Episode 6: On Mental Health

[MUSIC] You're listening to Community Crafted Education, where we explore alternatives to conventional K-12 education and their potential impacts on society and culture. I'm Eric Wairn, Director of the National Hybrid Schools Project. On this episode, we're joined by Michael Strong from the Socratic Experience. We'll talk about the landscape of American students' mental health and what impact community crafted education might have on it. [MUSIC] Welcome, thanks for joining us. Today we have Michael Strong from the Socratic Experience. Michael, thank you for being here. >> Delighted to be here, Eric. >> Great. So let's start off with maybe you just tell us a little in general about yourself and your background and then your work at the Socratic Experience. >> Sure, so I've been in education for 35 years. I started back in Chicago with Mortar Moulin-Rattler's Pidea Project, training teachers and Socratic seminars in the late 1980s. So it's been a long time. That led to training teachers and Alaska to lead Socratic seminars. And from there, we were on grant money, the grant money ran out, and some parents loved what we were doing in the public schools so much. They asked me to start a private school. So I became an accidental education entrepreneur. And these things start small. So in some ways, I've been in microschools for decades. After getting that project launched, I was recruited by a Montessori School in San Antonio to create a high school program for them. And was the Judson Montessori School now the Montessori School of San Antonio. I came to love and respect Montessori tremendously. It's good most Montessori schools are small. I can socrates the program from age four and up. I was then recruited to create a school for highly gifted children in South Florida. Again, tiny school. Most we had about 40 students, but we had six, seventh and eighth graders taking advanced placement exams and passing them. I then created Montessori Middle Schools in Palo Alto for a multi-campus Montessori organization. I then created a charter high school in Angel Fire in Mexico, based on Socratic Pidea principles. Then left education for bet and worked with John Mackey, the founder and CEO of Whole Foods, on a project to promote entrepreneurial solutions to world problems. About a decade later, I came back into education here in Austin, created what was co-school combining both the Socratic with the entrepreneurial piece. That model is taken by higher ground education, the largest Montessori network in the US to be their high school model. Then I went to San Francisco and launched the first Academy of Law and Industry. We had campuses in New York, St. Louis, Austin and San Francisco. Then when COVID hit, everyone was talking about how bad online education was. I took my model virtually because dialogue works well virtually. That was the birth of the Socratic experience in fall of 2020 with three students on my credit card. Here we are four years later and about hundreds of students. We're a flourishing community. This is amazing. You've been around. From afar, you've been a big influence on the way I think of a lot of things. Because you've done so many interesting things over time. Today, we want to talk about specifically student mental health, which I know is something you're really interested in. Just to kick that off, can you maybe just give us a picture of the landscape of the state of American students mental health right now? Sure. To dig into a little bit how I got into this, the high level headline often identifies 75% of high school students are unhappy at school. Two thirds are not engaged in learning and teen suicides increase about 30% during the school year. They dip during Christmas break and they dip over the summer. This is a pattern that stops at 18. It's clearly associated with high school. I would say it's a catastrophe. The other thing I'd like to point out, I have a huge respect for Jonathan Heit and Jane Twiny for showing the increase in teen mental health issues, especially girls and suicides since the increase of smartphones. But almost no one pays attention to his teen suicides have increased 300% since the 1950s. In the, since smartphones, I think it's roughly 50% increased in teen suicides, which is catastrophic. But going back to the 50s, 300% increase. And I've been in education so long certainly in the 1990s there were problems. And so I see the standard American high school model as a catastrophe in middle school as well. We could start in middle school. And then, you know, just kind of going and connecting this with my experience, although I got into education because I love intellectual dialogue, creating all these small schools in, you know, across the US. Over and over again, over the years, I've seen hundreds of students who are anxious to press suicidal. This again goes into the 90s. And then they came to a small, highly personalized school, where I gave them a lot of attention, a lot of autonomy. We emphasized a sense of purpose, meaning I call the solution to health connection, community meaning and purpose. And within weeks or months, I've seen these students become healthy, well, often dropped their meds. And in some cases, these are kids, upper middle class families, where the best therapist, the best psychiatrist, you know, best everything, best retreat, and so forth. And the only thing that made a difference in their mental health was moving from a large, impersonal high pressure, one size fits all school to a very personalized program where, you know, we could appreciate their real strengths and we could do whatever it took to, you know, everyone says strengths-based education, but, you know, in a small personalized environment, where they're close relationships and you really know the kid, you can carve out a path that is validating. Again, I go back to human beings who are raised in small communities. So I love the fact that, you know, you're calling it community-based education. Now, it's the whole thing, the whole thing. Yeah, so lately we talk a lot about COVID causing this, but it sounds like, and your experience and opinion, you know, it's way more, there may be there's something inherent in the way we're doing schooling. You know, smartphones, I agree, definitely didn't help, right? They're definitely part of the problem, but maybe something more inherent than that. Not totally, and I'll give you a few case studies pre-COVID, and pre-smart phones, actually. So I had one student who was, who had been bullied. So, you know, in the background, of course, there's this whole issue of bullying, which is immense in schooling, and of course, bullying and mental health, bullying and suicide, huge correlations. And in large schools, I think of it as lower to the flies. You know, to be sympathetic, if you're a teacher and you have six, seven sections of English, with 30 students each, you know, you don't have time to kind of intervene in their lives. Whereas, you know, I've created all these schools where we have, you know, somewhere between 20 students in my biggest school, charter school is 130 students, but even 130 students, I knew every single, as head of school, I knew every single student. You know, I knew a lot about their lives, you know, a lot was going on, and then the staff knew really well as well. And so, you know, when can, when can I trust things in a human way? So I had a student who has had been bullied. He came to one of my schools. Initially, to talk about how severe it was, he would hide under his desk at school, because he had been so bullied in the past. After a year, you know, he was healthy well and came out from under his desk and became kind of a normal kid. Sadly, we only went up to eighth grade, and I heard that after, after he had, unfortunately, been forced to go back to regular school, he later died by suicide. And, you know, it's horrifying. But, you know, this is the situation out there. So for me, this is a crisis. It's a, it's a real crisis. Give you a different case. When I published, I published an article, our public schools, causing an epidemic of mental illness. And somebody reached out to me and he said, this resonated so deeply, said up until he graduated from high school, every day, he pictured pulling, putting a gun in his mouth and blowing his brains out. And then after school, he gradually became half being well. I met him in person a couple years later. He was happily married, working as an engineer for Google, making plenty of money. You know, a normal, healthy person. I think one of the things, one of the things I'm, I think as many of us who did just fine, I went to public schools, straight A's, went to Harvard, all that. I think many of us who think education is okay, we're the ones who succeed. You know, we're the ones who are just fine. And I think, and then there's this narrative, that oh, there's a problem with these people, you know, and they're all these diagnoses, not against diagnoses, but I think we underestimate the extent to which the system itself is harmful for many kids. Give you one other example. I had a daughter, not a daughter, I had a child, a young teenage girl who came to me with her parents. And she was, you know, in therapy, psychiatrist, medications, the whole works. And I talked to her about it and she hated school. And I said, look, she was very bright. And I said, look, you can, you can just study it for advanced placement tests on her own. You don't need to go to school. And she actually, instead of coming to my school, she just started studying AP exams on her own, dropped out of school, passed the APs, and instantly, was off the meds and the therapy. Again, many people hate school. So I could rant on and on, but those are just a few of my many examples. Yeah, I mean, I can think of some too, right? And when I was doing interviews from my first book, I talked with a girl who had graduated from high school, but she went to a hybrid school. So she was only going three days a week. And she wasn't bullied, but she just couldn't do the grind of five days in a row, right? So if she could take off every other day and kind of decompress or whatever and work at her own pace at home, she was okay. But when she was in a five day school, she struggled a lot. So yeah, so we have all kinds of, I'm sure everyone listening has millions of these stories too. But so, you know, my friend, Katie Broadman from Prenna has written about some of the some of the psychological needs that kids have. And so she talks about things like a need for belonging and some sense of competence and some sense of personal autonomy at school. Right. So I went to public schools too. I didn't go to Harvard, but I'm turning out, things are going okay so far. But so this is not true of every kid, right? But you can, or maybe not even most kids, but you can picture a kid who goes to a school and never feels like they belong there. And they're told that they're bad at everything and that there's no autonomy. Like they're bad at everything and there's nothing they can do about it, right? So I wonder what you think. What's the, what's the, to what extent is the value of new school models, just the smallness? And to what extent is it something else? No really great question. And first, I love Katie Broadman from Prenna. They're doing fantastic. I'm a fan of what I call highly personalized high agency schools. And I think of Montessori, of Prenna, Acton, Alpha, my program. All of these programs where it's more personalized, so it's not just small, but there's there also high agency. And talk about that and the personalization. Give you a couple of more examples. I have, I had two and this gets into special needs. So I had two students who, you know, very special needs scored poorly on cognitive tests, on dyslexic, and so forth. One of them every morning she would pass by the kitchen and see the knives and think of slitting her throat. Because she felt stupid and it came to our program. And then a different one, well, a little more time, came to our program. And one of the things we did was, you know, what do you go to? What do you love? I immediately, my question whenever I interview a child for our program is, what do you love? What do you passionate about? Turns out she was really passionate about animation. You know, her creative side was great in stop-motion animation. And so she would spend hours doing that. And we did not require her to do any math. And this gets into an interesting thing because, and, and within, you know, months, she was happy and well in Flores, she actually later went on to a great liberal arts college. But, you know, and with many of these kids who have been in a special needs program, their experience, say, of not always math, but often it's math is their dumb, their dumb over and over again, they're doing remedial math. And when they do, you know, fourth grade math for the third year in a row, and all the other kids are racing ahead, it's brutal. And, you know, what, what public school can say, hey, this year you're not going to do it. Many math at all. You are great at the stop-motion animation. Let's do the thing. I had another student, similar dyslexic, Gordon-Porley on cognitive tests, came to me, he was brilliant at video, the most incredibly creative in their dynamic videos. Hey, let's just do video this year. And, you know, we, we did this credit because conversation works well and some other things. But I would say with several kids, I'd say we saved their lives by just not doing math and taking what they're brilliant at, which in these cases was great of things. And then they're pride and then they show their products in the community and this goes back to re-monitor, we talked about valorization. Adolescence need to feel valued in their community. And so if you're only the dumb kid in the corner, it's brutal and you want to kill yourself. If, on the other hand, you know, you're a leader, maybe you're a leader in your leading something or you're a creator, you're creating something, you're doing a business or even you're just very conscientious, you're cleaning up every day, whatever it is. If we're not valued, the most brutal thing for our mental health is for us not to be valued by our community. And if the only metric according to which every child is measured or a test scores, then some of them may not feel valued by the community. And yet as human beings, you know, as an adult, I'm so grateful for conscientious people, for kind of people, for funny people, for, you know, in real life, there's so many virtues, so many virtues. And I think something as simple and this goes back to both the small and the personalization is in a small community where it's personalized and we're not driven by the state to do the thing. We can love a child for how funny they are, for conscientious or their leadership or whatever it is. And that is transformative in mental health. Then just to kind of complain a little bit, I'm passionate about keeping microscopy as free as possible from regular things. People who are against this moment talk about accountability is if accountability is a good thing. I always ask which of my children do you want to die this year? And it sounds harsh, but you know, with your student examples I give you, if I had been forced to have them do math when feeling stupid was the cause of their mental health catastrophe, they very well might have died by suicide. And so for me, you know, accountability in terms of health and safety, yeah, you don't want to build in the good burden now, and that kind of thing, of course. But beyond that, in order to really recognize the real strengths and virtues of every child, we need radical freedom from curricular constraints. Yeah, right, so we'll get there, right, or we'll get somewhere down the road, but maybe not on the schedule. So you wrote an interesting paper a few years ago about Eleanor Ostrom and polycentricity and how, how sort of centralized the US education system was. And you make this argument about how this is exactly strictly graded schools, you know, you're in fifth grade, you learn this, you're in sixth grade, you learn this, or you're you're washing out, right, combined with mandated standards and mandated testing and things like that, prevent three really important aspects of creative schools, right. And so the ones you list are the ability to create a distinctive virtue culture in your school, whatever that looks like, a system is optimized for kind of some sort of self-direction or personal autonomy. And then last, the ability to really change up the way you do pacing or time or the style of learning. So in theory, a conventional public school system could do some of these things, right. So public school systems, conventional school systems, so when I say conventional, I kind of mean public schools and also private schools that look like them, right. They could do theme schools where they say they have a distinctive culture of some kind. Self-directed learning is a little harder when you've got mandates piled on you, especially for testing. And some schools will experiment with like a hybrid program, but really it seems like to really go all in, you kind of have to go in, go all in and start a micro school or a hybrid school or some form of home schooling or at least be a charter school. I don't know, what do you think of that? Is that true? Do you really have to go all in to get the benefits of these kinds of changes? Super good question. So first, I'm a big fan of Taya Kankubin's concept of the grammar of schooling. And the grammar of schooling is exactly what you said. This is third grade. This is their history curriculum. These are the tests, you know, all the standard things. And it's, you know, gradually formed in the last 100 years. You know, 100 years ago, 1920s, one room school houses were basically micro schools and teachers had incredible autonomy. They could do whatever they wanted. But, you know, over the decades, the bureaucracy is sort of set in. And so now it's really difficult to do things outside the system. And it's not just various, you know, there are some federal regulations, state regulation, some district regulation. There are teachers union contracts that limit what you can do. And then there are also parental expectations. Part of this is most parents at this point have been kind of programmed to believe in the grammar of schooling that this is what school is. So if you're doing something outside, it's challenging. But, so I've found it very powerful. You know, there are exceptions. I've seen, you know, public school magnet programs that get away with breaking all the rules. And sometimes teacher of the years or the kind of people who break all the rules and do whatever they want. As long as they're popular, you're good, right? Yeah, yeah. Exactly. They're kind of heroic exceptions within the system. So I'm not saying it's impossible. But it's really tough and all the inertia is on the other side. And yeah, the reason you need to be heroic and popular is anybody can get on your case for, you know, oh, you didn't, you know, you didn't follow the curriculum. You didn't follow this procedure and so forth. So all of the incentive structures are for compliance and compliance with bureaucracy. So, you know, and the reason the grammar of schooling concept is interesting is you're correct. Most regular private schools follow that as well. Again, there's some interesting exceptions. St. Anne's in Brooklyn has been an out-of-the-box school for decades, high-end, prestigious, out-of-the-box private school. But, you know, the reason I'm excited about the micro-school movement and also educational scholarship gounts is we can now begin to gather parents who are ready for something different. You know, I'm going to give credit. Montessori has been at this for 100 years. You know, acting academy is something like 20 years now and, you know, print an alpha and so forth more recently. We've got a cool movement now. But when you gather parents who are like, no, we're really done with the system. Or at least open to being doing it. I want to give credit at home school and school movement as well, because they've been out of it. Now we're starting, I think, for the first time in the last 70 years to have a critical mass of parents who are saying this just doesn't make sense for my child. And so I'm, you know, in Austin, I think we're the alternative education headquarters of the world. It's almost everyone in the tech elite, at least knows somebody who's child who goes to an alternate school. And so I think it's not only coming even normal and the billionaires and senty millionaires are starting micro schools or homeschooling or it's gotten to that point. And I think, you know, for us at the secredit experience, most of our parents are either entrepreneurs or creative professionals. Because if on the one hand, you think of, you know, compliance and jumping through hoops and how many credits do I need to get the degree and you know, all that kind of thing. It's mine. So why do we do anything different. But the reason I see entrepreneurs and creative professionals leading the way out of this is it's all about creative value. You have to show up and create value and break the rules and do what it takes. And get get to the achievement in the most efficient way possible. And so they stay regular school. Can I emphasize kids maybe with learning differences and so forth, but they're also super fast kids who can, you know, I've got had kids who go through math at twice the rate sometimes one kid did four years of math for year. And so at the other end of the spectrum, when you've got kids who can do so much more, why on earth would you have them at the glacial pace of regular school. And you know, and so, you know, as we as we have this attitude of how do we actually on the one hand help our children learn more effectively. But on the other hand, we start being concerned about mental health and then the habits and attitudes and so forth. It becomes obvious for a certain segment segment of society to peel away. So, you know, I celebrate this whenever it does happen in the public sector and occasionally it does. But I think 90, 98% of the growth in this movement is going to be the private sector. Yeah. Yeah. So we've we mentioned teachers to a couple of times how teacher morale is a thing and teacher burnout will get a story every every year or so about how teachers are kind of not not making it. And so we have to serve a here a few years ago on hybrid school teachers and it's, you know, small sample not, you know, not naturally representative or anything like that. But they they seem to be much more happy in the schools, these small schools that they're choosing with high identities and things like that. So what do you think of it maybe is the state of teacher morale and teachers effects on student mental health and in this arrangement on teachers mental health. It's huge. Well, first of all, I would say I have never had a difficulty of recruiting teachers. I get unsolicited inbound requests to teach my program constantly. And of course, I would say the best teachers want a meaningful environment where they can have personal relationships with the kids who really coach them. And again, to be sympathetic, I think public schools were more like this maybe 70 years ago. You know, they're again, it's been a long boiling the frog sort of situation with more and more bureaucratic constraints and so forth. Right. And so I think what's happening is that the system has become so impersonal of your bureaucratic, it's health for the teachers and health for the students. I'm going to do a quick kind of side note on discipline people. Certainly there's a discipline crisis in public schools. You know, you can't kick kids out or it's very, very difficult and often egregious misbehaviors. But the other thing is when you have personal relationships that can be flexible, sometimes you have way fewer discipline problems. You know, just very simple example and goes back to small schools. Remember when I had a monastery middle school, I'd have, you know, some boys at puberty can be energetic and difficult. But we had a garden outside and they'd be misbehaving and say you go dig in the garden for a couple hours and they go out hard physical labor in the sun and they want to physical, you know, and it's simple. You know, back in the day, of course, you know, and especially I would say it helps to have male teachers, male role models, male teachers with boys and say, you know, you need to go do the thing. And then they come back in and they're all sweaty and tired and all the discipline problems gone, you know, not saying it's totally magic, but I do think that, as you know, there's a huge problem with boys distinct to problem with boys, not succeed in in school disciplinary problems, diagnosed learning disabilities, all this. And I think the one size fits all compliance model is a better fit for girls. And as a consequence, we have an immense crisis with boys. I know people I'll talk about the school to prison pipeline, you know, on the left, they like to portray that as a racist thing and there may be something to that. But I think a lot of it is the compliance mindset. I've known a lot of a lot of families with boys who are getting disciplinary trouble and they homeschool because they realize my kid is a good kid. It's got to go to hard and sitting in a desk all day doing as you're told is not good. Give you one other anecdote. When I was in Alaska, I was in a public school and you know, in secradica, I tried to find things that are engaged into students and I had one. This is like in seventh grade and I had one six foot to Native American kid named Seagram after the whiskey and he never talked and I said one day say Seagram. What would engage you? What would you like to talk about? He said fighting. And it turns out what he loved to do was he liked to go out and again six, two and seventh grade. He could beat the crap out of anyone. Every day after school, he'd go and take on it, all the comers and beat him. And so I did a story on fighting and he loved talking about fighting it totally engaged in the classroom. But I realized, yeah, in going in traditional hunter-gather tribe, six to two kiddists, you know, that age he would be the hero. He'd be like, wow, this is the one who's going to hunt all the walrus for us. Here he has just set under fluorescent lights being told what to do by, you know, female English teacher in their 50s. You know, and he just wants he's waiting to go outside and fight. You can see the mismatch between what human beings need. Just one other thing on the gender piece. There's an really interesting piece on, you know, elephants who were young elephants who moved to new place in South Africa because overpopulation and one nature reserve. The new place, the young elephants were raping hippos and other elephants and turning over tourist cars and being egregiously violent. Eventually, they discovered, oh, there were no older male elephants around. They shipped in some older male elephants and within a few months, the young male elephants were normal and happy. And just a, you needed, again, another part of the crisis, you need, you need, you know, I think you need adult males with the young males. And so many things, you're kind of natural, obvious solutions. And in micro school, forget credentials. This is why I'm again, radically against teacher, credentialing. If I need, you know, I'm in a certain school and I need a big mussely man, I'll go get a big mussely man to be, you know, in the school to do the thing. I don't care if he's got a teacher credential, if he's got a good heart, cares about kids responsible, those other things. Yeah, you need, I mean, you need guardrails, but you need, you need to be able, you know what those guardrails need to look like when you've got a manageable number of kids. It's not, it's not all about crowd control after a certain point, right? At least not if it's going to be healthy. Well, and to the market, you know, parents, if parents are choosing your school, you need to provide, this is markets 101. Customers will only continue to go to your school if you're providing a satisfying customer experience, whereas, yeah, public schools are locked in and no matter how miserable it is. Yeah. Yeah. So, so imagine if we, if, you know, we've seen a lot of growth in these schools, imagine that growth continues. How do you think this might shift kind of the bigger conversations around mental health for adolescents or for everybody? You know, we know, I mean, you've mentioned this, right? Adolescents all they want to do is to fit in somehow. Right? So what, in one sense, what we're doing is building more places for them to fit in. So, how do you think this would affect, you know, the general population? So, very, very dramatically. Again, I have an article, our public schools causing an epidemic of mental illness. Yes, they happen for decades going going back to, you know, in the 1950s, a majority of students began attending high school only in the 1930s in the US. And it was only in the 50s, a majority of students began graduating from high school. And it's not an accident as we basically forced everybody into high school in the 50s. So when we get the idea of juvenile delinquent, rebels out of cause, the whole trope of teenagers being rebellion, rebellious and sullen and all that. That is associated with high school back in the 19th century. So, kid of puberty, Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, they were working at 12 or 13, been a Franklin 18th century. And they didn't have time to be, you know, whiny and sullen. And so I think almost everything we associate with teens from misbehavior to, again, suicide, anxiety, depression. It's because we put them in a place without community connection, meaning and purpose. And we expect them to be okay. One other data point, there's a famous rap park experiment where they got some rats addicted to cocaine, while they were in cages. They let the rats go out and play in a park and the rats no longer interested in cocaine. I see we've now put generations of young human beings in the equivalent of these rat cages. And of course they bite each other, they attack each other, they attack the adults, they're resentful, they're soling, they're anxious to press. You know, on and on and on. So people talk about mental illness as the chronic disease of the young. You know, older people might get heart disease and metabolic syndrome and diabetes and all these things. But the chronic diseases of the young are substance abuse addictions and mental illness. Even schizophrenia is typically youth onset and so forth, anxiety, depression, all these things. Many addictions take place then or get started then. So I see us as systematically undermining the fundamental needs of young human beings now for, you know, 50, 60, 70 years, as having created this mass culture that, frankly, I think is sick. I don't want to be disparaged individual kids, but you know, my wife is from Senegal where it's not yet hit so badly. And teenagers there are kind, respectful. Many of them work because you still need to work. It just feels completely different. All of the tropes of what it means to be a teen. They're now in Hollywood and spreading around the world. I see as artifacts of our compulsory mass education system that forced kids into this unhealthy environment. Yeah, I mean, you just described all the reasons for deaths of despair. Right. And these are things that we have some, some control over if we want to. Right. So, so if you were, if you were advising somebody who wanted, who said, I want to start a micro school or a hybrid school or some kind of home school group. What's one strategy or resource that you'd recommend they priority, prioritizes there as they're in their startup mode thinking about what they want to do? No, great question. So, first of all, I've seen a number of, you know, some people kind of back up a little bit. Somebody think, oh, starting a private school, I need to, you know, plan curriculum for three years and raise $3 million in that kind of thing. But going back to more organic thing, one of the, you know, benefits of COVID is many. When, when we saw how bad public school was through the screens, many parents started doing just learning pods, where they'd be kind of homeschooling and then spontaneously getting together with other parents. And in many ways, I would say the modern micro school movement was just an extension of these organic learning pods. And so, the first thing is to find like-minded parents in your neighborhood. And it is important that you're aligned on what is an educational look like. The interesting thing is once you get out of the box of standard school, then there's so many different directions. Are we prioritizing core academics? Are we prioritizing health and wellbeing? Are we individualizing? No, what are our behavioral boundaries? You know, you can't count on any common manners even. So, I would encourage people to find like-minded parents to get going. And the like-minded, it's worth really discussing, what is the vision? What do we care about? What do you not care about? And then, you know, the first year is typically really difficult. I often say brutal. My wife, wife, let me start another one at this point. Because, you know, basically all the parents have to be all in kind of helping to get this thing off the ground. Unless somebody can write big checks. If somebody has plenty of money, fine. But what I think is interesting about this movement is I know a lot of even low-income parents who, yeah, you start by homeschooling your kids. Sometimes some neighbors say, "Hey, I see what you're doing with your kids. Could you take my two or three kids?" And how about those two or three kids? Next thing, you know, you've got a micro-school. And then the great thing is with software, personalized learning has become so much easier with software. To be fair, you know, how do they do it with one-room schoolhouse 100 years ago? Must have been tough. But now there are all these learning apps where, you know, you can personalize math and language arts and history. And you can basically fabulous educational resources available for free on the internet. Or if you want to pay, you know, 50 bucks a kid, 100 bucks a kid, you know, at really low price points, you can get the academic content these days. In which case, the human side is entirely focused on the community and the virtues and the work that works. Which is wonderful, actually. You know, people talk about AI doing education. I think the people that talk about that have no idea how important the human side is. So the urgent need is let's have, let's use, I always say, let tech do it, tech does best, let's humans do it, humans do best. And I'm very optimistic about the future with better and better ed tech, including AI, taking on more and more of the kind of teaching and learning. And then the humans in deeper and deeper coaches in terms of virtue, community, excellence, motivation, all that. Yeah, well, that last point I think will be interesting for us to talk about again in even one year, much less two or three or four. So I want to ask you one more question to close us out. And which is this? What is the most interesting thing in your opinion happening related to student mental health right now that people involved with this sector would be interested in hearing about? I think it goes back to the fact that, you know, you mentioned your conference, people are talking about this people. I think people used to regard me as a crazy man for saying these things 5, 10, 15 years ago. But I think more and more people are realizing that I'm Peter Gray, I want to give Peter Gray tremendous credit. Peter Gray has been talking about this for decades. He has a column in psychology today. He's an advocate for self-directed learning. So I think there have been a few of us kind of voices in the wilderness, but now these messages are becoming much more mainstream. And so the exciting thing is that I think once people, the tough thing is almost everybody school is so specific. You know, we all picture classroom 30 students, 10th grade social studies, you know, all of that. And that's a notion that, oh, you know, you can learn math at your own rate and you can start a business as part of your education and you don't need to be inside 7 hours a day. You know, once you kind of break out of the box, then you can start to see, wow, then it becomes plausible. The rat's an engaged thing probably is really damaging to mental health. And now let's explore all the cool alternatives that might be profoundly better for children. Yeah, as the kids say, you can just do things now. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Michael, strong. It's always great to see you. Thank you so much. I think this is this is a really important topic in great conversation to be having. Fabulous. Great to see you, Eric. Can't wait to see where this goes in the next couple of years. Thank you. Thank you for listening to Community Crafted Education, a podcast hosted by the National Hybrid Schools Project and Kennesaw State University's Michael J. Cole's College of Business. If you have any questions about the topics we discussed on today's show or want to learn more about what we do, please look up the National Hybrid Schools Project or reach out to us directly at coalscollege.com/hybrid.