programming, you have to chess, you'll do all these other things, because the schools are not providing it. They're doing, quote, "social and emotional learning", which is BS, if you Google it, it's vapid, it's vacuous. This is a content less pedagogy that was produced in the last generation, I could go on and on. And you know, I do have friends who are more establishmenterian and mainstream. And they're like, Oh, you're, you know, they literally will say, like, You're repeating Fox News talking points. And I'm like, No, I'm, I'm repeating Razib Khan lived experience talking points. Okay. So I'm sorry, if I've offended people out there, but it's gonna keep it real here. This is a very important topic. We are, you know, our kids are not being educated. They're not learning. And it's scary. And so why I'm passionate about it. So can I can you just like to talk a little about its relevance to geopolitics and stuff like that, like, how is it abroad versus right here?
Yeah so on a world stage, academic standards in America have have fallen drastically over the past few decades. We're not really competitive on a global scale, when it comes to like, our literacy rates, our math abilities on a national level, and that should should concern people more than it does when you think about, you know, our economic future, we are a global player, economically, we do need to be able to be competitive in order to continue to flourish. And, you know, we're we're much more concerned, as you said, with like equity, and teaching kids, you know, how to how to be socially conscientious. And -
Actually, I apologize for intervening here. Can you define what equity is because it has a very precise definition, that's not colloquial. And we know, but a lot of non Americans will not know. And actually, a lot of Americans don't know, because they think it's crazy when you describe it, but describe it?
Well, actually instead of me describing it, can you describe what you meant? When you said equity math, I feel like you can actually give like, they'll check your kid, whereas I would be giving like a broader definition.
Yeah so basically, you know, things like equality of opportunity, which is kinda like what we talked about in America, you know, access, it allows kids to take advantage of resources to, you know, whatever their talent level is. The argument from maybe a social justice perspective, I'll say is like, well, people start with, like, different resources. So my kids have way more resources than I don't know, like a poor kid. I mean, I can say that. And also, you know, I would honestly say, I mean, like, okay, like, I'm a geneticist here, they have some human capital advantage. Okay, as some of its heritable, some of its non heritable, some of its cultural, okay. So when you're doing equality of access, they're going to be able to take more advantage of it. So equity is the idea that the outcomes are going to be more equalized, and that you kind of compensate for the different places people start out from, and that's kind of an innocuous way to say it, how does it functionally operationally work out? Well, it works out that they keep the math instruction, for example, at a very low level, my daughter has many, many grades ahead. And she's extremely bored, and she hates math. And when the teachers are confronted with this, they just explained, look, we're focused on the bottom 25% We want to get them up to snuff. And your kids can actually help them learn. Why are they in school? So it's just it feels like you're being you know, gaslighted whatever the you know, the, they're like, trying to make you feel like you're crazy. You're not crazy. You're just really confused. And so then you have to get external math. And, you know, the, the administrators like we've had discussions, they're quite proud of what they're doing. They're quite proud of shutting down accelerated math tracks, what used to be called gifted programs. They're very proud of it. So they want to equalize everything. And that's a vulgar way to say it and describe what equity is, but that is actually what practically, they're doing. And it's driving me insane. So
Sometimes vulgarity is just being precisely descriptive. But yeah, it's it When you when you look at the way people describe equity, it sounds so innocuous. It sounds so kind at first glance, it's like, Okay, we're gonna focus on the kids that are struggling the most. And the kids who are farther along can help. And there's not, there is a grain of truth to that there's a grain of correctness, where it's like, yes, the kids that are struggling, they do need extra support. And also yes, it actually is like a scientifically tested and effective model that have kids who are farther along helping kids who are behind kids are more incentivized to learn from other kids versus from an adult. And it reinforces your own learning to then go teach it to someone else. So it sounds at first glance, like this is not a terrible idea. But then when you stop and you think about it, you're you're one I mean, really, the primary thing that you're doing is inhibiting the growth of the most promising kids, the kids who are farthest along and not every kid, it's not like a straight line continuum, how every kid learns, there's a lot of nuance here, like some kids are ready to read when they are four years old. And other kids are eight years old, and they still struggle to sound out multi syllable words. But most of those kids sort of like the gap between them normalizes as they get, or it shrinks once they hit, you know, like middle school. So a lot of people's panic about their young kids not being readers is it doesn't their, their inability, or lack of desire to read when they're young, like doesn't correlate with their long term literacy, it's most of the time, it's just like, the circuits haven't come online in the same in the same order for different kids are on the same timeline. But if you have that five year old kid, who is like reading all the Dr. Seuss books, and they're ready for something like a little bit more complicated, and you tell them no, no, like, you need to help Bobby over here, sound out his, you know, like cat, that, rat, because he's not wet ready to read yet. Instead of being deeply curious and hungry, to go read the next book, and then the next book and like chase this, this naturally unfolding intellectual exploration that can lead to a lifelong love of learning and curiosity and information consumption. Instead, this child is being told consistently like no, don't follow that don't don't keep doing that. You need to do this very boring thing to help your friend learn this thing that just like clicked for you very naturally, one day when you were four, because you were just ready to read. And it kills that child's love of learning. And it kills that child's love of reading. And that's the same thing is happening, like with the math example and with, with all of these different subjects is when you have you're forcing kids to, to to hobble themselves, you are sapping their joy of learning, you are sapping their desire to naturally pursue these things that they are good at. But you're also you're you're crushing their long term potential, like you could have Rockstar students who are way ahead of everybody else in mathematics, which is a net positive to everyone. It's not a zero sum game. It's not like, well, you know, this kid over here, got all the math aptitudes. And now there's none left for anyone else. Like that's not how it works. You're the rising tide lifts all boats, if your kids really good at math, and then they're like building, they're using that math to build algorithms that makes everyone else's life better. That's a huge net positive, when you drag everybody down to the lowest common denominator, you just crush everyone's potential. And so we're so worried about this culturally about not hurting kids feelings and making sure that everyone's equal, that we're completely missing. The fact that our test scores are plummeting. Across the country, our literacy rates are terrible. Our math aptitude rates are horrific. And we can't complete compete on a global scale, which, you know, like, there's, you can even look at this in different ways. It's like, well, you know, like, my child is the most important thing, like I care about the individual kid, I care about their potential and like on a local scale, and that's like, all fine and good. That's important to like, yes, that is, that is the singular indivisible thing that you should care about. But your child is competing in a global economy, where other countries especially like, you know, newly first world countries or countries, you know, rising into the fourth world,
the People's Republic of China.
Yes, exactly, exactly. Yes, they have, um, they, they drilled their kids with with mathematics and science when one of my really good friends grew up in Taiwan. And when she talks about how she would, you know, have her normal school, um, her normal school day, and then she would go to like, math camp afterwards, basically, and then drill like all evening, late into the night studying math, and I'm just like, oh my gosh, like, that would seem so inhumane here, like a parent couldn't do that to their kid. But that's that's the norm in these other countries in there, you know, you, it becomes a local issue very dramatically and very quickly, when all of a sudden your child is entering the workforce and they're being out competed for a job by someone in India or China or somewhere else in the in the world who has fantastic English skills, and fantastic maths skills, and is like actually more technically proficient than they are, but also cost a fraction of the price because they're in a location with a lower cost of living, all of a sudden, your kid can't compete anymore. And we're kind of we're kind of at the top of the food chain still, in some ways, because we're just sort of grandfathered in, like, we've just, we have all the infrastructure here to be at the top of the food chain. We've been here for a long time. But we're not really there by merit anymore in terms of academics. And I think people are going to be in for a really rude awakening as as things like, I mean, even like Fiverr and Upwork are taking jobs offline, then you've got AI to that you're competing against, and now like robots can do a lot of things way cheaper than than a human can. And then you've got all this offshore talent that's becoming incredibly proficient, and all of a sudden, like, where's the edge anymore? It's not, it's not going to be there. And people are going to be, I think, really, really surprised in a very unpleasant way when all of a sudden, the job prospects just aren't there anymore.
Yeah, and you what Hannah's saying here. I have friends who are in academia who are young professors, assistant professors are like nothing I have tenure there associate professors. But they do tell me and this could be just curmudgeon, old people talk, that the undergraduate stream is changing, and they do seem less informed and kind of less prepared, also more emotionally fragile. I mean, look, everything that they're doing no offense, I'm sorry, if you're a teacher out there, or were a teacher, but you know, they're learning less, it seems. And also, they're cracking under pressure a lot, you know, so I mean, like, what's going on here? And, you know, I told I mentioned this on social media, a friend of mine has an intern who's really great, Tulane graduate for non Americans Tulane is very selective, good university, not Harvard, but it's in the second tear after that, right. She didn't know who Mao Tse-tung was. You know, so it's like, we just don't don't know things. I think a lot of this is the focus on skills that happened with No Child Left Behind, as opposed to facts. You know, not that - I don't want to sound like, you know, Hersh her . But I mean, I'm saying like Hersh, you know. So, there's some serious issues here. It's not just, like, it's not just rhetoric I hear out there. It's actually what I hear from people that I know, you know, and you know, our children are not learning, right, like to re emphasize, I want to ask here, we're talking about kids, I got kids, I know you want kids. So you know, you have a future investment in this issue. There are a lot of people, we're an aging country, average age is now 40, you know, and there's a lot of retired people, their kids are graduated. You know, their kids are adults. And there's a lot of people like 30-35%, of millennial women, for example, and I say women because women, bear and have children are probably not going to have children. So there's the constituency, for public school or focused on school and education as a whole, because you could do vouchers, you could do other things. You know, there are literally people who say, I sound like a millennial say literally like that. But in any case there are people, there are people who say, you know, I'm not going to have kids, I'm a child free person. Why should I pay with my taxes for the schools and all of this stuff, you know, like you pay. So we're, you know, we're talking here about, like, anti institutionalism or not, you know, outside of the institutions privatization, other things implicitly, you know, homeschooling implicitly, it's privatization, you know, it's not a private school, but it's in your private home. And so these people will say, Well, you know, what, like, let's privatize everything, and you pay for what you use as a user fee. And, you know, I mean, I probably have some anarcho libertarian listeners or viewers are like, Yay go! Most people are not most people are not like that. I want you talk a little bit about someone who I know you like children and know you want children. So you know, you're a pro child person. And I have three and so I'm pro child by my actions, I guess.
Yoy better be by this point.
At this point, yeah. Yeah. Yes, that's fair. You'll get you just talk about why children are important. Why this isn't a very, very important topic. I mean, look, I have skin in the game. It's important topic for me, but you know what, even if you don't have kids. It's an important topic talking about it. I mean, you have said things which like, okay, you can connect the dots. But some people need you to connect the dots. So do it. Do it for me.
Yeah. So there's so many things that you just said that I want to that I want to touch on. But I'm gonna answer your question very literally first. So even if you don't have children, all of this still affects you. Because well, first of all, if you don't have children, if you're one of those 35%, of millennial women, one in three millennial women who doesn't have children and won't have children, who's going to take care of you, when you get old is going to be people who are the product of the education system, and the quality of their education is going to impact the quality of your life, you're living in a culture that is being run by politicians that are being voted for by public school graduates, your your existing, you're relying on infrastructure systems that are built by people who are public school graduates, you're going to be cared for when you're old, by people who are public school graduates. So you absolutely have skin in the game, even if you don't have children. And I think a lot of us are very bad at thinking about the downstream effects of things. It's like, well, there's no obvious immediate impact on my life, through within any change in public school policy, because I'm I don't have a kid in school like, very, very logical, very understandable conclusion to come to when you hear something about education come up in the news. But, but to your point about about Horace Mann and the creating of citizens, the education system was very explicitly a social engineering experiment, you say that, and people go like, Oh, that's just like a Twitter conspiracy theory. But it's, it's very true. And it was explicitly stated that we lived in this rapidly industrializing society in the late 1800s. And we needed to be able to produce the different pieces of this very complex system in terms of human capital to keep the whole thing running. So the education system was very explicitly designed as an experiment to see can we consistently produce the types of people that keep this whole thing up and running, can we can we produce a consistent number of machine operators versus farmers versus truck drivers versus like, you know, line managers versus railway conductors, like all these different things that we need for this, like complex national system that we've never had before, and that like, you know, at a level that we've never seen historically, and that's what the education system does, it creates all the pieces that keep the keep the whole system running. And it started out as a much more industrial system in the early 20th century, and then it's become a more and more corporate system, as, as our culture has evolved over time. But this system is, it is all, it all, it all begins in the schools. So everything in your life is a downstream effect of education, every person you talk to every system you interact with. So you absolutely have a vested interest in it, no matter what vesting interests, you just don't know it. But I would also say like if you're if you're on the fence about having kids, like you don't have kids, but you think, you know, maybe, maybe someday I will, which I'm a little unusual as a 26 year old being, like, very adamantly, I want to have children, I have been planning my career around having children since I was, you know, 18, which is another piece, this is a more controversial piece of the college argument. And it's a very personal one to me, but I knew I had a limited number of like, full time working years, because I want to have kids, and I want to be I want to homeschool my kids the way I got to be homeschooled. And so you know that that cuts back on the number of years I can spend in the workforce, like fully going after the things I want to chase. So I want to spend all the time I have building startups not, you know, spending a third of those years theoretically doing academic work that's not moving me towards that goal. But anyway, like, I'm kind of unusual. And being very certain that I want to have kids. A lot of a lot of women in their 20s like, well, you know, maybe you'll have kids at some point. But like, you know, let's see if I can make partner first or like, let's see, if I can, you know, move up in my company first. And so they don't know if they want to have kids like maybe if I meet the right guy, I'll have kids like I'm open to it. So it's very easy to say, well, education doesn't really mattered to me right now. When I decide to have kids, then I'll think about it. Or even if you want to have kids, it's like yeah, I want to have kids but in like a decade. So not really relevant to me right now. But the people who are going through the education system right now are the people who are going to be educating your kids when they go through this system. Like if you think there is even a possibility that you will have kids in the future. The state of the education system should matter free to you very much also because our education system is such a such a calcified bureaucracy that it takes forever, for change to happen. So, you know, if you look at the test scores from on a national level, and you're like, Wow, this is really unacceptable, I don't want to send my kid to this, it's going to take years to turn that around. So you have to care now. So if you think even, it's even possible that you might have kids in the system someday, their future teachers are probably being educated in the system right now. And their outcomes very matter very much to your kids outcomes. So no matter who you are, you cannot separate yourself from it.
I do want to say one thing is like, implied by what you just said, the children, they're literally the future that's going to support our economy, the retired people, even if you can't have children, or you don't want children, or it didn't work out, you know, who knows? So I mean, it, it, you know, the productivity of these future generations matter, their human capital matters. So it's actually like increasing the skill level, the human capital level of these kids, has a direct effect on everybody in the future. And, you know, you just said, you talked about positive externalities, like, if you're an innovator, all of these things, right? We need to keep it all in mind, because there's gonna be some people that are going to be the next, you know, Steve, Jobs, Wozniak, whatever, but a lot of people in various professions and various roles. I mean, okay, like, candidly, like, if you've ever had had to call a plumber, there are good plumbers, and there are bad plumbers, you know, there are plumbers that can do a little bit of math and, you know, kind of can like plan ahead, and their plumbers that - Education has this huge effect all across your life. Now, I think a lot of us think it doesn't have an effect, because of all the social engineering things, whether you like them or not, that are happening right now. And that's not as important for, you know, if you go into the trades, or you go to college or something like that, but, you know, this compounds, it has a huge effect everywhere. And, you know, even something as simple as literacy, we in the United States are technically universal literacy, reality, functional literacies. Yeah, that's what I was. Yeah, I mean, you're gonna know what I'm saying. If you have like a society, where there's less literacy that makes it more difficult to transition to industrialization and manufacturing, so for example, here's a concrete example. You know, my family's from Bangladesh, it's literacy was like 50%, and 1990. And Vietnam was about like, 90%, in 1990. And there's historical reasons for this, we don't need to get into that, like Confusion system, blah, blah, blah. But they both had about the same per capita income. And Vietnam is way, way ahead now. And a lot of it just has to do with the fact that when you have a literate workforce, you can transition them to working in factories, like they can read the instructions, and everything like that they can, you know, do the forums, whatever, if you have any forums, but literacy really makes a big difference. And I'm using that as an example just to illustrate that increase in human capital does make a difference. And you know, that's what we're really focusing on here. So we're saying education, we're saying schooling, all these specific words, but they're instantiations of allowing you to grow and flourish as a human human being. Some people don't like learning. So even setting aside the learning part, I love learning, everyone who's listening to this loves learning, you love learning Hannah, but there are people who don't like learning, they just want a job jlb, make some money, have some change on a Friday night, go do their thing, right? But they still need to have skills, they still need to know what they need to know, if you got an electrician, he better be literate and be able to, like read the diagrams and know stuff like that. Right. So you still need an education is still really relevant. So we've been talking, as we ended this out at like a pretty high level, you know, talk about, you know, where you're seeing yourself in the next, aside from, you know, hopefully, you know, your personal life successes and all those other things. You know, I don't think, you know, that's not the purview of this conversation. So, you know, let's focus on, okay, professionally, Rebel Educator, and this whole, like educational sector, like what are you seeing from Year Zero now to like, year five? I'm particularly interested, this is like a self interested question, because, you know, I have kids in elementary school now. So I want to know what's happening in the next five years, you know, obviously, there's going to be people who are your age listening now. And, you know, they're like the first scene in Idiocracy. And they have to wait until they get their tenured professorship when they're 36 or whatever, like, ignore them. Let's talk about from here to five years,
from here to five years, like what is how does the landscape of education going to be changing?
And how are you going to try to affect it like what are you going to try to evangelize? What are you going to try to like promote what do you good looking into.
Yeah, I think I think the future I think I think the next five years are very bright. I think that we're really at a tipping point, we have the potential to be at a tipping point whether or not the momentum gets utilized properly. It's going to be interesting to see. But I think the we're in a really unprecedented position right now and a little bit of context for that. So COVID changed everything about education in America specifically. We were on a very slow march towards privatization, not on a national level, like public schools aren't going away. Again, I don't think in my lifetime. But we're on a very slow march towards privatization, homeschooling becoming more socially acceptable, you know, different different types of options starting to emerge. And then the pandemic happened, and every school in the country shut down. And every kid brought school home. And parents saw what was happening in the classroom via zoom school. And there was sort of this collective "I'm sorry, what?" that happened, where parents were just kind of horrified by the quality of the education being delivered to their kids. And there was a huge spike in homeschooling, where some parents were like, well, I have my kids at home anyways, let's try this homeschooling thing. And then other parents were like, you are absolutely not going back there like this is this is important. And so there was this really big spike in homeschool numbers specifically that have not come back down, which is highly indicative of the fact that this is like, it wasn't just like a pandemic fad, this is a cultural inflection point. And a lot of alternative schools have started to take off. And we're, you know, in a little bit of a recession right now. But over the past couple of years, coming off of the first stages of the pandemic, there was a lot of investment money being made available to different schools and programs being built. Investors see like VCs see this as a very exciting sector to start breaking into, because there's weirdly little innovation on the education front like there is there is a weirdly small amount of schools being built variety and options in the market. There's like public school owns like 90% of the monopoly in the school category, and then everybody else is competing for for the other pieces. But people kind of realize that that that needs to change and the demand started to grow. And I think with the very dramatic cultural milieu that we're currently in, where just the atmosphere is weird, and there's a lot doesn't matter what side of the aisle you're on, like, things are tense right now, and people are a lot of that's getting played out in the classroom. And parents are pretty horrified by that, whether you're pro equity or anti equity, whether you're pro gender ideology being taught in the classroom, or not, like, it's a thing. And so a lot of parents are exiting the system for that, too. So I think the the landscape at large is very ripe for a lot of things to happen, if innovators come in and take advantage of that. So I think like right now, the, the education, the alternative education movement feels a little scattershot. Like most parents, I talked to you who have their kids in an alternative school, knew somebody who was familiar with the school or had their kid there. And that's how they chose it. Like, it's still really hard for parents to look at different options that exist and choose one. It's really hard for parents to, to have a sense of like, there is a very robust movement that's starting to coalesce of people who are building alternatives to the traditional model or the institutional model, really. But I think it feels very scattershot to an outside observer, where its like, oh, there's like just one little weird micro school, the next town over where there's like hippies teaching the kids like out in the woods every day. And then there's, you know, this, this private school that's like, super focused on classical education. And then there's like this online school that's teaching kids through like the Socratic method, and it just like feels very, it's hard to see the wave. People are just seeing, like, individual drops. And so that's part of what I'm focused on, is, you know, as someone who is a writer and a speaker and someone who like, you know, talking about things is my skill set, like how do I help? How do I help make it more obvious that like, how do I paint a picture of everything that is happening and make it easier for parents to see the whole thing at once so they can make informed us decisions about which types of schools they want to send their kids to, and why. Like, we have, again, the future is here, like all of the infrastructure that we need for kids to exit the system. And mass is pretty much here. Like, the schools need to figure out how to scale, but there are tons of options. And there's a really big gap in parent's ability to know what to do with their kids. And to feel like they're making an informed decision. It's like, well, education is this like, weird, mysterious thing, that the surgery analogy makes sense, because it's like, well, I don't know how to perform surgery on my kid, I also don't know what they need to know to be competently educated. And it's really like, once you start breaking it down, it's really not that complex. But, but it's hard for parents to like, really, objectively look and see, like, Okay, this is what my kid needs to learn. This is what's going to set them up to be successful in life, these are the different types of institutions that can teach them these things, the different types of schools, these are the different ways that they do that. And this is the approach, and the model is going to be the best fit for my kids. So we're going to try that. So I'm gonna make it as easy as possible for parents to take that leap. So that's the role that I see myself playing over the next few years. Again, this is like a really quickly emerging category. So I think there are going to be I think my answer to this will, will evolve quite a bit over the next couple of years, I think there are going to be more and more specific areas of this fight that I start jumping into. But as I'm looking at it, in a high level right now, I think we're gonna see way more online schools, way more micro schools, the school choice movement, which is basically like opening up state funding, instead of just being tied to your local public school parents can use it on whatever education option they choose for their kids, that's picking up a lot of momentum. So that if that actually passes in as many states as it's poised to, that could very quickly free up like a quarter of the kids or a third of the kids or more in the country, to have like, the financial burden of choosing an alternative option is eliminated. And that's gonna change things really quickly. So I think a lot of those types of things are going to start to like, if these things happen the way they're poised to, we're gonna see a huge uptick in Access. And then the biggest problem is going to be how do parents find schools? How do they know how to choose one? How do they know if they're like messing up their kids future? Or if they're actually setting them up for success? How do they go through the process of like, saying, I want to pull my kid out of public school all the way through to actually like enrolling them in an alternative institution. And that's the infrastructure that I want to build over the next few years to enable as many parents as possible to exit in mass.
Yeah, I mean, I will just really quickly before the very last thing, I want to say like, I do feel sometimes that this is like, you know, before 1920, or 1910, where there are all these car companies and the early internet when there weren't these big oligopolies. And I'm not saying that there should be oligopolies. But there's a lot of choices out there. It is a very, very in flux, nascent ecosystem. And as a parent you are and I don't believe in the was at the paradox of choice. I think that's overdone. But but, you know, there's synthesis school and, you know, like alpha school and all these different schools, and it gets a little bewildering. So I'm glad that you are, you know, just kind of trying to clarify a little bit of this, like, sometimes you do need other people to kind of like, interpret and guide you because you're busy with your job, you're busy with, you know, all your other things. Right. That's just another thing. Now, last thing I want to say, and thank you for your, you know, thank you for your time and your service. Um, it was great. It was great. I think we touched on a lot of things. You are, you are a something of a podcaster yourself. So can you just like talk about a little bit about that, so that they know where to find you. And you know how to track your as the next five years, there's gonna be a lot of stuff going on, that you're gonna be doing out there.
Yeah, I appreciate you asking that. Yeah. So I also have a newly created podcast. You can find me on YouTube or on whatever podcast platform, you listen to Apple podcast, Spotify, just look for my name, Hannah Frankman. It's an eponymous show. Because basically, I just talked about the things that I find interesting. So I spend a lot of time talking about education. But I also talk about, you know, like, cultural commentary, more broadly, lifestyle design. So like I've taken a very alternative path all the way through from basically first grade all the way up into my 20s. And so that sort of like question of how do you live a life on your terms, the way that you want to without asking someone else for permission or following just sort of the standard rules you're supposed to is a very interesting question to me. So I spend a lot of time talking about that to how to learn. What does education mean not just for kids, but as an adult, too. So if those things are interesting to you, if you found this conversation interesting please come find the podcast or find me on Twitter too. I also spend a lot of time there
Also are you going to do episodes on the RHLF?
RHLF? I mean,
are we not supposed to talk about your redhead Liberation Front?
Maybe you're gonna have to come listen to the podcast to find out I can't tell you everything here. Of course if you do want to talk about that we can talk about genetic the genetic like underpinnings of the movement and why this is you know, scientifically validated.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, there is I mean, this is a very good point like there's like a whole like field about ginger redhead people like it's a whole thing. Some of the listeners know it's a whole thing. You actually feel the world differently. And I'm not going to like elaborate what I mean by that but if people want to google it they know or you know, but listen to the podcast.
Or just come Talk to me. I'll tell you all about it.
All right. Thank you Hannah
Thank you Razib
Is this podcast for kids? This is my favorite podcast.
