Culture Apothecary with Alex Clark - “Soon Going To Public School Will Feel Like A 20th Century Idea.” - w/ rebelEducator Hannah Frankman

Episode Date: March 31, 2023

It’s no secret that the American education system is broken. But sometimes it seems like even pointing out the massive flaws in the system is *rebellious*. What else is rebellious? Suggesting that public school isn’t the only way for children to learn effectively. Actually, it might just be causing more harm than good these days. Because no child is the same, which means that no child learns the same way. And, while there are incredible educators in the public and private school systems, the ...

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To learn, right? But are they even learning? Today's guest believes that kids are better than the traditional education system gives them credit for. She wants parents to know that the classroom isn't the only place kids learn, and that the truth is, the classroom may very well be the most unproductive part, of your child's day. That's why she founded Rebel Educator, which is described as an all-inclusive resource hub for parents, teachers, and entrepreneurs containing everything you need to transform your kids' education. Rebel Educator believes that your child was made to learn, explore, and

create, and they want to help unleash all that potential. The founder is today's guest. She not only grew up as a homeschooler herself, but then she skipped college, she went into the startup world, and she has been dedicated to alternative education all along, acting as an advocate for things like school choice and unschooling. Please give a warm welcome to Hannah Frankman on The Spillover. Hannah, you have created a movement to totally rethink kids education K through 12. And your prediction is that sooner than we think going to public school is going to feel like a 20th century idea. What do you mean by that? Well, it is a 20th century idea.

The public school system was designed for, a world that's very different than the world we live in now. And the minute the internet came online, our entire education system became obsolete because the whole thing was predicated on the assumption that education needs a physical location to access. And parents can access worksheets, apps, recorded lessons from world-class teachers on any subject you could imagine from their laptops at home. And when that type of information access is available, why do you need school anymore? You don't.

It's really just child care. So the public education system, in my opinion, and I'm talking like kindergarten all the way through college, has been obsolete for probably 30-plus years, and that might even be on the conservative side. It's just that most of the world hasn't caught up yet. This is so interesting. So what you're saying is beige food, fluorescent. Lighting, cement brick walls. You mean, that's not conducive to an amazing education for our children?

And we wonder why our kids are miserable. Yeah. We wonder why they're depressed and unhappy and don't want to learn and hide playing video games all day. And then you describe that environment. It's like, plants would die. Dude, you're so right. And that's the thing, you know, what was really, what really got the wheels turning for me

is starting to think about this whole idea where we're. We're telling little boys, you know, sit down, sit still, all of those things. Maybe they're not supposed to be sitting down and sitting still for seven hours a day. No, people are so quick to diagnose kids, especially little boys, with things like ADHD. And we just default to thinking, well, something's wrong because they don't fit inside this artificial system we've constructed. So they must need medication to fit our system. Nobody stops to ask, maybe it's the system that's broken. Maybe our kids weren't designed to do this.

By the time this interview goes live, we'll have published a piece, a long-form substack article about this whole question that you just asked, like, what's happening in our school specifically to boys? Because it's much more harmful to them than it is to girls in the short term. In the long term, I think it's harmful to both. But you see the negative effects much more quickly in boys because it's just more obvious. Like, they're really full of energy. They're really rambunctious.

They want to wrestle with each other. They want to fight a little. They want to get their hands dirty. They don't want to just sit still in a classroom and with their hands folded in their lap and listen to somebody talk for seven or eight hours a day. And that's perfectly normal. Like, they're kids. It's ridiculous. It's almost as if there are inerrant differences between the way a boy learns and the way a girl learns.

And that's okay. And it's important to know. And then how much worse is that actually going to get in the education system because we're trying to erase gender now? I mean, honestly, I can't imagine. imagine it's already so bad where we ignore the needs of boys versus girls in school. And I feel like that's only going to get worse. But that's a whole other, you know, rabbit hole to go down. I really want to focus on the public schools for a moment. Is it true that the public school model was intentionally built to keep kids from fostering their creativity? Yes. So this is one of my favorite fun facts because it's actually pretty commonly known, but people think it's an urban legend and it's not. The education system was designed as it was, it basically is in military industrial complex for kids. Like the way it works or the way it was designed is we had, in the early 1800s, we had no formalized education system in America at all. And we had a lot of immigrants coming into the country. We had a

rapidly industrializing society. So we had very different needs for a workforce than we'd had before. and there was a lot of social unrest between like the Catholics, the Protestants, the Irish, the Italians, the freed slaves, especially in the north. Like there was just a lot of tension between these social groups. And so the, you know, the people who are designing the education system and the elites at large, they wanted something to homogenize all of this a little bit, raise some of this tension, make it easier for people to work together. And so Horace Mann, who's basically the granddaddy of American education, went to Prussia because Prussia was in the business of invading and conquering people. And they'd developed, their military had developed an education system that they would take to countries that they'd invaded. And they would use it to subdue and control the populace. And so Horace Mann went and studied that and brought it back to the United States and said, hey, look, this is a really great way to get all, like,

to build social cohesion between groups that didn't necessarily fit. Because when you get it, when people are kids, they're a lot more malleable than they are as adults. And then as our education system became more systematized on a national level in the early 20th century, it was funded by the Rockefellers and the Carnegie's and the Fords and, you know, whether or not you're a fan of the Titans of Industry, which, you know, that's a separate question. And they had, you know, they needed, like, practically, they needed people to work in their factories. And so, like, their interests, whether you have, you know, just unbi-like, whether you have an opinion about it or not, their desire was to have people who could work in factories and fill all of the staffing needs that they had for their very rapidly growing companies.

And when you look at the literature, it's very blatant. the amount of both just like blatant social engineering that was going on. When you look at the founding documents and the writings of the people who are building the education system at the turn of the century, it's very obvious that these people wanted to, it was a social engineering experiment, like very explicitly. They wanted a system where they could output a specific number of factory workers. and farmers and longshoremen and all the different specific industries that they needed to fill. If you watch the movie Interstellar, I watched this last night, so it's top of mind for me right now. There's a scene at the beginning where Matthew McConaughey's characters at his kid's school,

and he wants to know, well, what about my kid going to college? And they're like, well, we need farmers. Okay, so this is interesting. So you're saying like there was a purpose trying to all get them to go into that field. Is it fair to say that maybe now the objective of public school education has changed to now we need more activists, left-wing activists? Is that fair for me to say? I don't know. I don't have a strong opinion about that. Okay. I think there are a lot of factors at play. Got it. But originally, it was very inconvenient to have people who were too creative. Like, again, the people who founded our education system were very blatant. They weren't hiding this. They're like, we don't need more creative people. Like that's what the top, like that's what the top classes are for.

Like they'll go to college and study poetry and philosophy. And the average industrial worker doesn't need to trouble themselves with this because it's not really helpful in the, and I quote, humble problems of their lives. So creativity, it's hard to systematize. But now would you say that we've really gotten it wrong because we are still stuck in this notion of we need algebra and reading and science, but we don't really need the arts? I do think it's problematic. I think we can go down some real rabbit holes with this one because I have a lot of thoughts on all of this. But when you have a kid who, you know, they have a set of interests and proclivities and things that they're good at, you want to nurture them in their education in a way that's going to set them up to put those skills and aptitudes to use over the course of their life.

And so for kids that are really scientifically minded and they want to go in that direction, that's great. But a lot of kids have more artistic inclinations. And that's good, too. We need, especially in the 21st century where a lot of the more rote things can be automated and that's going to accelerate really rapidly. We're going to want to have kids who are creative thinkers and creative problem solvers and coming up with ideas because more and more that's going to become the uniquely human. and stuff. And so the fact that we're educating them in a system that's totally beating that out of them and then trying to send them into a world that requires creativity, perhaps more than any other time in history, is just setting them up for failure. Well, not only just beating the

creativeness out of kids, but we're also really suppressing any urges to be doers or builders. And we have no one, it seems like, who knows how to do trades anymore. So when these older people start passing away, that generation that does know how to build, you know, construction workers, plumbers, electricians, welders, we're not teaching kids to kind of go into those fields. We're telling them that's beneath you or, you know, that's like peasant work. And it's ridiculous because you can make more money as a plumber than you can as a poet. Exactly. Or someone who studied like a literature professor.

And especially if you're skilled technically, but you also have an entrepreneurial mind and you can go start a business. Like there are so many brilliant people out there running multi-million dollar blue-collar businesses and making a killing and making the world a better place. Absolutely. But we're very, you know, it's considered like, well, if you're not good at school, which comes with all kinds of stigmas, then you go and do those things. Oh, I have questions for you on, what do I do if my kid isn't good at school? Pull them out. Exactly. So it's not your kid that's the problem. It's the school. It's the school. Yeah. How is separating subjects in? into blocks like math and reading and science, getting it wrong.

Well, I mean, when you think about how we interact with the world, we don't, you know, break up our day into, okay, we're going to do some math stuff at the start of the day. And then around 10 o'clock, we're going to do some reading. And then maybe at 3 o'clock we'll have to write some e-mail, so we'll have to practice our writing skills. But we won't be using any math in that. Like, it's not how the world works. It's everything is integrated.

And it's helpful to break it out into pieces to learn about it, but only if you understand the context. And I find this is really interesting, especially as people go farther and farther down the academic track. So if you're going into, like, you go to high school and you kind of have areas of specialization, like things that you're good at, you take more electives in certain areas. And then you go to college and you take, you know, you have a major, so you're specializing even more. And then maybe you go to get a master's or a Ph.D. and then you're super hyper-specialized. You know, there's benefit to that, sure. But you're missing out on all the context of how everything fits together.

And all of the successful entrepreneurs that I know, creative people I know, one of the things that always strikes me about them is that they're very well read across multiple disciplines, but their best ideas come from connecting areas that wouldn't look like they went together. Which one of you DM me last night and told me that you started using the needs to Neamy skincare retinal moisturizer that I have raved about before your high school reunion and then everyone ended up telling you that you looked better than you did as a teen. I cannot remember your name, but I loved the story because there is something special about the Neamy moisturizer.

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That's NimiSkinkare.com with code Alex Clark for 10% off. Or just click the link in the description. So does that mean like if your kid goes outside for a play break and then they find a ladybug? And they're asking you all these questions about ladybugs to be like, hey, you know what? Let's go read now a story about a ladybug. And then let's go look up how ladybugs have baby ladybugs. or I don't know what, but you kind of use something that they're naturally asking questions about. They're naturally inquisitive about.

And then you can use that one thing to go into different lessons. Like, let's use ladybugs to go into a reading because we're going to pick a story about that. We're going to go into science. Whatever. Is that what you mean? Yeah, you've exactly got it. And Alex, the crazy thing is that we were designed to learn that way. Like if you don't have this top-down, very bureaucratic interference system trying to get in the way for 12 years, kids learn just like you described.

and they come out the other side, honestly, most of the time, better functioning. Right. In terms of their ability to interact in the real world. Like, that's what unschooling is. Because I feel like kids naturally do want to learn. They do. That's why they're asking, well, why? Why? Why?

Why do we do this, mom? Why did you say this? They're always asking questions. They always want to learn. And I love the idea of kind of going at their pace and just seeing what they're naturally interested in that day, that week, that month. But, you know, I'm not a parent. yet, so I'm not allowed to have these types of thoughts or opinions. But you can have intuitions

about how all this works. Well, I've got a lot of intuitions. I mean, that's what I grew up homeschooled and that's what my experience was like. Like my very first week of homeschooling, we saw some monarch butterflies that were migrating. And my mom was like, okay, we're doing monarch butterflies this week. And we went and found some caterpillars and we raised them in the terrarium and we like fed them milkweed and we drew pictures of monarch butterflies and we read about them in books. And like, that was science because that was what we were all curious about. And learning can be this really iterative process where you're interacting with the real world, which contextualizes the learning. So it actually makes more sense to the kid than it does

if they're sitting in these really arbitrary rows with a textbook and they're learning, like, very abstract ideas that don't translate to the real world and aren't interesting to them because they don't see how they're useful. Like you can learn in context about whatever's occurring in the world around you. And if you just have your kids with you while you're doing life, especially in elementary school. Like, they're going to pick up on all the stuff that they need to know because they're, they're learning the basics, like the basics are the basics because they apply to everything. Exactly. So, like, math, like basic arithmetic is everywhere, readings everywhere, writings everywhere. And if you just go about your life and you bring your kids with you and you

narrate what's going on and you answer their questions and you dive down the rabbit holes that they're curious about, you draw connections between the different subjects, they're going to get a very holistic and comprehensive education, again, especially in elementary school. And it's going to make more sense to them than it did in the, than it would have in the classroom. And they're not going to hate learning as much because they've associated learning all this time as something that's fun and curiosity-driven and playful and not something that's coercive and forced and unpleasant, like doing, you know, your math quiz of the week in these boring fluorescent-lit rows. And so your kid's going to be much more inclined to become a lifelong learner, too,

because they're enjoying the process of learning. And it's something that to them is synonymous with life, which is what it should be. And parents are so afraid of getting it wrong with their kids, but it's really hard to get it wrong with your kids. This is a very controversial take. Most people don't agree with me about this, but this is a hill I will die on. It is very hard to get it wrong with your kids. And the people who tell you that that's not the case are just, I don't know, protecting their jobs indoctrinated by the system, have never really thought critically about it, wherever you want to go with this. It's not true.

My intuition tells me that we are not fostering a love of learning. We're really teaching kids to hate learning. We are. Oh, yeah. It's like the most implicit lesson of school is that learning is unpleasant. It's a universal experience with kids sigh on Mondays and they sigh when it's back to school season and parents and adults still get this little twinge of like,

oh, no, it's back to school season. Does the summer really have to be over? We learn these very ingrained patterns about what learning is. And it's tragic because you talk to toddlers and they're so curious. They want to know about everything. And you just leave that alone, that love of learning stays with them and it'll blossom. Yeah. And it's a huge life asset too because the people who are growing and adapting and evolving

and who are able to iterate and build throughout their lives, you have to be learning in order to do that. The world is an ecstatic place. You can't just graduate from high school with us. set of knowledge and like this is the package you're working with for the rest of your life and that's it. So you need to be a lifelong learner. But school crushes that. It also makes kids really complacent and really obedient. And those things are also very detrimental for long-term life success. I would like to see, now, I don't want to say this in the wrong way, but I would like to see less obedient kids. And what I mean by that is not disrespectful, but I want to see more risk takers. I want to see kids be less

afraid. And I think that those traits can really be important as they grow into adulthood. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, people love to use the classic Silicon Valley entrepreneur examples for this, where it's like, well, Steve Jobs wasn't afraid of getting it wrong. It's like, yeah, not every kid's going to be Steve Jobs. We don't want to live in a world that's full of Steve Jobs. It's like it would be a disaster if nobody else was doing the plumbing and all of the other things. Right. But in most cases, it is helpful to have a little bit of like, you know, I'm not afraid of failing. I'm not afraid of breaking the rules. I'm not afraid of doing this thing because I want to do it, even though everybody else is telling me I'm wrong. For the average person, a little bit of that is helpful.

But it was baked into the system to discourage that from a very young age. And again, when you think about it, like if you're trying to design a very cohesive society where all the cogs are functioning very smoothly, if you have people who are asking too many questions, things aren't going to run. You're start getting snags between the cogs and you're going to stop working. Well, what have we seen in the last two years? Don't ask questions. Just do what you're told. Don't question any science. Don't question. You know what I mean? And what would have happened if more people would have immediately said, wait, I have a question, you know? Now, you brought up, you were homeschooled. Yeah. Talk a little bit about your personal journey with education for yourself, but also,

I'm assuming you have children. I don't actually. You don't? I don't. No. Okay, so tell us everything. Does that discredit everything I just said? No, see, this is my thing. My unpopular opinion is that I don't think that you have to be a mother to have certain opinions on parenthood or education. I can look at different things in culture or in politics and not necessarily have lived that out and still say it's wrong. For example, I've never owned a slave, but I can still say slavery is wrong. So for me, I'm not saying that my opinion or things can't change once you have your own kids,

but I think it's totally okay to say, you know, this is what I think or I'm more inclined to think that this is better. So talk about you were homeschooled and then what ended up pushing you then to start Rebel Educator and talking to other parents about not only just homeschooling, but you guys talk about lots of other types of schooling that could be better than just public school. Yeah. So I'm going to answer those in reverse. I'm going to talk about backstory first and then the homeschooling part. So I grew up homeschooled and that's part of why I do what I do is because like I am the proof. that this works. Like I grew up homeschooled. I'm living a functional adult life now. Like it didn't ruin me and all of my potential to be homeschooled. And so I feel like I honestly feel like being

homeschooled is one of the best things that ever happened to me. And I know that there were people who my parents were reading about who were homeschool graduates when they were trying to decide, like, does this homeschooling thing work? Can we try this? And so I really want to be a voice advocating for this because I feel like I got so lucky. And I just want to share that. But I've also been working in alternative education pretty much ever since I graduated from high school. Like I started teaching homeschool classes right after I graduated. And then I became a tutor. And then I was working for a college alternative program for years called Praxis where I was doing like basically it was a startup apprenticeship program for kids who wanted to go into the professional world but didn't want to go to business school.

So I was a coach there. I became their program managers like I developed their curriculum and stuff. So you have a lot of education experience like educator experience. Yeah. And I got really far into the week. with that. And it kind of, I always like to joke that I work in education by accident. Like, I really didn't mean to do this. Like, things just kept happening. And I kept having fun. So I kept doing it. And eventually Rebel Educator was born as like the sort of the synthesis of all the things that I was

doing that I enjoy. Like, I loved writing. I loved podcasting. I loved Twitter. I had a lot to say at all these platforms. I met a lot of people that I wanted to work with and wanted to promote. Well, the Rebel Educator Twitter is what I first discovered. And then I told my team, we have to have this girl on because the tweets were so juicy. So juicy, just really poking the bear in terms of everything that you've thought about traditional education, think differently about it. And I loved that. Yeah.

And for me, it's really funny because I'll talk to my friends who are very pro-altitative education but went to public school. And they'll tell me that my takes are just like a little different because I didn't go to public school and I don't see it. I'm like, what are you talking about? What do you mean? This is weird. But there's just so much I miss.

because I was in, I was being homeschooled and not just your cliche. Well, she was homeschooled so she doesn't get all the pop culture references, which for me is totally true. I definitely have some gaps. I think that's a good thing. But I don't think I missed much. Arguably, yeah. But like I just, I missed out on all of the, not just the academic lessons that we think we're learning when we're in school, but the like underlying assumptions about how the world works because of the way school is structured.

Like my home school experience was super self-directed. It was super organic. It was when I was in elementary school, like I spent most of my time playing because you really didn't need that much time to do academic work and keep up or far exceed what people were doing in traditional school. I started my first business when I was 12. Like entrepreneurship was a big part of my education. My high school experience was super self-directed. My parents basically just made sure I was meeting the state requirements for graduation and I like found my materials, gave myself assignments. I was basically listening to recorded college lectures for all of high school. It was amazing.

But having that experience and then going out into the world and meeting all these people who had very different experiences and just had no conception that what I had done was an equally possible and really pretty frictionless route to take. Like it's really shockingly easy to find all the materials that you need and all the resources and support that you need to deliver a homeschool experience that far exceeds what you're getting. the classroom because what you're getting in the classroom really truly is the bare minimum. Our standards are so low. And when you look at the numbers, too, of what's coming out of public school, like, most kids in high school, like, their test scores hardly improve at all over the course

of four years. Let's dive into this because the cost of education keeps rising while test scores are remaining relatively the same. So what does that tell us? Yeah. It tells us that the system's not working. It's like the McConaughey quote from dazed and confused. It's like, I keep getting older, but the high school girls all stay the same age. It's the same thing. The test, the cost keeps going up, but the scores stay the same age. And most, and I didn't know this, but most Americans cannot read above a sixth grade level. Fifty four percent, according to the United States Department of Education. Like, they're not even hiding it. Over half. Over half. Yeah, that freak. I go out in public sometimes and I'm like, who here can't read?

I didn't know. I didn't know. Raise your hand if you can't read. Which, to be very fair, like, it's not anyone, it's not these people's fault. Of course not. They were, I mean, the way we teach reading is broken. And we've known that for a really long time. Like, the education system insisted on teaching kids to read, to not teach kids phonics and to teach them to read the whole words.

Please tell me that you listen to the Soul to Story podcast. When I tell you, I want that podcast to win awards. I thought it was one of the best podcast. that I've listened to in the last several years. And if you haven't listened to Sold a Story, it's a short series and this investigative journalist just dove into, wait a minute, she discovered the kids in our public schools all across the United States aren't actually reading. They do not know how to read.

No, they're memorizing what words look like. And when they don't know what a word is, they guess and they often get it wrong. And they're told to look at a picture and just, well, based on what's happening in the picture, what do you think this sentence is? saying. It's just guessing. And so also what's happening is that all these kids are like, well, I hate reading. Well, I don't love, you know, I don't love literature. I don't have this love of reading. Well, who would if it's terribly hard to do or you don't even know how? And it's crazy because I often talk to people in my network who are good readers and prolific readers. And I ask them, like, did you,

like, you never learned phonics? And I'm like, I did. But like, I guess my mom taught me. Like, I guess I learned it at home. I don't really know. I knew it before I went to school in the first place. And so even though people think that, well, you have to send your kid to school for them to get a good education, kids are already getting the most important stuff at home. Right. And so this is something, too, that Rebel Educator really goes into is telling parents, Kay, because I get this all the time because I'm always going hard on homeschool, homeschool, homeschool, homeschool, your kids. But parents will say, well, I can't, you know, I can't for whatever reason.

They're a single parent. They can't afford it. Because there's a lot of stereotypes which I'm not, I'm going to have another guest on specifically about homeschooling very soon. And we will go into the stereotypes and myths about homeschooling and what is true and what isn't. But what I'm saying is you talk a lot about how, okay, so let's say you're right. You have to send your kids to public school. Here are ways that you can basically supplement their education and make sure that they're getting what they need when they're not within those four walls. Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot, like, not every parent can pull their kid out of the system, not every parent wants to, not every kid wants to. And all of that's fine. Like, I'm very, I'm very much an advocate for abundance of options in education. I think our biggest problem is that we've been assuming for the better part of a century that there is one correct way to educate kids. And it's serving, like, it's targeted at the middle. And there are a lot of kids on both sides of the bell curve that are just getting lost or smothered. by the way that the system works, and even the ones in the middle are only being adequately served. They're not being exceptionally served. But so it's good to have an abundance of different options. Public schools aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

And there are a lot of reasons why people don't want a homeschooler. They can't. Do you think we should just get rid of the Department of Education entirely? Oh, yeah. I can't believe we haven't done this already. Yes, we absolutely should. but parents who think that they're not qualified to homeschool, those parents, you are. Everyone is.

If you're worried about it, you are. Yeah, that's the thing. Like, if you're thinking that hard about it, you're doing all the right things. You're going to be fine. Everything you need is on the internet. But for parents who can't pull their kids out of the system for whatever reason, like, both parents need to work. Their kids really social and doesn't want to leave. There's some other, you know, financial pressure or whatever going on.

You can do so much to counteract what's going on in school. supplement it with your kids. What are a few examples of that? Yeah. So my favorite one is just reading out loud with your kids because so many kids never experienced reading in a fun way. It's just a thing you do in a classroom because a teacher told you you should. And if you're in, you're sitting at home maybe after dinner or at bedtime and like as a

family and you're reading books together, that's just such a fun experience that as your kids like teach them phonics. and as their reading capacity expands, give them a chance, like maybe it's their night to read the book. Like, you alternate back and forth. Play math games with your kids. Like, take them to the grocery store

and have them calculate how much, like, calculate the total of what's in your cart. And, you know, if you have multiple kids, like whoever gets close enough, whoever gets closest to the total wins, like teach them how to round and stuff. Play budgeting games. Attach the things that they're learning in school

to the real world, like draw, like bring them back down into the dirt, draw that context, root them in a way that school isn't. Like, if they're learning about writing, have them write a letter to somebody. If they're, have them write a chain story together. A prison pen pal. I'm just kidding. I was thinking more like a friend of grandmas who can tell them like fun stories, but I mean, whatever.

Yeah, whatever. What are other countries doing right now that America isn't? Like, is there a destination country you think for children's education? I don't know. I actually think, I mean, many countries are doing things differently. And if you go into Asia, like a lot of those countries are vastly outperforming the U.S. in terms of test scores. Like, we're just kind of grandfathered in at the top of the employment hierarchy at this point because, you know, we're the center of the economy.

But we're not actually the most competitive in terms of, like, raw academic outputs. and which is very interesting as it becomes easier and easier for countries to hire people in other countries, companies to hire people in other countries. We're kind of, I think a lot of people are in for a rude awakening when they realize that there's someone in China or India or Thailand or something or the Philippines who can actually, it's like actually more qualified on every front. Like they actually speak. They have better grammar. Right. And they have better math skills and they can do the job better. And those countries are doing, like I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of issues with these hyper academic countries too, at least in my.

personal opinion, there's a lot of just like drill and kill. Like, we're just going to master memorizing all of this stuff, but not really solving the context problem. The creative outputs aren't necessarily matching. Yeah. How much time during a day is a kid even actually learning? You mean practically in the our education system right now? In a traditional public school, how many hours a day is a kid even actually learning sitting there? I don't know the hard number, but it's very, it's very little. Yeah. Because you have to think about how much time spent redirecting the room. Okay, you know, all the kids are talking. We have to take a break for this. This kid is having trouble. So I have to pause the lesson to help this kid.

Yeah. Well, there's also another way of looking at answering this question is looking at how quickly kids can catch up on what was missed. So if you have a kid who was behind for some reason or maybe they were being unschooled and then they need to reenter the traditional system and hit some benchmarks or whatever, kids can catch up on everything that they're learning, again, especially in elementary school, very quickly with a small amount of very focused study, especially if you're learning things like apps to teach, like math, especially, because apps are way more adaptive than a classroom setting. Like in a classroom, you're just sort of handing out worksheets teaching to the common denominator and not, you're hoping everybody follows along,

but like a 60% can be a passing grade. So you can understand 60% of a subject and be considered like you've learned the subject, but there's 40% of that that you don't know. And then you're building on those gaps in the next class. Like you understand 60 or 70% of fractions, and then you understand 60 or 70% of pre-algebra and then like 60 to 70% of algebra 1. But you've missed like 30 to 40% of everything that's going on in all of these subjects. But you've passed.

Like, technically you've learned these things. Let me tell you something. I technically passed algebra one in high school, but I could not. I couldn't do it. Well, and that's really common, but it's really problematic when you start building on top of your, like, building foundation. Like, you're building stories onto a foundation that's full of holes. So the whole thing just starts to, like, buckle under the weight. Like, because you have to do fractions in algebra.

Right. So if you don't understand how to do different problems, you can't do the algebra problems. either. And so there's all kinds of that going on too. So when kids, like kids can catch up on all of those things very quickly, which indicates that they really don't need nearly as much time as we're giving them to learn these things in the first place. We're just doing it incredibly and efficiently. Let's talk about how you know if your kid is bad at school or actually just bored. It's probably the latter. Explain that. Because people are like, what do you mean? Well, so let me let me give some context because it is more complicated than that.

One, kids have different aptitudes. And kids also learn at different paces. And so some kids are ready to learn how to read at like four. And they'll teach themselves. And then other kids are eight and they'll still struggle with reading. But the difference between the reading levels closes statistically when, like once you hit a certain age range, like by the time kids get into middle school, like it really doesn't matter if they were four or eight when they learned how to read. Like the eight-year-olds catch up very quickly. Oh, so all the parents that brag is their.

kids are learning to read earlier, it actually doesn't really matter. I mean, it matters a little bit, but basically it balances itself out, yeah. Because kids' brains develop at different paces, and kids are good at different things. Some kids have better spatial awareness. Some kids are better, like they're just like wired to be bookworms. Other kids are really great at math. Some kids are really good at things that school doesn't measure for, and they spend their whole lives thinking that they're just not smart. Yeah. But really, they're like very socially smart and not book smart. And it's very sad that they think that they're not good at things when they are. But generally speaking, especially the types of kids that are getting in trouble consistently for goofing off in class, like those kids are very rarely not good

at school. Most of the time, those kids are very smart, and they're painfully and excruciatingly bored. And they're just trying to get someone's attention or do something to break out of the monotony. And they get flagged as troublemakers and non-academic kids and not good at school. all. But really it's just the system's fault. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's not a teacher's fault. Like, they have a classroom full of 30 kids. What are they supposed to do? Right. But the system is not designed to serve. It's designed to, to, again, create as, like, as uniform a set of outputs as possible. And any chaff that gets lost in the process is just, you know. Can I be honest? Sometimes I just do the bare minimum for dinner. Okay. I'm human. I'll warm up some beef

tallow in a skillet. I'll put a steak on with seasoned salt, pepper, and garlic powder. I'll sear it for like 12 minutes total, okay? Two minutes back and forth on each side. And voila. I put a little primal kitchen steak sauce, seed oil free baby on my plate. And that's really it. Now, is that a balanced meal? No. Sometimes is it just faster and easier? Yep. But because my meat all comes from good ranchers, it's the best quality and flavorful meat that's 100% grassy, fed and grain finished from ranches and farms in Middle America, hand cut, hand trimmed, and aged 21 days. She's legal to reach the optimal tenderness and richest flavor possible.

Now, the process of starting a Good Rancher subscription is simple, and you can pause your subscription at any time. If you want to try some stuff out, you can even purchase most of Good Rancher's products as a one-time purchase as well. So I always recommend doing the subscription because you're going to get tons of perks and no long-term commitment. you can pick the shipping frequency that you think is best for your family. And you can always change that frequency later, all right?

Like if it's just you, single girl out on the town like me, you meet Mr. Wright like I hope to. And then, you know, you need more steak. Well, you can just adjust that. And then you sit back and you get free shipping on all orders and a consistent price on all orders of your subscription forever. That is how it works and how buying meat is supposed to work. Ready to save on meat for your family, decrease trips to the grocery store and support. and farmers, go to good ranchers.com slash Clark with code Clark, and you'll get $20 off plus free bacon for a year. Start a good rancher subscription today and get 24 ounces of applewood smoked

bacon added to each box for a year for free. This is 100% American high-quality bacon sourced from local farms worth over $200.200. This offer won't last forever, so you should act now before it's gone. Get $20 off and free bacon for a year by going to go. By going to $200,000. We're to good ranchers.com slash Clark with Code Clark or click the link in the description. Good Ranchers. American Meat delivered. Well, now every time I say, every time I talk trash about public school, I have parents saying, well, that's why my kids go to private. But is private better? Is that necessarily the case? No. Most private schools, there are many, this is a very sweeping statement. I'll clarify in a

second because there are many exceptions here. But the average private, school is running basically the same curriculum as the public school just in different colors. It's the same thing, but it's a religious school. Or it's the same thing, but it costs more money or has a better, I don't know, better amenities or, you know, whatever. Well, and a lot of conservative parents, because my audience is primarily conservative. They say, well, I want my kids to go to a private school because I want to avoid all the woke stuff. But what they don't understand is the woke stuff is everywhere. I mean, that is in your private schools and your public schools.

But also the woke stuff is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of the problems. It's the most painful expression of all of this. But it's not it's not the like it's a symptom of much deeper, honestly more insidious things. Yeah, because again, it's the conformity. It's the deference to authority. It's the not thinking for yourself, but doing what someone else is telling you you should be doing. Like all of those things are setting the stage for the wokeism in the first place. And those things, even if you're sending your kid to a school where like it has really

conservative values and the wokeism isn't there, most private schools aren't innovating that part out. So they're still getting the classroom settings, the very like abstract feeling to a child's subject, subject, like divisions and separations. And they're still on, like, they're still being measured by grades in specific subjects that someone 100 plus years ago decided was important to measure. Yeah. So let's talk about alternative schooling methods. So besides public and private and homeschool, what are the other options for parents? Well, private is a very big, that's why I said some caveats at the beginning of my answer, because private school is a very big umbrella,

and there's a lot of much more innovative schooling that's going on in the private sector that's very exciting. And there's a lot of different language that gets batted around to describe different types of schools. Some people call them progressive schools. Other people are like, no, we don't like that word. It's kind of complicated.

But I use the word innovative schools. So what falls under that, like Montessori or something? Monosory, for sure. Montessori is fantastic. I'm a huge fan of Montessori education. Where does Waldorf fall on your list? I'm very partial to Waldorf because I had a very Waldorf-inspired elementary education. That's the one that I gravitate towards.

It's really beautiful. I think from what I'm read, and I'm not an expert on this, I think there's some interesting research to delve into and like the outcomes between Waldorf and Montessori and like arguments to be made for which ones like better on a technical front. I find Waldorf education very beautiful. So I'm very partial to it. I almost feel like a good mix. Like Waldorf in early years and then go into kind of a Montessori style.

But I don't know. Is that common with homeschool parents is mixing different styles? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, for sure. And that's one of the beauties of homeschooling is you can find the exact mix that fits your kid. And you can kind of break out of the idea that you have to that there's one right model for your kid. And you have to find the right one that fits. It's like, no, you can pick the best thing out of like 10 of them and design the perfect education for your kid.

But even like Waldorf and Montessori are like they're they're really lovely models, but they're again, just the tip of the iceberg of what's being developed. Especially with the advent of the internet, there's a lot of different types of online schools that are cropping up. There are game-based online schools, like synthesis is one. It was built off of Elon Musk's Ad Astra school that he designed for his kids and the kids at SpaceX. are the kids of SpaceX employees. And it's like their whole thing is that kids play video games that are teaching them like problem solving and critical thinking skills.

So they're like playing as teams trying to figure out how to solve complex problems and like that school. I'm a really big fan of world schooling, which is online school, but for kids all over the globe. So it's divided into like maybe like three or four time zones around the globe. And there's classes and kids,

kid can be taking a class with like a kid in Switzerland and a kid in the Philippines and a kid in Australia and like, you know, building not just taking classes on things they're interested in, but also like building a global network, which is such cool context for a kid to have. I like that. Micro schools are really awesome. I'm a huge kind of the micro school movement. Oh. I've never heard of that. I'm about to send you down a rabbit hall. Send me. Micro schools are awesome.

So micro schools are very loose term because, you know, there's not a hard definition for how many students counts as a micro school. But the simplest way to describe it is it's a modern twist on the one room schoolhouse idea. So it's a smaller. Oftentimes microschools are running like in someone's home or in a church, but often too they'll rent a building. And it's usually a mixed age environment. it's running off of some type of educational philosophy. There's a lot of different types of educational approaches you can run with. But it's like a very localized, decentralized,

grassroots approach to education where some educator in a community or a parent is like, I want to do school a little bit differently. A lot of these are run by educators who are fed up with the public school system and have left. There's a lot of those. And they've started a classroom of their own. own for mixed age kids in the community. And it's small and has no administration so it can run on a much lower budget. Like a lot of the education savings account programs that are either, like if you have in Arizona, Arizona's universal education savings account program where

parents can take the money that would be normally allocated to the local district, they can take to any school of their choice or homeschool program. It's super exciting. There's a lot of movements like that happening around the country. It's a very, very cool thing. Very cool. Which who knows how long that's going to stick around because now we have Governor Katie Hop. So I don't know, but it is very neat.

But it's very exciting in terms of changing, like the conversations change so much around what's possible. But that, like, it's, I think in Arizona, it's $7,500 or $7,500 roughly dollars per kid. Like, that's enough to run a micro school. Yeah. If you have like 10 kids, that's enough to pay a parent or a teacher. a full-time salary to teach. And these are things, if your state doesn't offer a program like this, these are the types of things that you bring to your local legislators and you say, hey, we need to change some things.

I'd like to see this and get the other homeschool parents or unschool parents or whatever around you to kind of rally behind it and start asking for these things. Let's talk tangibles. What are five things that a parent can do today to start deschooling their kid? You're putting me on the spot now. There are so many things. one is to encourage your kid asking questions

because school stifles I forget the exact numbers but there are studies that have been done on how many questions children ask and a kid

pre-school asks well over 100 questions an hour oh my gosh and by the time kids get like into elementary school

and they've had a few years of schooling that number drops to like maybe one an hour. Like they stop asking questions. Oh, that's heartbreaking. And some of it's developmental. Like, you know, you go through your peak question asking phase when, you know, it's a

cliche everybody knows the Y years. And then, you know, you're making more sense of the world. You're asking fewer questions, but you're not asking one an hour. And so encourage your kid asking questions, not just of you, but of adults around them, because that's like a really big, scary thing in school. Okay. Ask an adult that you don't know a question, but encourage that. What's number two?

Ask, encourage creativity. Again, school's not doing that. Like you have, when you think about art in the classroom, everybody gets the same coloring page and everybody's supposed to do it in the same colors. It's not creative at all. It's formulaic. And creativity isn't a formulaic thing. And it needs to be messy and wild and emergent. and like look a little insane when you're in the middle of it.

It's like, I'm sorry, you're rigging up what in the living room? And where did I thought I hid those scissors? Like, what are you doing? Like you need to let your kid run with that a little bit. Okay. Because that creative spark is, one, it's driving the questions. But two, it's going to drive their creative capacity and their thinking capacity. So over the course of their entire life.

Three is having. have your kid like encourage them to to push back and not just take your word for it which is a really scary thing when you're a parent sometimes that can be challenging i think for parents it's you want to be able to say like because i said so and then move on you know i'm sure yeah yeah but but encourage that okay um for encourage learning for fun and encourage learning about things that are not academically relevant at all. Encourage your kid to go down rabbit holes and chase things that they're curious about and there's like no clear benefit whatsoever. And you might think it's a total waste of time, but encourage it because school's killing that. And then five, like break them out of a lot of the implicit assumptions that school's starting to layer on them in terms of what you're supposed to be when you grow up and how you're, You're like even asking the question, what do you want to be when you grow up and like assigning labels to like, well, this is good and this is bad and I did a good job on this. And this isn't very this like this isn't I didn't do a very good job on this coloring page or whatever. Like all of those things that are they're starting to learn how to self-censor the way they're thinking about what they're doing and putting themselves into a box.

push back on that, that desire that school has to push them in that direction and like stop trying to prune them so much into a perfectly shaped thing. Let them be a little wild for a while. Is there a common denominator between exceptional people in history and their childhood experiences? Very much so. Yes. There are a few. There's a really great article. on substack about this that my friend Henrik Carlson wrote for people who like really want to go down the rabbit hole. That's where I would send you because this is a fascinating rabbit hole. But yes, there are a lot of exceptional people in history were actually homeschooled. I was just writing about this how Laura Ingles Wilder was homeschooled for a lot of her education.

And people don't really think about that part of her story. But like she was a homeschooler for a lot of time. She lived in a log cabin with no schools around. Who else? All kinds of people like Virginia Woolf, Blaise Pascal. like you start you start breaking down like I mean anybody in history like so many people were homeschooled Frederick Douglass like he's a great he didn't even he was not he wasn't even homeschooled like he had to fight against the adults in his life to get an education he's a great example of what kids are

capable of well and then all the Silicon Valley people the big tech people what I find interesting is that they do not send their kids typically to traditional public school. And they also do not let their kids use tech. They don't like iPads and all that kind of stuff for their little kids. Yeah. I mean, it definitely depends on the entrepreneur.

It's not an absolute. But yeah, there's a lot of, they're not quite as, they don't, they went through the system. They know what worked and what didn't for them. A lot of them ended up dropping out of universities too. And they do look for different education criteria for their kids. but yeah the kids who are like when you think about the great writers of history or the great the great novelists the great scientists and intellectuals the great inventors they had to have like they had to have space to develop their own set of questions and their own ideas about the world and their own interests like you can't be obsessively focused on writing the next great novel if all your time is filled and you're never bored and you're never left with time to ask questions we as a culture have, I feel, pressurized parents to always think you're not a good parent if your kid

doesn't have a schedule and every single moment of their day is not scheduled out and they're doing something. This is the time that we go on a play date. Now, this is the time that we go to softball. This is the time that we do this. And really having some wiggle room of some hours where your kids don't have everything scheduled out and they can just say, okay, I have several hours. I have an afternoon where I can just try to entertain myself or be creative or, you know, build a fort in the backyard. Those are really crucial to children's development, right? Yeah, this might be my most controversial opinion is that your child, it's important for your child to be bored. It's also possible to over-socialize your kid. Like, everybody's worried about their homeschooled kids not being socialized enough.

But we're not looking at the opposite end of the spectrum, which is where the average kid sits, which is they have no time in their day where they're not around other kids. other kids. They're in school, in class, from, you know, eight in the morning to three in the afternoon. And then they go to soccer practice. And then they go to like whatever club they're a part of. And then they have like other activities all weekend. And they're around kids all the time. Yeah. And they never have a chance to discover who they are when no one else is asking them to be anything. And there's so much potential that gets wasted when you don't know you don't even know who you want to be. And we just, you can just kind of go on autopilot, you know, you consume the same pop culture things that everybody else consumes and you talk about it. You make all the same jokes and all the same references and you have all the same assumptions about what you want to do with your career. And then you like go to college because it's what you do. And then you come out at the end of college. And that's for a lot of people is where they have their moment of reckoning where they're like, wait a second. I don't know if I even like this subject that I majored in. I don't even know that I want to do this. I don't quite know how I ended up here. And that's pretty common for people to have a quarter life. crisis. All the time. Most of my friends. So I did not go to college. Most of my friends did. And

like clockwork, almost all of them graduate from college. And then they say, oh, I don't even, this isn't even what I want to do for my career. And then they didn't even end up doing something career-wise that had to do with their major. Yeah. It was a huge waste of money in time. Culturally, American parents really seem to place a lot of value on education above childhood, which is kind of what we're talking about. You know, how early is my child reading, doing multiplication tables, memorizing the periodic table. But how is putting pressure on those measurements a mistake? Well, one, it's discrediting all of the other things that also could make your child great.

Like, maybe your kid isn't great at the, like, book learning, but they're actually an amazing innovator and entrepreneur. But you're not measuring it, so you don't see it. But also, like, you're teaching your kid to think in those terms. as like their worth is tied to their measurements in performance. And we see this when we look at the depression rates and the anxiety rates of kids, especially in high school, it's through the roof.

It's ridiculous. There's no reason for 14, 15, 16-year-olds to be so depressed and anxious that they can barely get out of bed in the morning. And they need to be on meds to get through the week. Like that's tragic that our kids end up there. but we're putting so much pressure on them that's so unnecessary because a lot of times it doesn't even matter

like does it's, does it matter in your, like you're killing it, you're a podcast host, you're doing all this awesome stuff. Does it really matter what grade you got in algebra when you were in ninth grade? It's never mattered. It's never mattered.

The kids think their whole future rests on this. Like they're going to ruin their entire lives. And I think honestly my parents, obviously, they were going to ask questions of how I came home with really bad grades, but there were subjects that I, I would always, my whole life probably averaged a C in.

But then I would get an A in something like Honors English where I could do creative writing and do all these things. I was in radio and TV electives all throughout high school. Then I ended up pursuing this as a career. So it was like they kind of were very supportive of. There are certain subjects that Alex really excels in. And then there are subjects that she doesn't care for and she does met on. But they weren't just on my butt the whole time.

Like, you've got to get an A in math when I hated math. And I wasn't into, I wasn't good at it either. But I just, I didn't care about it. And I knew in my heart that nothing math-related was what I was going to do for a career also. But I want to ask you, why is aiming for your child to be fine and normal, a terrible goal for parents? Well, look at everything we've talked about in this conversation. Normal means you can read at a sixth grade level. And you've, like, graduated from high school.

But what does that mean when you look at the academic performance, your kid goes through high school and they've been. barely learn anything and they still can't read at a sixth grade level. And you're like, well, my kid's normal, so they're fine. Like, we're settling for this very, very mediocre set of standards because it's safer for us to all fail together than it is to strike out and take a risk on your own. Like, it's really scary to buck the status quo. It's really scary to be the one person in your neighborhood or the one person in your extended family who's not sending their kid to school. And you get a lot of pushback. because people kind of get offended too.

They're like, I'm sorry. Is this, is this not what I'm doing not good enough for you? It's like, well, kind of no. But also like, it's hard. Like if you mess up, you know, if everybody goes to public school and they all fail together, it's like, well, we were doing what we were supposed to do and we all did it together. And like, we're all in this together. If you buck the status quo and you go do something totally different and your kid fails,

that's really scary. And even if your kid is successful, people have a really hard time seeing that. I see this all the time with families who homeschool their kids and their kids are successful adults. And the grandparents like still don't really understand like what's going on. They're just kind of confused. What you're describing is being a rebel, which is the name of. Rebel educator. What you do is Rebel Educator.

So what is Rebel Educator? What sorts of resources do you provide parents and how do you teach parents how to be a rebel educator themselves? Yeah. So Rebel Educator is the way I described is like, We're a jumping off point. So we're trying to help as many parents exit the public school system as possible, and we're trying to save as many kids from the clutches of the public school system as possible. We're trying to save their potential, basically.

So we're a starting point. Like when you are trying to figure out, okay, public school is not working. What do I do? The hope is that you find us. You come to us, and we can start answering some of those questions for you. So we have a website that's full of content on everything from really practical advice. Like, okay, your kids struggling in to learn to read. What can you do?

Should you even be worried about this? Here's how to think about it. How to add more entrepreneurship into your kids' education, stuff like that. We have a lot of content on like how we got here in the first place. The history of the public school system breakdowns of different types of education models, kind of how to like set mental models in your own head around how you're thinking about your kids' education. and how to choose, like, how do you choose a school? You know that, like, can you homeschool?

Are you equipped to do that? What resources are out there? Should we choose a private school? Like, what type of private school should we choose? Should we do online school? Should we do a micro school? There's a lot of questions that parents have. So we're trying to help them answer them.

And then, you know, we're doing, we have a soon-to-be-launched podcast by the time this goes live. The podcast might be live, too. So people can check that out as well and we're just facilitating conversations with people about education and trying to be very rebellious about it. Like we're saying all the things that maybe isn't polite to say but it's important to say in terms of like what people think. Most things I've found that are actually important and life-changing.

I've improved my life are the things I'm quote unquote not supposed to talk about. And education is one of those things. And it's so weird too that it's something you're not supposed to talk about. Like it's not polite. But it's also people kind of get bored with it. No, it's so interesting. We're kind of unusual, you and I, and that we don't have kids that we really care about this. Like, a lot of people, like, well, I don't have kids yet, so I don't need to worry about this yet.

No, worry about it now because the thing is, is that people, that's why everybody asks me, they're like, why do you like all these parenting books and homeschool books and all this? And I'm like, because I want to have an idea of that stuff now. I don't want to wait till I don't want to have nine months and then I have to figure out everything. Right. Like, so I'm like, I'm interested in it now. And here's a thing, even if I am not called to be a biological mother in my life, As women, I do believe that God is placed a calling on us to mentor other children. And there's different capacities in how that looks, whether it's your nieces and nephews or kids in your

neighborhood or, you know, kids at your church, whatever. I think all of us are called to kind of be that mentor and look out for children in our communities. And I think we have lost that in society today as we're not raising kids with the help of a village. And so I'd love to be that person. And maybe, you know, part of the way that I do that is through this podcast and having people like you, Hannah, on. Where is your website and what's the name of the Twitter and all that stuff for people? Yeah. So the website is Rebeleducator.co.

You can find the Twitter is at Rebel Educator on Twitter. We also have a Substack newsletter if you're into that sort of thing. It's Rebeleducator. Substack.com. You can find my personal Twitter too, which is at Hannah Frankman, which is sometimes where I post some of the spicier stuff actually. Like the really hot take sometimes go there. And that's where we'll find updates on podcast and stuff too.

once that goes live. And yeah, I mean, this is, I care a lot about this, even though I don't have kids because, like, education is the future of everything. Absolutely. If we're not educating the next generation, well, nothing else matters. So. Thank you, Hannah, for coming on the spillover. Thank you so much for having me, Alex. This has been so much fun. My social media manager asked me the other day. She's like, Alex, what subjects are you really into discussing with your friends right now, like in your personal time? And I was like, education, 100%. education, styles and methods, all the ways that we've failed kids in this area. I cannot get enough of it. I'm so passionate about it. And so soonish, I am in contact with a pretty well-known homeschool mom of multiple children. I want to have her on to talk all things homeschool, busting myths and stereotypes, talk about different methods, logistics, literally all of it.

And then next week is for the theology nuts. It's hot take after hot take, and it's going to conjure up some very heated debates with this audience, which I cannot wait to see. They say some stuff about the end times that I've literally never heard before, some stuff about heaven that I've never heard before. And of course, all of this is coming out just in time for Easter, because we love it when the Christians and the Catholics fight each other right before Easter. It's all a family here at the end of the day. The spillover is back next Thursday at 9 p.m. Pacific, midnight Eastern on Apple podcast and Spotify or anywhere else you listen to podcasts. Now, if you learned something new today, Tell me what it was in your five-star review.

Please and thank you. I'm Alex Clark, and this is the spillover. Love you, mean it. Bye.