What should school cost?

0:00How much should school cost? Hey, it's Seth, and this is Akimbo.

0:14Hey, it's 2025. The last time I did a short rant about school was 12 years ago. I'm going to include the audio of that at the end of this podcast. That was about what is school for. But a more urgent short-term question is how much should school cost? If it's your kid or if it's you, what should the school be like? Should it be clean and safe, well outfitted? Should the science lab have the tools the science lab needs to have? Should the teachers be well-trained and well-compensated? When we ask just about anybody across the planet about what school should cost, I think that we can agree that almost everyone, when talking about their kid's school, will say we shouldn't make important compromises.

1:13That education is so important to the family, to the future of our kids, that we're not going to scrimp on it. Okay, well, that's a case for people who have means to invest in things like private school. Next question, how much should your kids' friends' schools cost? Meaning, do you want your kids to grow up and hang out and be friends with people who go to schools that are well-outfitted, efficient, leveraged, filled with good cheer, well-trained people, etc.? Most people are also going to say yes. So then we move on to the community at large and then our nation or the whole world. Is school worth it?

2:07What is the difference between the world of 1400 and the world of 2025? Well, we could say a big part of it is the infrastructure we've built, the culture that exists. But I think education is at the heart of this, that when we have doctors, people are healthier. When we have engineers, bridges don't fall down. Go down the list. Education builds the world. So now consider the case of an organization like BuildOn, a nonprofit founded by Jim Zilkowski in Connecticut. You can find it at buildon.org. BuildOn visits communities in some of the poorest parts of the world and works with the community and for the community to build a school, a concrete school, a school that will last.

3:02They build it. BuildOn is simply the catalyst to get it going. It's the first school in that village. The cost per student is trivial. The school your kids go to probably spends more on school lunch in a week than it costs to run one of these schools for a year. Can we agree that a school in a village that's never had a school is transformative? Of course we can. Kids who stay in school, particularly girls, end up being spectacularly more productive and healthier than ones who don't get any schooling at all. So now that we've got the minimum, the school up and running, does it make sense for that school to have pencils or books or trained teachers or a second trained teacher?

3:57I think you can see where I'm going here. education that is invested in a way that increases effectiveness always pays for itself. And incrementally, the dollars spent improving schools that are on the lower end of the investment spectrum pay bigger dividends than, say, installing a new stadium at a giant university in the United States that already has a stadium. And yet, given the perverse incentives, that's not actually what happens. What happens is we tend to over-invest in institutions that offer us status and affiliation. Harvard University has enough money to send every student through Harvard for free for the next 50 years without blinking an eye.

4:59And yet people keep giving money to Harvard, status and affiliation. The story that they're able to tell to the donor is obvious and significant enough to cause people to take action. When we think about school in a country that cares about its future, and that country could be Spain, it could be Tanzania, or it could be the United States. I think we can make assertions about that country based on two interesting pieces of data. One, how much do they invest in the most effective and probably best funded schools? And how much do they invest in the least? because kids, kids are a blank slate. We can invest in them from an early age to build scaffolding.

5:52And that scaffolding is present when they need it the most because most learning is autodidactic. I learned what that word means on my own, and I'll never forget it. Autodidactic learning is how we learn to walk and to talk and to do just about everything that's important. But the scaffolding, the cultural bias to proceed through the hard parts, the scaffolding is what separates people along a spectrum of outcomes. Is there an institution, a culture, a teacher, an adult present who can make a difference? Fast forward to the world of artificial intelligence. If you haven't read The Diamond Age by Neil Stevenson, I strongly recommend it.

6:44To imagine that he wrote this before the iPad, before there was large-scale access to the internet, is stunning, but it still holds up to this day. What happens when there's an AI-driven device, custom for every single student, that sits with them, sticks with them, stands by them for decades as they work their way through the educational system? We have all the pieces we need to pull that off right now. And so education is at a turning point. It's at a turning point because we can invest in physical locations and local schools, and we must. But there's also a universal sort of scaffolding that is about to be available.

7:30And if we care enough, we can bring it to schools where it will make a difference. When we hear teachers complaining that students are using AI to help or to replace their work on essays, I'm not at all sympathetic to that. Essays aren't the point of school. We need to be really clear about what school is for and to build that for a generation that needs us, that needs our leadership and care to build schools that will make a difference. So with that preamble, and it's good to be back. I can't promise I'll be back again anytime soon, but I wanted to share this one. With that preamble, here from 12 years ago is my talk on Stop Stealing Dreams.

8:16the most important thing to do is to ask what is school for? And then once we come up with an assertion or an answer to spend the time and spend the money to make it happen. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

8:48Good morning, boys and girls. That was terrible. You've learned how to do that from a young age. You're supposed to say, good morning, Mr. Godin. So let's try again. Good morning, boys and girls. Good morning, Mr. Godin. Have you thought about what that's for? Have you thought about how for 100 or 150 years that was ingrained into the process of public education? Have you thought at all, as people on the cutting edge, as people who are interested in making school work again, about a very simple question? What is school for? I don't think we're answering that question. I don't even think we're asking that question.

9:40Everyone seems to think they know what school is for, but we're not going to make anything happen until we can all agree about how we got here and where we're going. So my goal today is to put that question into your head and help you think about it. First, we have to understand what school used to be for. There's a woman named Mary Yvette Buhl, and she came up with this notion. she was a mathematician in the late 1800s, that you could use string and nails and wood and make decorations, those things where the string goes back and forth, and there's math built into that. And that a teacher on the cutting edge of fifth graders might decide to use that idea of modulo nine and remainders and string going back and forth to teach an important lesson about math.

10:27So the memo went home to all the parents at my kid's public school, and it said, we need help with this, we need hammers. So I'm sort of unemployed. I showed up at school that day with a bag of hammers, a big bag of 18 hammers. Now, I don't know if you've ever heard 18 kids hitting nails with 18 hammers in a little room for 20 minutes, but I have, and I'm not going to do it for you because it's really hard to listen to. And what the teacher explained to the kids is they must arrange the brads in this certain pattern, hammering, hammering, hammering, and make sure they're in there nice and firm.

11:03And so these kids are hammering, hammering, hammering, 20 minutes of zero education, just 20 minutes of hammering. And then the teacher walks over and she says to a boy, I told you to make sure that brads were all the way in. And one by one, she pulled them out and threw them on the floor, every single one, and put the board down. And that is what she believed school was for. School was about teaching obedience. Good morning, boys and girls, starts the day with respect and obedience. Now we have to move on to Frederick J. Kelly. Some of you brought your own number two pencil for the quiz that's going to be part of today.

11:47The number two pencil is famous because Frederick J. Kelly made it famous. Back around World War I, we had a problem, which was this huge influx of students because we had expanded the school day to include high school. And there was this huge need to sort them all out. So he invented the standardized test, an abomination. And he gave it up 10 years later when the emergency was over. But because he gave it up, because he called it out, because he said the standardized test is too crude to be used, he was ostracized and lost his job as the president of a university. Because he dared to speak up against a system that was working.

12:32So let's try a little experiment here. I'd like everyone to go ahead and raise your right hand just as high as you possibly can. Now please raise it a little higher. Hmm, what's that about? My instructions were pretty clear, and yet you all held back. How come? You held back because you've been taught since you were three years old to hold a little bit back. Because if you do everything, if you put all out, then your parent or your teacher or your coach or your boss is going to ask for a little bit more, aren't they? And the reason they will is because we are products of the industrial age. The industrial age made us all rich.

13:07The industrial age brought productivity to the table. Productivity allows human beings working together with a boss and a manager to make more than they could ever make alone. Productivity makes us a car for$700 instead of$700 ,000 in 1920. But the thing about productivity and industrialism is this. The people who ran factories had two huge problems. Problem number one, they looked around and they said, we don't have enough workers. We don't have enough people who are willing to move off the farm and come to this dark building for 12 hours a day, six days a week, and do what they are told. If we could get more workers, we could pay them less.

13:47And if we could pay them less, we'd make more money. We need more workers. And so the KKK went to industrialists and said, you need to get those kids out of the factories, those people you're paying$3 a day, because they're taking our jobs. And so a deal was made. And the deal was universal public education whose sole intent was not to train the scholars of tomorrow. We had plenty of scholars. It was to train people to be willing to work in the factory. It was to train people to behave, to comply, to fit in. We process you for a whole year. If you are defective, we hold you back and process you again.

14:30We sit you in straight rows, just like they organize things in the factory. We build a system all about interchangeable people. Because factories are based on interchangeable parts. If this piece is no good, put another piece in there. and org charts, those little boxes, are all designed to say, oh, we can fit Bob in there because Rachel didn't go to work today. And so we built school. That's what school was for. And the second thing industrialists were really worried about was that we weren't going to buy all the stuff they could make. That in 1880, 1890, people owned two pairs of shoes, one pair of jeans.

15:10That was it. You don't know anyone who owns one pair of jeans anymore, ever. What they needed to train us to do was buy stuff. They needed to train us to fit in. They needed to train us to become consumers. And so Horace Mann, who meant well, built the public school as we know it. And then he needed more teachers, right, because you have more schools. So he built a school for teachers. You know what it's called? The normal school. He called it the normal school where they trained people to teach in the common school because he wanted you to be normal. And he wanted the class to be normal. and he wanted people to fit in.

15:47And then we came up with this, the textbook. Now, if you want to teach somebody how to become passionate about, I don't know, American history, why would you give them this? Do people walk into Barnes & Noble and say, I'm really interested in that latest gripping thing that's going to get me all engaged about the Civil War? Do you have one of those? Textbooks in stock? If you wanted to teach someone how to be a baseball fan, would you start by having them understand the history of baseball, who Abner Doubleday was, and what barnstorming was, and the influences of cricket, and capitalism, and the Negro Leagues?

16:26Would you do that? Would you say, okay, there's a test tomorrow. I want you to memorize the top 50 batters in order by batting average, and then rank the people based on how they do on the test so the ones who do well get to memorize more baseball players? Is that how we would create baseball fans? Here's the key distinction. What people do, quite naturally, is if it's work they try to figure out how to do less. And if it's art we try to figure out how to do more. And when we put kids in the factory we call school, the thing we built to indoctrinate them into compliance, why are we surprised that the question is, will this be on the test?

17:16Someone who's making art doesn't say, can I do one less canvas this month? They don't say, can I write one less song this month? They don't say, can I touch one fewer person this month? It's art. They want to do more of it. But when it's work, when it's your job, when you're seven, of course you want to do less of it. So one of the things that I've done as an avocation is when I meet people, I take this out. This is a great bargain online. And it's filled with these blocks, right? You've probably seen blocks before. I'm going to dump it out a little bit. And I say, take four blocks and make them into something interesting.

18:00Now it's an interesting question because you can use the letters or you can use the shapes, you can spell a word, you can put a profanity there, you can spell a word that means nothing, you can make the shape into a bridge. And people hate this because there's no right answer and there's a million wrong answers. They hate this because there's no dummy's guide to how to make something interesting out of blocks when you're 30 years old. And now we're at a crossroads. We're at a crossroads because as a culture, we say the only thing we care about, the only place we're willing to cross the street to go, the only thing we're willing to buy, the only person we're willing to vote for, the only stuff we're willing to talk about is interesting, is art, is new, will touch us, is valuable.

18:46And then we spend all of our money and all of our time teaching people not to do that. And so we're now at this crossroads because technology is here too. And the technology says, you know what? For the first time in history, we do not need a human being to stand next to us to teach us to do square roots. For the first time in history, we do not need a human being to teach us how to sharpen an axe. Because the internet connects us all. And so I want to share with you eight things that I think are going to change completely if we decide how we want to answer this question. Or maybe even if we don't.

19:20One, as Sal Khan has pointed out, homework during the day, lectures at night. World-class lecturers lecturing on anything you want to learn to every single person in the world who's got an internet connection for free. And then all day, go and sit with a human being, a teacher, and ask your questions and do your work and explore face-to-face. It's stupid to have the same lecture being given, handmade, 10 ,000 times a day across the country when we can get one person to do it great for the people who want to hear it. Number two, open book, open note all the time. There is zero value in memorizing anything ever again.

20:03Anything that is worth memorizing is worth looking up. So we shouldn't spend any time teaching people to memorize stuff. Number three, access to any course anywhere in the world, anytime you want to take it. So this notion that we have to do things in a certain order, which is based on physical location and chronology, makes no sense. Number four, precise focused education instead of mass batch stuff. That's the way we make almost everything we buy now, right? It used to be you could have any color car you want as long as it was black, so we could keep the assembly line going. But now they make 10 ,000 kinds of cars, because they can.

20:39So we should make 10 ,000 kinds of education. No more multiple-choice exams. Those were invented to make them easy to score, but computers are smarter than that. Measuring experience instead of test scores, because experience is what we really care about. The end of compliance as an outcome. The resume is a proof that you have complied for years and years and years with famous brand names, and it gets you your next job. It's worthless now. And cooperation instead of isolation. Why do we do anything where we ask people to do it all by themselves when then we put them in the real world and say Cooperate for more teachers role transforms into coach lifelong learning with work happening earlier in your life and Really important the death of the famous college Not good college.

21:32We don't know what a good college is But we know what a famous college is because someone ranked them as famous or because they have a football team that's famous. Why on earth are we paying extra? Why on earth are we working harder to comply and be obedient just so we can get a famous brand name that has no relevance to success or happiness put after our name? I want to show you one more device I have over here as I start to do this. This is called an Arduino and it's a little bit like a Raspberry Pi. They're both electronic devices that cost 20 to 30 dollars each. Raspberry Pi, which you can buy for$25, has on it the complete Linux operating system, a USB port, audio out, and a monitor.

22:16So if we take that cable and that keyboard and that monitor we already have in front of almost every kid in this country and hand them one of these, we can then say to them, go build something interesting and ask if you need help. Why wouldn't we want to teach our kids to go do something interesting? Why wouldn't we want to teach our kids to figure it out? And yet, every day we send kids to school and say, do not figure it out. Do not ask questions I do not know the answer to. Do not look it up. Do not vary from the curriculum. And better, better, better, better, better comply. Fit in. Be like your peers.

22:59do what you're told because I must process you because everything in my Evaluation is based on whether or not I processed you properly. So there are two myths I want to close with the first one and we got to be really honest with ourselves about this myth one great performance in school leads to happiness and success if That's not true. We should stop telling ourselves it is and And two, great parents have kids who produce great performance in school. If that's not true, we should stop telling ourselves it is. Are we asking our kids to collect dots or connect dots? Because we're really good at measuring how many dots they collect, how many facts they have memorized, how many boxes they have filled in.

23:53But we teach nothing about how to connect those dots. You cannot teach connecting dots in a dummy's manual. You cannot teach connecting dots in a textbook. You can only do it by putting kids into a situation where they can fail. Grades are an illusion. Passion and insight are reality. Your work is more important than your congruence to an answer key. Persistence in the face of a skeptical authority figure is priceless. And yet we undermine it. Fitting in is a short-term strategy that gets you nowhere. Standing out is a long-term strategy that takes guts and produces results. If you care enough about your work to be willing to be criticized for it, then you have done a good day's work.

24:43So what now? What now? What should we do? Because we've been talking about it a whole lot. Only one thing. Ask the question. What is school for? When they say this is our new textbook, the question is, is that going to help us with getting what school is for? When they say this is the new superintendent, we need to say, yes, but is this superintendent going to help us do what we think school is for? And if you don't know what school is for, then have a conversation about it. Because until we can agree what school is for, we're not going to get what we need. thank you for the work you do I appreciate it