“If our public education system is so bad, how does our economy remain so strong?”
“What happens to lower-income students once the public school system is gone?”
Have you ever had these questions?
In this episode of the Anecdotes for Success podcast, hosts Paul and Matt asked Hannah Frankman these questions and others about the alternative schools movement.
The conversation covered important issues such as the motivation of the average family to look beyond the public school system, what happens to lower-income students if the public school system goes away, and what public school teachers think about the alternative school movement.
Hannah (an innovator), Paul (an educator), and Matt (an entrepreneur) use their differing backgrounds to provide interesting perspectives and insights into the alternative schools movement.
They also addressed devil’s advocate arguments against the alternative schools movement, and why Hannah thinks this will be the future of education.
Topics Covered (with timestamps)
- Hannah’s background and story (0:00)
- What does alternative education mean? (4:35)
- What’s wrong with the current education system? (5:40)
- If education in the US is so poor, why is the economy so strong? (12:03)
- Is the old school system completely outdated? What’s the motivation for the average family to look at alternative school systems? (18:23)
- What would happen to kids from lower-income families if there were no public school system? (23:24)
- Can there be company-specific schools? (28:36)
- What do teachers think about the alternative school movement? (33:35)
- What are microschools? (42:24)
- How do we know that non-traditional schooling is better? (48:56)
Interesting quotes
“I always laugh with my students (about this). Attorneys have walls and walls of resources and online databases of past cases. So do doctors. Every profession on the planet has an incredibly library of resources to look up whenever they have questions, and yet kids are just supposed to memorize stuff?”– Paul Richmond (10 12)
“Kids are innately wired to learn. It’s in our biology, we wouldn’t survive as a species if we didn’t want to learn things, because we don’t come out of the womb knowing how to survive in this world we have to learn it. So kids naturally want to do that, and one of the things the school system is really good at is making kids hate learning and not want to learn anymore. Like, kids graduate from school (this is one of the great tragedies of this era) so excited about the fact that they never have to learn anything again!”– Hannah Frankman (46 53)
“Half of the jobs that kids will be going into (maybe even more than that!) twenty years from now don’t even exist yet. Like, who was going into kindergarten in 2000 going, ‘I want to be a social media manager?’ That didn’t even exist! And yet how many of those people are social media managers now? So we are raising kids for a world that doesn’t even exist yet. So the more adaptable and self-directed we help them be, the easier it is going to be for them.” -Hannah Frankman (47:59)
