Alpha School: A New Approach To Education - MacKenzie Price - #981

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
What's fundamentally broken about the current school model?

**MacKenzie Price** (0:04)
Oh boy, I don't know how long your podcast is, but let me tell you the fundamental issue. The teacher in front of the classroom model of one person trying to educate many kids who are at wildly different levels of understanding just fundamentally doesn't work. And that would be the summary. There's a lot of sub points in there. I think the other thing that we really want to fundamentally change in our culture is the attitude about school. I think people think school is like spinach. It's good for you, but you kind of just got to get it through and do that. And what I truly believe is that kids should love school. Because when kids love school, it opens up the possibility to do so many incredible things. And that's what we're doing at our schools.

**Chris Williamson** (0:57)
Dig deeper, what's wrong with the one person lecturing to 2030-40?

**MacKenzie Price** (1:04)
Yeah, well, you know, if you want to go back in history, think a thousand years ago when Socrates was tutoring Plato, who tutored Aristotle, who tutored Alexander the Great, who went on to go take over the known world at the age of 22 That tutoring system was phenomenal, but it was reserved for the very, very elite, and, you know, education was not given to the masses. You know, fast forward many years to the 1800s with the Industrial Revolution. We had to figure out a way to educate the masses. How could you get education to as many people as possible? But there was also another goal in mind at that point. How could you raise up compliant citizens who would listen to instruction and do as they're told so that they could go to work in the factories and make industry work? And, you know, so that system of education, a teacher leading a group of students in a classroom, you know, came out in the 1800s. And you think about all of the industry changes across the board, except in the area of education. And if you went and visited a rural school in India or you went to the most posh boarding school in the East Coast, you would really see the same thing. You would see a teacher leading a group of students in a time-based classroom. You know, the building's nicer in one versus the other, but otherwise, you know, our education system has not changed. And we're seeing all of the kind of bad fruit that is coming from that, especially in recent years where our world is changing so quickly, and we fundamentally need to create a different type of citizen that's able to have critical thinking skills, is able to develop life skills. And, you know, we're not even in the traditional system developing great academic skills at this point.

**Chris Williamson** (3:04)
Why doesn't the traditional system enable life skills, social skills, academic skills effectively?

**MacKenzie Price** (3:11)
Well, you know, one of the things about the teacher in front of the classroom model, and, you know, just to be clear, Chris, I think teachers are heroes. You know, it's an impossible job to take, you know, 15, 20, 25 kids who show up in a classroom, and some of them, you know, barely know how to read, and others, you know, are super advanced. You know, if you think about a teacher having, let's say, a group of fifth graders come in, and she's got to explain a concept, and some of those fifth graders, before she's even opened her mouth, they already know the concept, and they're sitting there just bored to death. And after she's explained the concept, there's a huge percent of the class that it has gone right over their head. They have no idea what's happening. And in either case, you're forced to just move forward and do that. And so as a result, the learning system in a traditional classroom is wildly inefficient, right? So kids are spending, you know, six hours a day, and then at homework, as kids are getting older, starting in like second, third grade, to try to learn in this way, it just doesn't work. And so these schools only have so much time in the day, and they're trying to get, you know, 50 minutes of math and 50 minutes of English and language and social studies and history, all of that stuff kind of crammed into a day. And what that results in is a bunch of kids who are chained to their desks all day doing academics and again, either learning how to play the game and jump through the hoops and study for the tests to get the A's on the report cards, or they choose to rebel and kind of disengage like, yeah, I'm not playing this. What were you, Chris? Did you know how to play the game or were you a rebel?