Episode 006 – Deschooling Your Mind with Hannah Frankman
“At the end of the day, the goal of an education is to enable your child to live a good life.”
– Hannah Frankman
Most students will spend 15,000 hours in classrooms – much of it wasted.
But Hannah Frankman – the thinker behind the popular @rebeleducator Twitter account – notes that the situation is actually worse than it seems. Not only are many students wasting time in school, they’re also also learning the wrong things, like:
- Confusing services rendered with actual learning
- Developing a dependency on external validation
- Losing your natural curiosity and love for learning
As Hannah puts it, “We think we send our kids to school and they’re learning math, reading, writing, history… but there are also implicit lessons baked into how school is structured.”
In short, schools are killing kids’ creativity, one standardized lesson at a time.
What if we could reimagine education to open up new possibilities and tap into our innate curiosity?
Imagine a world where learning is driven by genuine interest and real-world application. Where the joy of discovery fuels your educational journey.
Picture yourself mastering new subjects efficiently – perhaps in just a couple of hours a day. Not by cramming or rote memorization, but through engaged, focused learning.
This isn’t about rejecting traditional education wholesale. It’s about expanding our toolkit, adding new dimensions to how we approach learning.
But to do this, you need the right tools. Razor-sharp critical thinking skills that most schools don’t teach.
Hannah has a habit of collecting these mental razors – the secret weapons of independent thinkers, and they’re about to become yours.
Want to know what these skills are and how to master them?
- The “guillotine” that will make you question every cause-and-effect claim you hear
- The “flaming laser sword” that’ll save you hours of pointless debates
- The counterintuitive truth about learning speed
Get ready to unlearn, relearn, and revolutionize your education.
Links:
- https://twitter.com/rebeleducator
- https://renegadeeducator.com/
- Deschooling Society by Ivan Illich
- Dumbing us Down by John Taylor Gatto
Transcript
00:00 Introduction to Alternative Education
Isaac: Welcome back to the Open Ed podcast. I’m Isaac Morehouse, the sometimes host. Today we have a very prominent voice in the education space. Hannah, welcome. Glad to have you.
Hannah: It’s exciting to be here, Isaac.
00:59 Meet Hannah: The Voice Behind Rebel Educator
Isaac: First, I’ve got to ask you, I know how passionate you are about alternatives to education and your own homeschool experience, your experience with Praxis, which is a college alternative. When and how did you decide, “I’ve got to be loud about this. I’ve got to be a voice about this and get Rebel Educator off the ground”? What’s the goal of Rebel Educator, and how did that come about?
Hannah: I launched Rebel Educator a little over two years ago. But I’ve been talking about alternative education long before that. Working at Praxis is actually where I got my start in education commentary. I was writing blog posts for the marketing team, partly about my experience being homeschooled and then not going to college and starting to work in startups instead.
That’s when I started to realize that this was something I really liked talking about and that it was really important to talk about. There weren’t nearly enough resources out there for parents. Rebel Educator was the culmination of a few years of writing independently about education and slowly formulating this hypothesis that if you really care about the future, the education of our children is one of the most important things to get right.
Isaac: In those two years, you’ve gained about 140,000 followers on Twitter, and for good reason. You’re putting out really great stuff. You have some very fun, kind of edgy, but very useful threads and tweets out there. I wanted to use a couple of those as jumping-off points for our discussion today. I’d like to get into three topics: deschooling, critical thinking, and use of pacing.
02:42 The Concept of Deschooling
Isaac: Let’s start with deschooling. Unschooling has become a popular concept that people have heard of, which is essentially letting your kids have maximum freedom to learn how they want and sort of do what they want and play, without prescribing a lot for them. Deschooling is something different that we used to talk about a lot at Praxis. It’s the process of unlearning all the bad habits, primarily that you picked up in school.
Even those of us who grew up homeschooled are in such a schooled society that a lot of the assumptions, mindsets, and beliefs about learning processes are just so pervasive throughout society. Even if you weren’t in school, you have less deschooling needed. I used to say this when people would join the Praxis program: if they were homeschooled, we didn’t need to take as long to have them unlearn a lot of things. They only needed to unlearn a few things. If they had spent their life in the public school system, or even the private school system, there was more deschooling that needed to be done before we could start to really teach them how to be successful in their career.
You walk through a lot of these things that you think people need to unlearn. Dive into this for me. Walk me through some of these and how you’ve seen those play out, either in your own life or just with all the people you’re interacting with.
Hannah: I think you hit on a really important point in teeing up this question, which is that we live in a very schooled society. There’s a great little book by Ivan Illich called “Deschooling Society” that everyone should read. The schooled mindset is a very cultural phenomenon. I was homeschooled first grade through 12th grade, barely set foot inside any normal education institution for my entire childhood, and I still had all kinds of mindsets that I’d picked up from the culture that I had to unlearn.
I remember when I was a junior in high school, I took the PSAT because I thought maybe I was going to go to college. I checked that little box at the bottom of the test that said, “Yes, you colleges can send me mailings.” I got boxes of pamphlets from colleges, and they were all talking about, “How are you going to change the world?” The language they used had a big impact on my 16-year-old brain as I was thinking about my career. I had to unlearn afterward that doing well in college does not equate to being successful in the real world, but I somehow picked up that I needed an equivalent to doing well in college in order to be okay.
Even if a child is not immersed in the normal education system, they’re still going to pick this stuff up. There’s a really great book by John Taylor Gatto called “Dumbing Us Down.” For those who are not yet familiar, Gatto was a public school teacher in New York City for 30 years. He worked in every type of school imaginable and won Teacher of the Year two years in a row. The second time he won, he accepted his nomination and resigned from his position all at the same time in the pages of the New York Times. He wrote this amazing piece about why he felt like he was doing more harm than good as a school teacher, and if he really wanted to help the youth, he had to find something else to do.
06:43 Implicit Lessons in Traditional Schooling
Hannah: Gatto talks about this idea of secondary lessons or underpinning lessons that you’re learning when you’re in school. We think we send our kids to school and they’re learning math, reading, writing, history, and how to solve geometrical equations. They are learning all of those things, but there are also implicit lessons baked into how school is structured.
For example, you have to appease authority and please authority to be considered successful. You have to do things in the correct order and pass the test to have learned something. The measure of your success has nothing to do with what you can do in the real world; it has everything to do with how you’re able to score on some standardized measure of your learning.
There are all of these implicit lessons that kids are learning, and most of us go through our entire lives without ever unlearning these things. They’re baked into how we engage with the adult world. We look for tests to pass and we look for the authority figure that we have to appease or please in order to get what we want.
If we decide we want to make $100,000 a year, our mindset is, “Okay, we have to go find somebody who’s happy enough with us that they will give us permission to make $100,000 a year. They’ll sign their name on the dotted line and give us the checks.” And that’s how you’re doing it successfully.
People who have shed some of this mindset or never picked it up in the first place – and a lot of this is just because of personality and nature, less nurture – will be very entrepreneurial and see things very differently. They’ll say, “I want to make a hundred thousand dollars this year. I wonder what I can do to make that money happen. Maybe I can launch a drop shipping business. Maybe I can sell an online course. Maybe there’s a need in my local market to build a coffee shop or a car wash business that will have high margins and allow me to make $100,000.” And those people are, in some ways, deschooled, sometimes not intentionally, but they haven’t adopted some of these permission-based mindsets.
Isaac: So sometimes the schooling doesn’t stick. And often those are people that have an easier time in the market transitioning into roles where there isn’t as much of a playbook. If you’re not going to go into academia or government, most of those things don’t translate very well.
I think that’s such a great point that you brought out. There are two different types of learning happening at all times in every situation. There’s the explicit stuff – when you’re sitting listening to a lecture, the content of what they’re telling you. But implicitly in every environment, you are learning through conditioning: what is rewarded, what is praised, what is punished, what has a cost associated with it, what has a benefit associated with it.
Just being aware that that is going on is such a huge thing to step back and consider for yourself and for your kids. It’s easy to find the explicit things that are being taught and possibly learned, with varying degrees of success. But what are the implicit lessons that I grew up with? What things was I conditioned to? What was I rewarded for socially, financially, with attention, and what things was I steered away from?
23:20 The Importance of Critical Thinking
Isaac: You had a great thread about critical thinking or just learning how to think in general. I think that gets overlooked a lot. It’s kind of like, “Okay, what are the specific subjects people need to learn and the facts they need to learn and competency levels at these various things?” People say this: “How to think is more important than what to think.” But what does that really mean? What are the building blocks of critical thinking in your mind?
Hannah: Critical thinking is such a buzz term that gets thrown around the internet. “Our society would be so much better if everybody just learned to critically think.” And it’s true – if you subtract all of this authority-following, permission-seeking mental frameworks that people use to navigate the world, and you learn how to actually think about what you want out of life, what you want to accomplish, what’s meaningful to you, what you value, and what the steps are in the process to bring more of that value and meaning into your life, that’s really powerful.
But most people don’t actually break down what critical thinking means. There are things that parents can do because, at the end of the day, it’s the ability to look at the world, analyze it, make sense of it, and formulate opinions about it – not opinions that have been handed to you, but opinions stemming from your own analysis of the information in front of you.
There are a lot of different ways that a parent can teach those habits to their kids and model that behavior. I’m a very big advocate of teaching kids philosophy, especially as they get older. This is something that’s been very watered down in our public school curricula, but it’s the building blocks of how our civilization works. Understanding it is sort of like having a cheat code.
It’s kind of like how schools stopped teaching kids phonics and started teaching kids how to read by just recognizing words – the “look-say” method. You’re stripping kids of the cheat code that is the alphabet, which allows you to decode any words you could ever come across, not just in the English language, but in other languages too. You’re not teaching kids the code anymore. You’re just saying, “Look at a word and recognize it. And if you don’t recognize it for sure, guess what it is based on the clues of the rest of the sentence.”
We do the same thing with thought. We have these philosophical underpinnings of our culture, and we don’t teach them to kids. Kids don’t understand the history of philosophy. They don’t understand the Western canon. They don’t understand how both dynamic and also in some ways singularly dimensioned the trajectory of how we think throughout history has unfolded. If you teach your kids the basics, expose them to some of the great works, and talk about philosophical ideas, they’re going to learn very quickly where most of the philosophical opinions of their culture came from and how they were formulated. So they can discern for themselves whether or not they even agree or what they think about them.
29:25 Discovering the Fun in Logic and Fallacies
Isaac: One of my handful of classes in community college that I found really valuable was a logic course. Going through and turning arguments into symbols, like turning statements into letters, for example, and the argument essentially looks like a math equation, categorical syllogisms and things like this. At first I was like, “Why are we doing this?” But then it really got fun.
Once you learn various logical fallacies, I think those are really great to learn. A lot of people are familiar with things like ad hominem or appeal to authority, but understanding that and being able to then go and watch the news or get on social media and just scroll through what people say and see if you can break down the claims that they’re making and see how many of them are logical – that’s actually really fun for a kid in their teens. Especially if they’re cynical at all, you can actually lean into that cynicism and be like, “Hey, let’s learn basic logic and let’s learn logical fallacies and let’s go spot how many people are not making any sense.”
30:50 Exploring Popular Philosophical Razors
Hannah: Let me share a couple more philosophical razors. There’s one called Hume’s guillotine, which is such a great name for a mental model. You should teach that one to your sons because they’re going to love it. It states that a cause must be sufficiently able to produce the effect assigned to it. Which is a good measure of like, okay, if we’re saying that this thing happened, like X happened because of Y, is Y actually powerful enough to cause X? Or actually capable enough to cause X?
This is very helpful, especially if you’re teaching your kids to be independent thinkers in the age of the internet. All of these are incredibly important because things circulate on the internet all the time that don’t make sense or aren’t well verified. Maybe they look really prestigious, so you just assume that whoever published the thing knows what they’re talking about, but having these razors to verify information is incredibly useful.
Isaac: I wonder if there’s one for a variation on Hume’s guillotine, which is: If X caused Y in this instance, why would X not always cause Y in other instances? What I’m thinking of is whenever something happens, like a malfunction in a product – say a car has a part that was bad and it causes the car to explode. What do you always hear? People will say, “Oh, it’s because of greed. The car company was greedy, so they cut corners.”
And it’s like, okay, well, greed exists always and everywhere. Everybody’s almost always greedy all the time. So why did this only happen this time? Why hasn’t it happened all the time? Why doesn’t every part break on every car all the time? If that is an explanation for this, which it could be – I’m not ruling it out – but then you have to answer the question, why only this? Why did greed only cause a problem this one time?
Hannah: There’s one more that’s really funny. Just the name. It’s called Adler’s razor, but it has another name, which is Newton’s flaming laser sword, which is also a good one to teach your kids because again, the name is really funny. It states that if something can’t be settled by experimentation and reason, it’s not worth debating. If you can’t produce sufficient evidence or sufficient rational arguments to make and debate your point, it’s not worth the other person’s time.
32:34 The Value of Mental Models in Education
Isaac: What I love about razors is they’re very pragmatic. They’re tools in your toolkit. They are not always and everywhere universal. Sometimes the simplest explanation isn’t actually correct. But if you start with your default assumption that it probably is, or if it looks like the most obvious thing is probably true, that helps you get better at identifying those exceptions.
I’m just so pragmatic when it comes to this stuff. This is why I like mental models – being able to use them as tools and to recognize that I’m going to start here. These are like starting points when you’re going out and trying to recognize patterns in the world. And similarly, it takes some deschooling to even find these valuable because you want to be like, “Okay, so always and everywhere, the simple thing is always the true thing. Great. Got it.” And it’s like, no, that’s not the case. Most of the time, these are heuristics. They’re rules of thumb. They’re not always, but they’re tools.
I think approaching education in this way as well is valuable. Like, hey, most of the time kids will learn better under these conditions, but my kid under these conditions is not learning well. So maybe I need to make a change. And if you look around and nobody else seems to be agreeing with you, that doesn’t mean you’re wrong. I think it’s so valuable to have rules of thumb that can help your thinking rather than having black and white lines that sort of prescribe what’s true and then blind us to being able to see things that are deeper.
Hannah: Well, also, you know how we determined that those things are universally and indivisibly true? We spent a lot of time observing them and using things like mental models to observe the behaviors of these various phenomena and finding that we couldn’t find exceptions to these rules. Therefore, they seem to be indivisibly true, but it required this type of thinking in order to discern that these things were true.
Isaac: Yeah, exactly. It’s so important to think about what those assumptions are that you have baked in and make sure that they’re good ones.
40:01 Rethinking Time and Efficiency in Learning
Isaac: My friend Jeff Till years ago just told me this, and I had never run the math in my head: the average kid spends 15,000 hours in school. When you think of it that way, that’s a lot. So what are those hours being used for?
I remember reading a bunch of studies, I think by John Holt, who’s an education researcher. It was pretty big in the ’80s and ’90s, on how long it takes kids to learn various things. The key was this concept of focused instruction. When it came to the big three – reading, writing, and arithmetic – kids could learn with like a minute… it was something insane. Like math, for example, you know, 20 hours of focused learning, they could go from basically zero to algebra. Reading was very similar.
The amount of hours of unfocused learning that’s happening in school for each of those topics is hundreds or a thousand plus sometimes. So just this idea that learning, when the motivation is there, can be so quick – you can go from zero to a hundred really fast when you’re motivated, when you have a reason to learn it. When you don’t, and it’s just being imposed upon you, it’s not sticking.
So much of the instructional time is really being wasted because you’re not in a good position to actually learn it. You don’t know why you should be learning it. It’s of no interest to you. And it takes so many more hours. It’s so inefficient.
Hannah: Every homeschooler knows that you can learn everything that you need to learn in two hours a day of studying. Most of the time spent in school is not productive time. It’s incredibly unfocused because you’re shuffling between subjects, and if you’re in grades 7 through 12 and you’re moving between teachers and classrooms throughout the day, you’re spending maybe 45 minutes to an hour in a class, which is just enough time to get settled in and get focused.
If a kid is spending 45 minutes to an hour in a classroom, they have almost no time to do actual focused work. So much time spent inside of a class is wasted space. You’re taking attendance, you’re chatting with your teacher, you’re catching up on assignments, you’re going through logistics. The amount of time actually spent doing focused learning is very small. And as soon as you have focus, you’re breaking it again to move on to the next thing.
You’re also working at the pace of the averaged pace of an entire class instead of the individual pace at which you learn, which is almost universally not the optimal pace. It’s not the right pace for any kid. It’s sort of this weird amalgamated average, this sort of invisible student that doesn’t actually exist. And so you’re wasting most of your time.
46:49 The Importance of Motivation and Individual Pace
Isaac: My oldest son, he’s just not a math guy. He doesn’t really like it. He’s very analytic, very philosophical, very artistic. So he was just way behind in math. At various points, we tried to kind of get him to do it and be really structured and fight with him. But for the most part, we kind of threw up our hands for several years.
Well, then all of a sudden he wanted to go to school. It was like a two-day-a-week school when he was, I think, 13 or 14. So over the summer, we said, “Well, to go there, you have to take math, and if you want to be in math with other kids your age, some of your friends, you’ve got to know the level of math that they’re doing.”
He’s like, “Oh, so I’ll just start at the beginning.” So that summer, he literally started Khan Academy as a 13-year-old. He was like, “I’ll just start at kindergarten,” and he just went through the entire Khan Academy until he caught up to like algebra or whatever they were at. He did it in like a month or two just by himself. It’s not like he’s a master of math. He never will be. He doesn’t care to be, but he was able to get to a level where he could get by, do okay, not feel embarrassed.
I also just want to say that the learning speeds in different learning environments are so interesting. Anyone with kids can observe this if you have multiple kids. Your older siblings’ ability to teach their younger siblings things is so much better than you oftentimes, and the things stick, especially if they look up to them.
Hannah: That’s a really good point. I also want to just asterisk that it’s very easy to glorify speed and make it seem very impressive and aspirational that, “Well, my child learned like eight grades of math in a month over the summer on Khan Academy.” That is very impressive. I’m not calling you out as saying that…
Isaac: No, no, I get it.
51:48 Balancing Speed and Depth in Education
Hannah: People hear that kind of story and they think, “Okay, my kid will have made it when they all of a sudden click, and they’re able to learn multiple grade levels over the course of one year.” And that’s not the point here. I want to be very clear about that. Your child shouldn’t be aspiring to learn way faster than kids in the classroom if it doesn’t align with their goals. If there’s no reason why they’re intrinsically motivated to do so, or for whatever reason they’re not ready yet.
The goal isn’t to crack the code somehow so they suddenly can learn way faster. The point is that it is possible and it routinely happens when a child is motivated correctly and incentivized for the right reasons to do something. It’s possible for kids to learn this way. It happens. It should be enabled. It should be allowed. Kids should be given the space and the flexibility to a point that when they want to learn something quickly, they can learn way faster. But it shouldn’t be the thing that you’re trying to push your kid into doing.
There’s nothing inherently virtuous about learning two grades of math in a year as opposed to one. It doesn’t make your child better. It doesn’t even mean that it’s a thing that’s moving them towards whatever goals they have. At the end of the day, the goal of an education is to enable your child to live a good life. And part of that means having their own internal agency and compass to determine what they want and why, and for what reasons, and to chase what they want for the right reasons.
53:30 Conclusion: Embracing Flexibility in Learning
Hannah: Part of the ingredients of this is to have a level of self-direction and self-discipline. But when they have the freedom to learn things very fast, and also not to learn things very fast if that’s what’s aligned with their goals, that’s the thing that indicates that you’re on the right path. Not that your child is learning faster than average – you’re still playing the school game, which is “Here are the metrics. My kid is scoring higher than yours.” You’re still thinking in a schooled mindset. You still haven’t cracked it. And I think that’s really important.
Isaac: If it takes a kid four hours to get through what it takes another kid an hour to get through and they need that time, that’s okay. If your kid is 10 and they’re doing math at a typical 8-year-old level, like that’s okay. We don’t treat things like this as adults. We recognize people have widely ranging abilities and skills.
If I go and say, you know, I’m going to take piano lessons for the first time ever, and I’m 40 years old, no piano teacher is going to say, “Oh, you’re 40. Okay, perfect. We’ll start you on a book for all 40-year-olds. All 40-year-olds start at this level of piano because they should already know this.” It’s insane, right? But we assume that about all these subjects during school.
So the ability to speed up or slow down, I think that’s the key – having that freedom. Hannah Frankman, the rebel educator. Thanks so much for hopping in and joining us. Keep up the amazing posts and look forward to hearing what you’re up to.
Hannah: Thanks for having me on, Isaac.