 they used to be called factory schools. For a long time, they were literally called factory schools. Why? They were training kids to sit at a desk, follow orders, do their little tasks, be a cog in a machine, raise their hand if they needed to go to the bathroom. And it was widely perceived in a very positive way that this was going to help prepare kids for having good jobs. We see this today, even though we have a totally different economy, though we have the same education system from a century ago that was for a different economy. But we see it today with things like Common Core and No Child Left Behind and other emphases that are focusing on what are called college and career readiness. So the purported purpose today of the K-12 system is to basically prepare children for higher education and for the economy. What's fascinating, I unfortunately don't recall off the top of my head who did the poll. We cite it in the book, but just a few months ago, this huge poll came out. And they did a really interesting, had an interesting methodology. They were asking parents their own perspective of how they prioritize K-12 education. In other words, why do you think K-12 education is important for your child? But then they also asked them how they perceive others rank that type of perception. So college and career readiness, right? Parents for their own children prioritize that very low on the spectrum of priorities. They de-emphasized that, they didn't think it was that important. However, when they were asked what they perceive society and their peers prioritize it, it was very high. Because everyone thinks that that's why we educate kids. That's why we put them through all the misery of all these years of schooling, is so that they'll have a good, is so that they'll be prepared for the future. What ranked at the top for parents? Two things, practical skill development. Not these abstract ideas of getting it ready for a future career, but very practical skills, financial management and everything else. And number two is critical thinking. And if you were to assess the modern education system based on those things, I think it ranks very poorly. The push for charter schools, as you point out in the 90s, I think is best contextualized as coming on the coattails of the reforms in the 80s with homeschooling. Homeschooling was effectively illegal in most states until a lot of court battles throughout the 80s that really sparked a wave of parental rights and educational reform and interest in saying, hey, we need alternatives. There had been a large underground homeschooling movement, of course, but this was kind of brought above board in part with the supportive groups like the Homeschool Legal Defense Association that went and fought and knocked down a lot of these state laws. Leading us to the 90s, as you point out with the charter school movement, this idea that rather than a one size fits all approach, rather than we do it this way in this school and here's the conveyor belt, what if we could create some flexibility within the system? They weren't questioning the system overall. They weren't saying, let's have educations, savings accounts or vouchers or whatever, but hey, could we have schools that look a little bit differently, that operate a little bit differently? I'm ultimately not a big fan of charter schools just because I don't think that they lived up to the vision of their original proponents. A lot of times they devolve into kind of lipstick on a pig in the sense that they have superficial differences and some marginal differences, but fundamentally they're all following the same curriculum standards and required to do things largely the same way that happens in the public schools, but you can certainly see in the early stages of those battles, again on the coattails of the homeschooling reforms, an increased desire which now is substantially larger for parents to say we need something different because the status quo isn't working. What for you, what is the vision of, what is education for? In two minutes or less, here we go. Okay, so the root word of education when you look at the etymology, it is to draw out. The modern school system is trying to fill in cram kids full of knowledge, just in case they ever needed 30 years from now and need to remember that the mitochondrion is the powerhouse of the cell. I think by contrast, true education is trying to draw out it as a Socratic method. It is trying to challenge kids and adults to think critically about their own ideas, to identify where they can find that information from. So I think what we ultimately need is educational entrepreneurship. It's why I'm so bullish on micro schools because what you're finding is a lot of teachers who are fed up with the bureaucracy, they make way more money and have total freedom starting their own school and then they can cobble together curriculum and activities and projects from a variety of sources. My own kids go to an Acton Academy. I'm a huge fan of Acton Academies. They're all over the country. Can you explain what that is? Yeah, yeah, they're kind of a Montessori-like private school. Typically they're micro schools. These are small schools, but they're very Socratic in nature. It's project-based learning, it's self-guided. There are no teachers. The kids are in charge of their own education. The adults are what are called guides. So they're there to help when needed. But they provide all these resources to kids. They provide them the time and the educational freedom to follow their curiosities and figure out what they wanna do. They have a peer community there to kind of debate and challenge ideas and work together on projects. And it provides the children not only a lot more self-ownership to direct their own education, but the freedom to do so. The biggest thing that we stifled for kids that was stifled for me as a graduate of what I call the public fool system was that I had no education freedom. I would be curious about things. I would raise my hand, hey, why are we learning this? Oh, put your hand down, it'll be on the test. So fundamentally, Corey mentioned this earlier, it's a pseudo monopoly. Fundamentally, what I believe the school system needs is competition. We know that that's how things improve and prices go down. I'm not a central planner. I'm not gonna say we should re-architect all of K-12 education based on this. I think though systematically what we need is to introduce competition to the system and unleash education entrepreneurship to find a diversity of approaches and curricula and options that can best resonate with each unique individual experience. We don't really have that. We have a small amount, but with all these states passing education savings accounts and other reforms, I think I'm increasingly hopeful about the future that we're gonna have more of a marketplace of educational approaches to help kids in the future. That was an excerpt from Reasons Livestream with Corey DeAngelis and Conor Boyack. The authors of Mediocrity 40 Ways Government Schools Are Failing Today's Students. If you want to see the full conversation, go here. If you wanna see another excerpt, go here and make sure to come back next Thursday. Every Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern time when Zach Weismiller and I are doing a livestream with somebody very interesting that you are definitely gonna wanna know about.