Open Education co-authors Isaac Morehouse and Matt Bowman aren't just writing about educational reform — they're living it. In this conversation, they break down Part One of their new book "Open Education: How to Reimagine Learning, Ignite Curiosity, and Prepare Your Kids for Success," which challenges the foundations of our educational system and offers a compelling alternative.

The first section of their book examines the historical roots of modern schooling, the problems with standardized testing, and introduces a powerful alternative approach they call "mastered or not yet" that mirrors how learning actually happens in the real world.

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Our conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Matt Bowman: It's pretty exciting to have our book out, huh?

Isaac Morehouse: Yeah, this is amazing. We just launched the brand new book, "Open Education: How to Reimagine Learning, Ignite Curiosity and Prepare Your Kids for Success." Really, this is Matt's book and I just sort of sneak a few things in there and slap my name on the front. This comes from Matt's years, decades even, of experience and passion in the education space.

How difficult was it to distill everything in your brain and all the things you care about into a book? Was that really tough or did it just flow out of you?

Matt: It has taken a couple years of different iterations to figure out what to share and what not to share. There are so many stories behind the scenes, so many parents talking about their child's education. It could have been a thousand pages. The challenge was thinking through what's most impactful — what illustrations, stories, and principles tell the story best. It's been a couple-year journey, not easy to narrow down because I could talk for hundreds of hours on this stuff.

Isaac: It's interesting. There are kind of two different types of nonfiction books. Type one is where a smart thinker is basically doing research or observing things that are happening, crunching numbers, and putting together pattern recognition from a more scientific approach. Then there's the more memoir style: "Here's what I learned running my own business." And of course, the more experiences you've had, both failure and success, the better that's going to be.

This book actually has both. I remember you called me after reading the physical edition in your hand for the first time, which is a different experience. You said, "I don't really like the beginning and the end, but I like the middle." And I said, "I'm the complete opposite. I like the beginning and the end and the middle is kind of boring." You're like, "I want this specific tactical stuff." And I'm like, "I really like the high level analysis." So I think it's actually a good marriage of both.

Matt: It really is a good mix, and we intentionally did not want it to read like a textbook. Even the research and background content doesn't read like a textbook. It's accessible. You can grasp those concepts easily, and I think that's why I like how it turned out to be a really nice mix of both.

Isaac: I've really enjoyed the final stretches when we had it 90% of the way there, getting that last 10% right — the order, the structure, where the content goes, how it flows. You've done a really great job of being relentless about making sure it's right, and I tend to have a "good enough, let's go" approach. It's been good.

Matt: That's why we're good co-authors. We needed that balance. Had you said we should take more time, that wouldn't have been helpful to reaching the finish line. It's nice to have both perspectives: someone saying "it's good enough, go for it," pushing me to get to the point where I'm comfortable that it's now good to go.

Isaac: It's funny. There was a part in one of the drafts where we were talking about mastery-based learning, and I had a little story about my grandfather who always used to say "good enough for who it's for." He was a World War Two vet who worked with his hands, did carpentry, constantly building stuff, but he wasn't known for fine craftsmanship. If he built you a shelf or table, it was a little rough. But he cranked out stuff for his many kids and grandkids, like making 50 bird feeders in his basement for Christmas gifts. He was a one-man assembly line.

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Matt: We kept that story, Isaac. It's in there — "good enough for who it's for." I love it because it ties into what we talk about: don't pursue perfection. That pursuit is unattainable. None of us have it. Don't try to believe social media influencers whose lives look perfect. Your grandpa's quote aligns with the concept that in designing your child's education, don't pursue perfection. The messiness is where the experience is.

Isaac: And it's contextual as well. There are certain contexts where you want to have a higher degree of mastery or perfection and others where 80% really is good enough. Being able to know the difference and not have an absolutist approach is important.

I got started writing by doing daily blogging, which required "good enough for who it's for." If I were to say I can only publish if it's perfect, I would never have met that challenge. A book is different. I have to context switch because this is more enduring and needs more credibility.

With education, that's a great question. I asked my daughter this when she got upset about getting less than 95% on a Spanish test. I asked if she was mad because she wasn't as good at speaking Spanish as she wanted to be, and she said no. So I asked what made her want that perfection, trying to get her to question whether that's where she should put her effort and energy.

Matt: That's a great point. Identifying when it should matter and when 50-60% is probably good enough.

Isaac: So let's take this book section by section. There are three parts, and for today, we're just going to focus on part one.

Chapter one is a history of school and education as it stands today, how it came about, different attempts at reform, how COVID changed things, and the homeschool and school choice movements.

Chapter two is about standardized testing primarily and what that has done to the incentives in the education system.

Chapter three is a picture of a better version of goal setting than standardized testing. It's called "Mastered or Not Yet." Matt, I know you're really passionate about that framework.

It's funny, when I first created the Praxis program, I stumbled upon this concept because I was trying to combine theory and practice. When it came to demonstrating competency, I had people create projects or do oral exams with a simple "you mastered it or you didn't." If you weren't there, you could do it again as many times as you wanted.

Matt: The same principle — if you're a "not yet," come back. Take feedback, improve, and try again. Even in your daughter's example, if she's not happy with 95%, she can come back and finish that 5%. But if 80% is good enough, she can say "my not yet's are fine" and move on.

I love that part of your story about the oral exams and how professors helping judge were blown away by how engaged those students were compared to the kids they give tests to.

Isaac: That's one side of open education that doesn't get enough attention. Not only is this better for learners, but teachers have a much better experience too. When you're there with someone who's engaged with you, that's amazing.

When did you first come across the concept of competency-based education or "mastered and not yet"? Did you stumble on it yourself or find it through books and thinkers in education?

Matt: It goes back to my teacher preparation program. When I first started teaching in the 90s, I'd been trained to build rubrics — this idea of transparency where you have a clear rubric showing exactly what your project will be judged on. Project-based learning was big then.

That naturally transitioned to competency-based education, where those rubrics let you know ahead of time exactly what you'll be judged on. Students would self-evaluate on the rubric, get a peer to judge it, and then an outside adult. You had all this feedback and could see if you'd mastered it or had some "not yets."

I implemented project-based rubric assessments in 1994 when I first started teaching. It's interesting to see how that's entered mainstream education vernacular, with Southern New Hampshire University doing a whole college degree program that's interdisciplinary, project-based, and competency-based.

What bugs me is when we impose on kids that they're failures, or that they're not proficient enough, or they just aren't good enough. You have to say, "not yet." They're not there yet. And that three-letter word of "yet" adds so much strength to a kid, to a person who's struggling, because they know that they still have runway.

Isaac: It's interesting when you see the contrast between what happens in the professional world and what happens in the education system, which is supposed to prepare people for that. When you imagine hiring for a business and the only way you hire is sending out a multiple choice test and whoever did the best on it gets brought onto the team — no one would do that.

There may be a few jobs where that's one step, but the hiring process is really messy. It usually starts with a resume, but that's not what the decision is based on. Then you go through interviews where you're talking — it's like an oral exam — and you're trying to see if this person knows what you need them to know.

What's weird is sometimes you find they don't know as much as you thought they needed to, but they know something in another area you didn't even think about, and you might hire them anyway. It's not binary; it's complex. And then you might ask them to do a project — "send me a proposal for your first 30, 60, and 90 days." You're getting this multi-dimensional feel.

We all know that's how most of us hire, but somehow in education it's just: number grade, number grade, number grade.

Matt: And let's start the clock, and it's going to expire at 11:02. And if you don't have it turned in by then, you don't get anything. It's the stress of the timer, the lack of transparency. We don't even let kids or teachers know what's going to be on the test. We say it aligns to these ambiguous standards, but in the sake of protecting the authenticity of the test, we don't tell anyone what's on it.

That's the opposite of transparency. Teachers need to know, parents need to know, students need to know. And then we do "gotchas," we do timed tests, we say "don't talk to anyone." Where else in business would you say, "Don't talk to experts to get your answers"? That's the most ridiculous thing. "Do not email anybody. Do not have a Zoom call. Do not talk to anyone who knows what you're looking for." That's the opposite of what we want people to learn.

Isaac: I remember one of my early jobs as a teen working for a construction company framing houses. The boss would yell something like, "I need a four-foot two-by-four with an eight-inch 45-degree angle and a 30-degree bevel." I didn't know what any of this stuff was. Imagine if I just had to show up, make a bunch of cuts, and hand it to him, and he would either say "you're fired" or "we'll keep you." It would be crazy stressful.

Matt: So you ask questions, you research, you're motivated. That's learning. It's not that you just go do something in the dark and then show up and he says, "Wrong." But that's what we do to kids.

Isaac: And 80% of those cuts were probably wrong at first.

Matt: Right. And you can have a second try.

Isaac: So part one of the book has three chapters: Chapter one is "The 200-Year-Old Trap," chapter two is "Students Are Not Standard," and chapter three is "Mastered or Not Yet." What's your favorite of all that, Matt?

Matt: What's yours?

Isaac: I'm going to cheat and give two answers. My favorite chapter is actually chapter one. I'm a sucker for the history of the education system because the first time I learned the impetus for the people who put together the public school system, it was really shocking.

There was no broad-based public school system for the first couple hundred years in America. When it came about, the goals were very different from what people would want today. The structure was modeled after a Prussian system whose goal was to get people to go fight the wars that the government wanted them to fight and just obey orders without questioning. "If we tell you to run into gunfire, you do it." So how do we create a system that gets people to think that way from childhood? That was kind of the core. I love that historical context.

But I do have a favorite line in the entire book. Chapter three opens with: "LeBron James is a failure." Now it says after that, "at least he would be if he were graded like we grade our kids." I took a picture of just that first part and sent it to my buddies on our sports chat as a joke.

I love that chapter opening because it really gets at what we were just talking about. LeBron James is a failure if we apply this rubric to him, to any basketball player, to any athlete. You mean you make 50% of the shots that you take? That's it? On a grading scale? We're talking F, right? We show field goal percentage, three-point percentage, free-throw percentage — the best he would be on here would be a D+ in any of those categories.

I love breaking us out and recognizing that things outside of the education world, we have a totally different way of viewing and measuring them. What about you? What's your favorite part in part one?

Matt: Well, I'll take your two-part answer and mirror that. First, I want to do a shout-out to Amy's foreword. If you skip forewords in books, don't skip this one. Amy's my wife, co-founder of OpenEd, and what she lays out in her foreword just inspires me. It sets the table for everything you're going to read.

In terms of what I really love, we've talked about "mastered or not yet," and I love that line about LeBron, Roger Federer, and Simone Biles, but I love the quote we questionably attribute to Albert Einstein: "If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it'll live its whole life feeling stupid."

We put a graphic in the book that I hope readers digest as they read it. Can fish climb trees? No, they can't. So why are we judging a fish on its ability to climb a tree when that just doesn't make sense? In the picture, the monkey is excited. The squirrel is optimistic they'll perform well on the "climb the tree exam," but the fish is terrified.

I like to ask people which animal they identify with. I was probably like the horse — very happy, confident that I could do anything, but still couldn't climb the tree. I'm so confident in myself that I'm sure I could figure out a way, but I'm still not going to succeed like the monkey will. How frustrating is that concept?

The elephant gives up because they know they're just going to push the tree over and see if they can get a D for that! It's funny how we try to paint every child the same by birth year and cohort. That's the most illogical way to organize and assess kids, having them all climb the same tree. It literally doesn't make sense for human development.

Seeing that through my own five children, their spouses, and our grandkids — there's no such thing as an average child. Every child's unique. Their education should be too. That's really the favorite message throughout the whole book.

Isaac: What I love about that Einstein quote is that there's one reaction to it which is: "Okay, we need to shield kids from the knowledge that they're not good at certain things, protect them and make sure they never know they're not as good at something as somebody else because they might feel bad." But that's not productive either because you're creating fragile kids who'll be crushed once they find out.

I'll never forget Vince Young, an amazing quarterback in college who went to the NFL as a number one draft pick but really struggled. He said he sat in his car after a game where he got booed, questioning his entire life. He had never done anything but win at every level and had only ever been praised because he was so physically gifted. He didn't know what to do when he got booed.

You don't want to create kids where you hide their weaknesses, but how do you marry that with the recognition that everybody's different and has different skills? Sports actually provides a good model, especially sports with diverse skill types. I was driving home from baseball practice with my son and he was bummed because he thought he was the slowest kid on the team. But he actually has power as a hitter and a good arm.

I told him about Anthony Rizzo, who's an incredibly slow base runner but an amazing first baseman and a good hitter who's won a World Series. Some guys are base-stealing champions who never hit home runs — a team needs all types. You may want to practice to get faster, but knowing that if you're a fish, you don't have to be ashamed that you can't climb a tree.

Knowing what you're not good at is actually a good thing, but you don't want to attach shame to it. I want to know the things I'm not good at without letting that crush me. That's hard to accomplish in an academic setting, but it's important not to attach shame. Just say, "I'm not very good at math, so I'm going to need some help" and not feel bad about it.

Matt: I agree. It's not that we should protect kids and never make them do anything hard. In later chapters, we talk about how one of the most rewarding things is accomplishing something challenging. The point of saying "fish don't climb trees" isn't that we don't want kids to be challenged. The point is that there are challenging things for each child to discover. Once you find those things each child is passionate about conquering, that experience produces both learning and joy.

Isaac: As a parent, one of the hardest things to figure out is when something is truly not for your kid. Why make them do it if they're miserable and it's not benefiting them? But there are other times when you need to push them a little. Ideally, the older they get, the more they figure that out themselves. When my six-year-old says he doesn't want to practice piano, I'll say, "Sorry, do it anyway." But if he's played for years and it's just not his thing, maybe that's different.

Presenting people with opportunities in a low-stakes environment is better. "Here's a tree, anybody want to climb?" If some take to it and some don't, that's okay — more for some, less for others. That's better than "Here's the test, you all have to do it, and you'll all be shamed if you don't."

Matt: That's a good teaser for the next section of the book, about giving your child a voice. People say, "You just let kids do whatever they want?" No, that's not the point. The point is giving them some autonomy and agency based on their developmental levels. They still need adults and teachers and coaches, but don't dismiss giving them voice and choice. We'll cover that next time.

Isaac: Great setup. We'll come back to talk about part two, which gets more tactical with examples of how to do this with your kids.

Matt: Part two gives a playbook for parents who want help starting at the beginning. We find many families just don't know where to start, so that section gives you tactical things you can do in your family today.

Isaac: Absolutely. If you want to go to opened.co/book, you can find a link to get the book on Amazon and other resources we have. We want to spread the concept of opening up education. If you're at the playground and hear another parent say, "I want to do something different; I've thought about homeschooling or virtual school but I'm not sure" — that's a perfect person to grab a copy of Open Education for.

Matt: Thanks, Isaac. It's been a great experience to get this published and out the door. I appreciate all your work.

Isaac: Likewise, until next time.