Episode 007 – 5 Building Blocks of Open Education with Isaac Morehouse
Your paper certificate shows your level of conditioning, not your level of education.
– Isaac Morehouse
The greatest threat to your child’s potential isn’t bad grades. It’s an outdated education system.
In the latest episode of the podcast, Ela Richmond interviews OpenEd CEO Isaac Morehouse about his first principles approach applied to education.
What exactly are first principles, and why do they matter in education?
First principles thinking involves breaking down complex problems into their most fundamental truths and building up from there. It’s about questioning assumptions and getting to the core of how things really work. First principles tell us that our educational system was designed for a world that no longer exists. It was built to produce factory workers in an industrial age. But in today’s rapidly changing, information-rich world, we need a different approach. We need to rethink education from the ground up.
If you don’t have time to listen to the full episode, let’s unpack the five basic building blocks of open education.
- Education is Inherently Human Humans are born learners. From the moment we enter this world, we’re absorbing information and developing skills. As Isaac puts it, “Humans will and must learn. It can’t be stopped.” Children naturally observe, experiment, and innovate, solving problems in creative ways. Traditional schooling often stifles this innate drive, but open education seeks to nurture and channel it. Curiosity is our superpower. Is your child’s education nurturing it or killing it?
- Curiosity Drives Learning Force-feeding facts kills motivation. When children are allowed to follow their interests, they learn deeper and faster. Open education recognizes the power of curiosity and builds on it. As Isaac suggests, “If you can just remove those things that are doing harm… everything else is open. You can try it, you can test it out.” This approach turns learning from a chore into an exciting journey of discovery. Forced learning leads to resistance. Nurtured curiosity creates lifelong passion. 80% of learning comes from pursuing interests, 20% from guidance. Let children explore, and they can’t help but learn.
- Every Child Learns Differently Trying to force all children into the same educational mold is like expecting every plant to thrive in the same soil. One-size-fits-all education fails; personalized learning prevails. Open education recognizes and celebrates differences, allowing each child to thrive in their unique way. It’s about “building a longer list of things that are not a good fit until you kind of whittle down to what works really well for them,” as Isaac explains.
- Real-World Application > Theory Memorizing facts ≠ true learning. Children need opportunities to apply their knowledge to real problems. This builds deeper understanding and practical skills they’ll use throughout their lives. Open education emphasizes hands-on, project-based learning that connects classroom concepts to the real world. Your paper certificate shows your level of conditioning, not education. Standardized testing is overrated. Real-world problem-solving is underrated. Depth matters more than breadth.
- Education Should Adapt to the Child, Not Vice Versa Forcing children to fit into a rigid system crushes potential. Flexible, adaptive learning environments allow each child to flourish. “Open education is dissolving the debates about which method is best. You only have to answer the question, what’s a good education for my child right now?”
It’s time to move beyond the outdated factory model of education and embrace an approach that prepares our children for the challenges and opportunities of the 21st century. Choose flexibility. Choose growth. Choose open education.
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Transcript
00:00 Introduction and Host Introduction
Ela Richmond: Welcome to the OpenEd podcast. I’m your new sometimes host Ela Richmond, and I’m here with Isaac Morehouse. How are you doing today?
Isaac Morehouse: Good. I like that – the new sometimes host. We have a rotation of sometimes hosts, which is great because it takes the pressure off of one person needing to be available every single time. It also gets a lot more interesting, unique perspectives and types of questions. I know Ela, because the way I very first met you was when you asked me to come on your podcast several years ago. You are a great interviewer and you ask very deep and probing questions. So hopefully I haven’t set the expectations too high with that, but I’m excited for this conversation.
Ela: No, hopefully not. I really wanted to spend today’s episode talking about first principles. First principles is really, really important to you and as long as I’ve been working for you, that has been something that you’ve stressed. So, can you first just introduce the topic of first principles and then we’ll dive into first principles in education and why this is such an important topic.
01:16 Diving into First Principles
Isaac: I’m sure there are people out there who have defined first principles or first principles thinking. I don’t know; I’ve never read any of those definitions. I know people talk about it, but to me, it’s kind of like a label that I’ve retroactively used to describe the way I try to approach things. I approach things from this perspective, by the way, not because I think it’s always and everywhere better, but because I’m too stupid to do any other approach.
Here’s what I mean by first principles: things that are always true. If you can find things that are always true, basic underlying relationships, causal relationships or facts of nature or human nature, and work with those, you start with the really simple, basic ones. For example, as far as I know, every time I drop something, it goes to the floor. There’s some force called gravity. That happens every time. That’s a principle. So I’m not going to build a physical object that doesn’t take that principle into account.
Humans have these principles as well. This is what any good version of studying economics is about – not numbers and data, but human action. How do humans behave given certain constraints and incentives? You can’t predict every single thing a human is going to do, but you can predict patterns. An example in economics is: if everything else is equal, but the price of something goes up, people will tend to consume less of it. That’s a really great principle.
There’s another kind of principle, which maybe could be considered ethical or moral, like things that I know I need to do or not do. For example, I don’t want to have a business that only works if I lie to people. Or let’s pick something less obviously bad, like having a business where I need to have back-to-back 10-minute phone calls all day long for 10 hours a day. I don’t want the business to only work if I continue doing that because it’s going to make me really unhappy.
So to me, first principles are the things that are unchanging. Let’s start there and then let’s sort of figure out what we build on top of that.
06:10 Understanding Education
Ela: I love this as the way that we’re starting because they’re the fundamentals. They’re the things that are unchanging. Sometimes they’re so simple that people don’t ask the question. They don’t rewind almost and go back to those questions because it almost seems so simple. It almost seems dumb. But this is what this episode is all about. So I want to ask you a couple of just absolutely fundamental, so simple questions that some people might be listening and be like, “Okay, why are you asking such a simple question?” Hopefully, your answers will shine a light on why they’re so important. So first question that I want to ask you is: what is education anyway?
Isaac: It’s kind of one of those things we all talk about, and we all kind of roughly know what we mean, but when you’re asked to define it, it’s very hard to define. I’m just shooting from the hip here. I don’t have some preset definition of education that I return to. I think of education as simply the process of gaining knowledge or ability, any kind of process that helps you understand and navigate the world better. It’s very broad.
I suppose you could say any experience or activity that helps you navigate the world better. But I think “process” sort of moves it into something slightly more repeatable or systematic. If I said, “Okay, now I’m going to try to observe what’s happening every time I walk outside and then I’m going to write it down,” I turned it into something more repeatable. That to me feels more like education. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a process, but I tend to think of it as some kind of repeatable or slightly more consistent process by which you are gaining knowledge and ability. What’s your definition?
09:11 Education vs. Conditioning
Ela: Honestly, I’m working on that as I get inside of OpenEd. As I start to learn more about this market, I think there were so many things that I thought education was about a year ago, two years ago, three years ago. Especially when I was going through school, there were a lot of misconceptions of what I thought education was. I’m just now starting to realize as I’m defining terms, how I started to define education in terms of school. I saw those two things as synonymous and basically the same thing. It was like, you are educated through school and that’s it. That is your option. So right now, I’m definitely re-establishing my beliefs in terms of education and in terms of these very fundamental questions.
Isaac: Okay, you just made me think of something. We’re spitballing here, but I wonder if a useful way to talk about the difference between education and what’s often called education is the difference between education and conditioning.
Maybe education needs to involve some kind of agency on the part of the person learning, some kind of conscious awareness of this process, some kind of willingness. Like, “Hey, I want to learn, gain knowledge and gain understanding and skill,” or some willful participation in activities that give you knowledge or skill. Whereas conditioning is like you can change somebody in ways that are bad for them and that don’t help them necessarily achieve their own goals.
You know, the way that experiments condition animals to salivate every time they hear a bell ring? Humans can be conditioned too. You lock somebody up in a cell and you reward them for certain things and punish them for certain things, it’s going to change their behavior. It’s going to alter the way they see the world. It’s going to alter the thoughts that they have.
Everyone will be conditioned to some extent by their environment, whether it’s intentional or not. The things you see as possible are going to shape where your brain can go. But I think conditioning is sort of on the side of the individual who’s being conditioned; it’s kind of not chosen. Unless you choose, and then to me, that’s called education.
Maybe that’s the difference. Maybe there’s some kind of agency involved because I think a lot of what happens in what’s traditionally called education is more like conditioning. We put you in an environment of rewards and punishments against your will, and it changes you. It changes your behavior. It changes your ability to think of possibilities. It changes your knowledge set. But you didn’t really become educated. You didn’t really learn how to think, how to approach problems and break them down. You learned how to respond to avoid pain and to obtain reward, but in the way that an animal would. You didn’t learn to access the higher rational faculties that humans have to the same degree.
12:54 The Human Drive to Learn
Ela: I think that’s a very important point actually. You mentioned the term “educated” and for so long, I had the belief that to be educated was to go through higher ed or to have a credential. I don’t think that’s exactly accurate. I think the distinction that you made right there where it’s just like, are you conscious of what you know, or are you conscious of not just what, but also why – that’s actually extremely important and valuable.
Isaac: Yeah. The paper certificates, for the most part, show what level of conditioning you have received, not what level of education you have.
Ela: So let’s go into that a little bit. What is the value? You were saying that education is the process of gaining knowledge or ability slash know-how. Why is that so important for individuals?
Isaac: Look, I almost feel like you got to reverse the question. The burden of proof seems to be the other way around. Humans will and must learn. It can’t be stopped. Take a child. From the youngest age, they’re taking in their surroundings. They’re observing, they’re watching what other people do. And then they’re experimenting. They’re trying to do those things themselves. They’re emulating, they’re copying, and then they’re innovating. They’re taking things they’ve seen and they’re putting their own little twist on it to see if they can solve problems better.
Take a little toddler that’s seen people use a footstool to rest their feet on. They want to reach something on a shelf. They’ve also seen people move things around on the floor. They put those together and they move the footstool over by the shelf and they use it as a step to get up and reach what they want to get. That’s learning. That’s a combination of theory and practice right there.
That’s innate to humans. They are observing the world and they’re bumping around and testing things. Can I move this? Let me see what happens if I push it. And then there’s theory going on. They’re obviously abstracting in some way to recognize that this object, which they’ve never observed being used to stand on, could be used to stand on. They’ve seen people stand on something to get higher, walking up steps, and they’re connecting those dots. That’s understanding how systems work, how analogies work. Humans just do this. You don’t have to do anything for our brains to work that way.
So recognizing we need to learn, we are always going to learn, and saying this brings us closer to our goals, to happiness, to fulfillment, to a good life – whatever you want to call it. Let’s put fuel on this. Let’s do this the best way that we can. And the older we get, the more conscious we become of this and the more self-reflective. We’re thinking about what it is that we’re thinking and what it is that we’re doing and recognizing, “Hey, I want to do this more,” or “I want to learn specific things in specific areas to solve specific problems.”
What’s the best way to learn? You can’t shut that down in humans. You can suppress it and warp them, but they’re still going to be trying to do that. So I think it’s important just because it’s human. Education is a must. To paraphrase C.S. Lewis, who said good philosophy has to exist if for no other reason than that bad philosophy does: Good education needs to exist if for no other reason than that bad education will. We will be learning things, we will be experiencing education whether it’s intentional or not. So let’s try to make sure it’s the best that it can be. And a lot of times, by the way, it involves less conscious creation of exactly what that process should be and a little more room for free exploration and play.
Balancing Freedom and Structure in Education [17:02]
Ela: I love this and I’m gonna go back into the question of what is good education then, but before I do, I think it’s so fascinating that you said that about the idea of learning being so human. Whenever you said it, I was like, “Oh, yeah.” I almost had to remind myself in the moment that we take for granted the fact that we as humans like to learn, and we’ve been told in so many ways that we must have an external force pushing us to learn. Otherwise, we’re not going to. And I think in a lot of ways that conditioning has made it so that young children, young students, people don’t learn unless they’re forced to anymore. It’s almost divorced our sense of self as learners, which is an interesting thing. What are your thoughts there?
Isaac: Yeah, it’s such an interesting thing. I mean, as a parent, especially if you have multiple kids and you can see how each of them are so different, you often confront this problem of to what extent do I require things of my kids? And to what extent do I simply make options available to them?
If you don’t require anything of your kids, then you can start to see some negative things. They need some kind of constraints. They need some kind of boundaries, they need some kind of encouragements, maybe bargains sometimes. Okay, you really want this? If you keep your room clean for two weeks, I’ll give it to you. Sometimes those things are really valuable and really necessary as a way to incrementally get them to where they have full independence and responsibility as an adult, to kind of introduce smaller, ever-increasing elements of that.
But then there’s a degree to which you go too far. If everything in their life is mandated and required, and they have very little scope for their own goal setting, their own planning, how they’re going to use their time, then they start to see everything as obligatory, even the really good stuff. If it’s an assignment, it must not be very good because if it was good, you wouldn’t need to tell me to do it. I’d do it on my own. Right? Like, all I want to do is trade baseball cards, but you’re forcing me to read Tom Sawyer, well, therefore Tom Sawyer must not be very fun. It must be if you wouldn’t have to force me otherwise.
A lot of people who actually would enjoy reading Tom Sawyer end up not enjoying it because we all kind of have that rebellious independent thing in us for better or worse. And you’re like, “Well, that was forced on me.” I mean, how many people think of the classic books that everyone’s forced to read in school as stuff you’re supposed to read? They don’t think of those as “Oh, let’s check this out. Maybe this is cool. Maybe it’s not.” Some of those books are actually really lame and I don’t think anybody would read them if everybody wasn’t forced to. Some of them are actually great and I think way more people would read them. But it gets crammed into there.
So, try to figure out to what extent you can let people discover things. It’s funny, my youngest child, I would say, is like my most untainted. He just thinks everything is interesting and he wants to learn about everything. And even though we’ve done various forms of homeschooling, alternative schooling with all of the kids, we’ve just gotten better as parents at learning that combination of challenging and pushing them as well as giving them freedom. So we will require him to do things like I made him take piano lessons, but I didn’t ask him. I was just like, “Hey, you’re going to start taking piano lessons,” and he doesn’t have a ton of negative experience with us making him do stuff. So he was like, “Really cool!” And he’s all excited. And he loves it, practices all the time.
Now, part of that’s his personality, but part of it’s like, if you get it right, it’s not that he would have gone and taught himself piano by himself. Maybe he would have, but we did just introduce that to him. Because we’re not controlling everything all the time and he has a lot of scope for play, and if he’s interested in something, we’ll help chase that interest, he doesn’t perceive us introducing new things into his schedule as a threat or an attempt to control him.
Exploring Open Education [00:21:21]
Ela: I love that. I wanted to ask about the distinction between open education and education. How would you explain the difference between all of the different models of education – just the broad concept of education – and the very specific concept of open education that we’re doing here?
Isaac: It’s kind of like in philosophy, there’s a school called pragmatism. As I understand it, my midwit understanding is essentially: “Hey, let’s look at all the schools of philosophy and see what works to help us think clearer and live better. If I can take a little something from existentialism, a little something from stoicism – cool, if it works, if it’s useful.”
I think it’s essentially that with education. Instead of trying to decide “Okay, I have to improve, gain knowledge and skills. What’s the best way to do that?”, as a parent you feel all this pressure. How do I figure out what’s the best way to educate my kids? “Okay, I’ve been reading all this stuff about classical education. I think maybe this is it.” But then one of your kids is really having a hard time with that and you’ve got this tension. Or you’ve been reading all about unschooling and just letting the kids set their own thing, but this isn’t really working for you – you’re stressed all the time and it’s all chaotic.
You feel this pressure to solve education. What is the ideal education? How do I pick the perfect mode, the perfect approach? Is it being in school? Is it not being in school? Is it hiring a tutor?
Isaac: If you can sort of say, “I don’t know the answer to that. There is no one form of education that’s ideal.” The answer is: each kid at each stage of life, what do they need? And I want to look at all options. I don’t want to close myself off because I have an ideological commitment to a particular school or approach to education and say, “Well, I have to do this because we’re a public school family.”
Maybe all my kids but one will go there. Maybe my kids will go there for three years and then they’ll go somewhere else. Just break open, give yourself the permission to pick and choose. That’s open education – dissolve those debates. You don’t have to answer the question “What’s a good education?” You only have to answer the question “What’s a good education for my child right now? What does that contain?”
I don’t care what’s good for society as a whole, for all children everywhere. I can’t answer those questions, and I don’t want to try. I’ll probably turn into a giant jerk if I go try to impose my view of education on everyone. Instead, let’s just bring it back to what do my kids need right now, right here, and what are all the options on the table? Let me pick and choose and create those combinations and share what works and what doesn’t work. It’s okay – not everything works, nothing works perfectly.
So I think that’s kind of the idea. It’s very pragmatic.
Pragmatic Approach to Education [24:11]
Ela: As a parent who’s gone through this, how can you tell if a specific method or approach is working for your kid? What are some leading indicators that you’re like, “Okay, I think this is actually working,” or some things that would indicate that maybe you should change your approach? I think that’s really important for parents.
Isaac: That’s really hard. It’s funny, my instinctive response is “I know it when I see it,” and I’m trying to think, well, how do I know? You just know sometimes when your kids are not doing well, when they’re struggling in some ways.
Now, some ways it could be obvious stuff, like they’re acting up and they’re screaming and being bratty and making the house chaotic. But often it’s just more… they just don’t seem to be really flourishing. And it’s funny, it’s not just about their happiness. There are times where my kids are doing some drudgery or some chore and they’re not happy about it, but I can tell – even if we’ve made them clean up the common room and they’re all grumpy about it, I can overhear them talking with each other, kind of joking. And when they’re done, they have that glow of pride. They got something done. I can tell they’re doing well, even though they would tell you, “Oh, I don’t want to do this.”
So it’s not just like, “Oh, just give your kids whatever to make them happy.” That’s not what I’m getting at. How do they flourish? You can tell. Some kids will tell you and other kids won’t tell you. You have to tease it out of them. You just have to know if they’re quieter and they’re not as open with their feelings. It’s funny, you can almost just physically tell.
We’ve all had this experience – watch kids in your neighborhood walking home from school. There’s like a certain slouched shoulder kind of slump. It’s different from, say, my son who works full time and does physical work – he returns from a hard day’s work and he’s physically tired. This is different. There’s like a defeatism to it that you can see sometimes.
Recognizing When Kids Are Struggling [28:02]
Isaac: So I think it’s just really knowing those small things, and it’s not that hard. I don’t think it’s some huge secret. Most parents will probably tell you, if you ask them, “Is it easy for you to tell when your kid is flourishing or not?” They’ll probably say, “Yeah.” I don’t think it’s that hard. I don’t know if I can give you any more concrete signs than that.
Ela: I think that’s good and valuable. We have these subconscious mechanisms inside our brains, even micro expressions – you can just tell.
Isaac: Or if there’s conflict all the time. With my oldest, when he was very verbally smart with a good vocabulary and was very good at articulating himself, we thought, “Oh, we’ll be able to teach him to read at an early age.” So we tried starting to teach him to read at like four and a half. Didn’t work. Five, didn’t work. By six, we were like, “Fine, I give up. I’m just going to let you – I’m just going to see what happens. I’m just not going to try to teach you to read.”
Because it was conflict every time we would try. We tried reading the little Bob books, we tried flashcards, we tried different stuff. And it was just like, “No, I don’t want to do this.” Not always even in a bratty way, but just hard. It wasn’t clicking. We were just butting heads.
And then we used to read him Calvin and Hobbes comics every night before he went to bed. One night it was really late, he went to bed late for some reason, and I was like, “No, it’s too late. I’m not going to read you a story tonight.” And he’s like, “Please.” I’m like, “Nope.” And then I walked by the room later and he’s in there reading it to himself.
Now, he told me later that he wasn’t actually reading it at first. We’d read it so many times that he could look at the pictures and he had it memorized, so he was just saying it out loud. But at some point within two or three months, that turned into him actually reading. I don’t know how – he just taught himself to read.
The Challenge of Teaching Reading [30:39]
Isaac: For us, knowing that the approach – I didn’t know what approach to take, so I was like, “Forget it, I’m just gonna go hands-off for a while.” I don’t even know what to do because everything was creating conflict.
Sometimes it’s obvious – it’s just not working. You’re just butting heads constantly. They’re not learning. You’re stressed all the time. And just saying, “Okay, there has to be a different approach.” Sometimes, it’s like the Hippocratic Oath – first, do no harm. Okay, this is doing harm. It’s not helping, and it’s doing harm to our relationship, if nothing else. How about I just stop? If I don’t know what to do that’s better, let me just stop doing the thing that’s causing all the problems. And just let it breathe for a little bit.
Not every time is your kid gonna go teach themselves something, but they will sometimes! So anyway, I think that can be an obvious way to tell when something’s not working.
Ela: That reminds me of how during COVID, when everybody stopped using all the channels and waterways, we just stopped. And then there’s something about the natural progression of the way that things work, like homeostasis. Things want to be natural. They want to be in line with the way that they’re made to be. And so all of a sudden you see these whales coming back into these canals. I think that’s kind of similar to what you’re saying, where it’s basically like, sometimes if something’s not working and you’re doing negative harm, just let it be and maybe nature will take its course and it’ll just happen.
The Importance of Flexibility in Education [32:21]
Isaac: That can be one of the biggest freeing things for parents who do have a kid that’s in school, that’s struggling, that’s suffering in some way. Sometimes you don’t need to have an answer for what to do instead. If they’re really suffering, if you can just pull them out, just get them out of there, take a little time. And often they’ll start to kind of come down. They’ll kind of detox from that environment, that high-stress tense environment. And then it’ll start to open up a little bit and it’ll start to get easier to figure out what pathways to take. But in the midst of when you’re still in the stressful, anxiety-creating, threatening situation, you can’t think clearly. You can’t identify what’s a better alternative oftentimes.
Ela: I love that. I wanted to ask you about the cost of consciously schooling. Because if you are going to sit down and start to teach yourself about these different options, if you’re going to sit down and start to really pay attention to your kids and to really notice things and to really start to understand how they work, you know, what they might be interested in – it takes a lot. Why is that worth it? What is the cost?
Balancing Cost and Value in Education [34:11]
Isaac: You know, it’s funny. The cost can be anywhere from quite low to very, very, very high. And the difference, like there’s no limit to how much you could spend if you wanted to in time and money and resources, but the difference in outcomes for kids, I feel like you get the first 80 percent of the value just by doing any kind of flexible open education at all.
Just by stepping back and saying, “I’m not going to just unthinkingly plug my kids into somebody else’s form of education without considering what’s great for them.” And if you say, “I’m not going to do that, let me zoom out. What do I think is going to work for this kid this year? What are their goals and needs? What are my goals and needs? What’s the best way to get the best combination for everybody?”
It’s never going to be perfect. You’re always going to have some trade-offs. It’s like buying a house. You’re never going to get all the things on your list, but you’re going to get some things you didn’t expect. So you figure out what’s the best you can do given your constraints, and just making that choice and coming up with something that’s slightly, at least more conscious and customized is going to get you 80 percent of the value.
And then you can spend tons of time and money and resources to eke out as much of that additional 20 percent of the value as you can. But if you get 80 percent of it – like, nobody gets 100. So maybe you can spend a handful of hours a week and a couple hundred or a couple grand a year on a kid and get 80 percent of the value. Or you can spend 40 hours a week, like a full-time job, and 50,000 a year to make the most crazy custom education ever. And you’ll get 95 percent of the value. So what’s the delta on that 15 percent? I think that’s a good way to think about it.
So don’t think of it as this sort of all-or-nothing. The biggest chunk of value can be had relatively inexpensively, especially with young kids. It’s more about if you have a parent who’s able to be with them in the day. The biggest value to most people of the traditional school system is just that it’s free daycare.
Creative Solutions for Homeschooling [36:38]
Isaac: If parents are working and they can’t be with their kids, where can they go that I can afford to have them? So if you need to solve for that, that’s the biggest part. If they’re not going to be plugged into that system, is there some other version? Is there some private school or charter school? Is there some sort of co-op? Is there some sort of homeschool collective where each parent takes the kids one day a week and maybe you can work four days a week instead of five? Can you split time?
Solving for that, I think, is the biggest challenge. Having the ability for something more than just “I need a 7 a.m. to 3 p.m. daycare every day.” Once you solve for that, the rest of it, I think the returns are much, much smaller.
Even that – there’s ways to be really creative. There really are. Look at all these micro schools. Instead of just assuming the only option is whatever public school district I live in, maybe there’s a teacher from that school who doesn’t necessarily love teaching there. Can they do a micro school? What if you have 20 or 50 kids and can you figure out a way to get that down to a couple grand a kid? It could be in a church building. This stuff is exploding for a reason, and a lot of these things are a lot more accessible than people think.
Start with what does my kid need right now? What would be the best thing for them? Outline that and then say, “Okay, if that’s not attainable, what’s something that’s a little closer to that than what I currently have that is attainable?” Just take some little steps.
If you do have the ability – if you have one parent that’s not working, that’s at home – the actual dollar cost can be very, very low. Homeschool parents, homeschool moms especially – shout out to homeschool moms – they’re like financial wizards. They find ways to do insane, amazing, crazy, cool stuff with their kids for like 12 dollars and 27 cents. And they’re down to that – the difference between $12.27 and $12.30, they’ll notice. It’s crazy. It’s so cool when you kind of get it, and there’s a whole community of people finding ways to do things really cheaply, bargaining with local businesses who don’t get a lot of traffic during the school day because everybody’s in school. It’s really cool. You can actually do these things. If you have the ability to be with your kid at least some of the time, the dollar cost and materials and things like that can be very, very low. You’d be amazed what you can do.
Dealing with Pressure and Stigma [39:41]
Ela: That’s so true. I think you hit on a really interesting point there, which is also that there are a lot of parents who are getting into this – and I mean even parents who have been inside of this for a long time – who are afraid of doing it wrong. There are so many ways to do it, so many different options, so many different curriculums. It’s really a choose-your-own-adventure in so many ways. But there is pressure and there is a lot of stigma, and especially in the past, there was a lot of stigma around being a homeschooler or being an alternative education schooler. So there’s pressure to do it right, and then there’s additional pressure because other people are looking at you. What advice would you give to people who are experiencing that right now?
Isaac: What’s helped me the most is, when it comes to educating your kids, instead of thinking “How do I figure out how to do it right? I got to get it figured out. I got to do it right” – think of it less like a painting and more like a sculpture. So it’s not “What are all the right brush strokes and I got to make sure it’s all going to turn out well.” Think of it like, okay, here’s this hunk of granite. Let me just remove the parts that I know I don’t want.
What are the things that I know are not good for my kids? Everything else is fair game. What are the things that are doing them harm or causing them to behave in a way that I don’t like or seem to be making them grumpier? They’re not learning. Something is not working. If you can just remove those things, everything else is open. You can try it, you can test it out. And for each kid, you’ll start to build a longer and longer list of things that are not a good fit until you kind of whittle down to what’s a path, what’s an approach that works really well for them. And that’s where that sculpture will start to emerge.
So I just like to reverse that burden of proof. Instead of saying “What’s the right thing?”, just make a huge list of all this stuff that doesn’t seem to work for each kid. And don’t feel bad if some of those things are things that work really well for everyone else or things that look really good and prestigious in other people’s eyes. If you just know that certain things do not work well for your kid, don’t do them. Just eliminate the bad. Start there. It’s a lot easier.
The Future of Open Education [48:11]
Ela: Paint your ideal future for the category of open education. What does it look like?
Isaac: What excites me is this is not an ideal future I have to imagine in some sort of utopian construct. It is the direction I see things heading already. And just following that trend line and saying, “Hey, I can see the wave. I can see what’s starting to happen.” And then kind of extrapolating out what that might look like down the road.
Micro schools are going crazy. There are just thousands of micro schools founded, usually by a parent or a teacher who was in the traditional system that said, “You know what, I think I could have a much better experience for myself and for students if I just did a school for 10 or 20 kids and I had more flexibility.”
You’re seeing an explosion of education savings accounts where states are saying instead of giving the money to the school, we’ll give money to the parents and they can use it not just for tuition at a private school, they can use it for their own customized education. They can do co-ops and courses and all these different things. Fifteen states passed those just last year. Why? Because all parents like them. This is what’s crazy – this is not a partisan issue. You ask the most blue state inner city, hardcore Democrats, and they want education choice. They want an open education. They want all these options. They love it. You ask the most red state rural person who’s out there on the farm – they want it too. Everybody does. That’s what’s amazing.
Final Thoughts and Personal Stories [52:31]
Isaac: People want the flexibility and they’re recognizing the need to adapt the way that we educate, the way that we approach education as the world has changed. We’re way beyond the factory system of the economy, and the school system looks kind of like the factory. Nobody works like that anymore. So why educate like that? Everybody wants it and the market and policy are both starting to respond, but it’s still early. It’s still in the early days.
There have been people doing this for a really long time, homeschooling and things like that. But you’ve had this proliferation of approaches and different models. You’ve got Acton Academy out there. You’ve got all the Montessori schools that have been around for a while. You’ve got unschooling, world schooling, people who are permanently remote, who are doing like taking their kids with them to travel around if they have a remote job. It’s incredible.
So I just see that becoming so much more common and the line between all these things blurring. Like, oh, my kid’s enrolled at whatever public school, but they’re only there two days a week and then they’re doing this thing over here. There’s more and more of that happening. Public schools are losing enrollments and they’re having to adapt. “Okay, well, can we offer some virtual options? Can we say you can leave for the second half of the day and go do asynchronous virtual curricula and still pass the state test?” For parents who want to be a part of that system, those are starting to come out as options.
There’s just this entire breaking down of these boundaries. It’s already happening. It’s in the very early stages, but if you’ve met people who are in it, they have more energy and enthusiasm and there’s more innovation going on there than anywhere else. It’s going to explode.
So it’s going to be everywhere. It’s going to be build your own education. I think people will approach each child’s learning for each year much like if you go to college as a student, you look at the course catalog and you create your own schedule. But you’re going to be able to look not just at one institution’s course catalog, but every online provider, every in-person provider, whether public, private or tutor or homeschool, all of them. And you’ll pick and choose and you’ll customize your own schedule for each kid each year. That’s the future that I see coming for more and more people who want it. And ideally, that’s the future for everybody because it’s not a prescription of what you should do. It’s just opening up what you can do.
Ela: That was incredible. I think that’s a perfect note to end this on. We hope, the whole OpenEd team, me and Isaac, we hope that everybody else listening to this can get as excited about this vision as we can, that you are subscribed to the newsletter where we share so many good tips, tricks, things that are happening in the education space. And we hope that you listen to every episode after this. Is there anything else that we should shout out?
Isaac: No, I was just going to say we got to get your story out because you kind of did a combination. Didn’t you have some homeschooling, some public schooling?
Ela: No, I did private school all the way through. My parents started getting more active with the way that they were schooling us when they had my brother.
Isaac: I told you the youngest kid – always the parents have learned, you know.
Ela: Yeah, he also has the most interesting story because he’s been building a lot. He recently did an engineering camp at MIT. He built on the side. He does tons of different competitions. He has fostered such an interesting passion that I don’t think any of me or my other siblings – which I have three siblings total – we didn’t get that opportunity, but he did through the way that he was nurtured as a kid. And he’s only 16, but he has a really bright future ahead of him.
Isaac: So we’ll have to get, maybe over future episodes as you’re hosting, or maybe we can bring you on and I can interview you. We gotta get, we gotta tease out more of your story and how you got where you are. ‘Cause I know you have a lot of really interesting insights and I just talked for like 80 percent of the time.
Ela: Oh, I loved it though. You are a wealth of knowledge. So thank you so much.
Isaac: I had a blast.