In this thought-provoking episode of the Malcolm and Simone Podcast, we dive deep into the core issues plaguing the traditional educational system and the potential for innovative approaches. We critically evaluate the current state of education, its origins in the Industrial Revolution, and the outdated "one size fits all" methodology still prevalent today. We explore alternative educational approaches like unschooling, Montessori, and the Acton school system. Are these the answers we've been looking for or just steps along the path to a truly revolutionary education model? We also analyze the trend of optimizing educational research around self-esteem instead of tangible outcomes, such as career success and mental health. This conversation promises to challenge your perceptions and spark your curiosity about the future of education.

Malcolm: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. It's wonderful to be here with you today.

Simone: I thought today we might talk about a long time obsession of ours, which is crafting and cultivating geniuses and a world leader is what do you

Malcolm: think? Well, I mean, I don't see the point in having kids if you're not going to aim for the stars. Yeah.

Malcolm: I

Simone: mean, we were always really enchanted by what Laszlo Polgar did, not just because he was a shot caller. Like Laszlo Polgar,

Malcolm: okay, as to who Laszlo Polgar is, Simone, because some of our viewers may not just immediately know who this guy is. So there was this guy who was living in , a communist bloc country. And he had this theory that you could intentionally create geniuses.

Malcolm: And so, very similar to, I feel like how I met my wife. He puts an ad in the paper saying, I'm looking to create geniuses and I'm looking for a wife who I can do this with. Which is very important that he did this from my perspective, because there are [00:01:00] some people out there who claim they know the secret to being a good parent .

Malcolm: And they. Happen to have three kids who are really successful. And it's yeah, but if you're just dealing with a large population, some people are going to have. Three kids that are successful or four kids that are successful saying that you're going to do this up front and having it like as a recorded thing in media that is very, very different when you're talking about statistical outcomes and can be used as a sign that he probably understood something.

Malcolm: Well, this

Simone: comes back to one of our key criteria for truth, right? We, we give a lot more credit to people who we are, who are what we call shot callers and Laszlo Polgar called a shot. And so we were always really fascinated by this specifically because we are really interested in, well, what can you do to

Malcolm: create a great leader?

Malcolm: We haven't finished the story yet. They still have no idea who he is. Okay. Sorry. Okay. So anyway, Laszlo Polgar said, I'm going to try to create geniuses. They know that part. They know his hypothesis. [00:02:00] You're like, I love you. It'd be like, if we were telling a story about some famous basketball player and you're like, and one day that, that four year old boy said, I'm going to become the greatest basketball player of all time.

Simone: One can assume that obviously he did it.

Malcolm: You've got to say what happens. All right. All right. Okay. Okay. So he raises three daughters and he decides that the metric he's going to use for success is chess and the worst of his three daughters. was the sixth highest rated chess champion in her lifetime as the female.

Malcolm: The best was the best female champion of her lifetime. And the second was the second female champion of her lifetime. And actually, when they first went to participate in a chess championship, they called it like the event, the sack of Rome. Because it was just so outstanding. They just. Were these little like 13 year old girls who are just like sweeping everyone.

Malcolm: But the point being, and where this is really interesting is I think a lot of people have this [00:03:00] perception that if you approached education and you tried to really reform the system or try something very different, you could do like 20%, 30% better, what the Laszlo Polgar case study shows is that the ceiling for how much we could improve the educational system is.

Malcolm: Like a hundred X 200 X better that you could potentially reliably create outcomes that are What today would be we'd call geniuses like literally world class every time that is what got us really Excited about the potential of this space. The other thing that got us really excited about the potential of the space I'll get you in a second.

Malcolm: But Simone you have some stuff you wanted to say

Simone: Well, I mean, it's just been an obsession of ours. We really want to know how to consistently, and ideally at scale, create people who are capable of changing the world. Perhaps we are even more interested in this today because we [00:04:00] see generations of people graduating as infantilized people, as a disempowered people, people struggling not just to have a successful career, but like literally not.

Simone: like endure life with crippling depression, anxiety, et cetera. So this is something that we were always really obsessed with.

Malcolm: Yeah. So when we first went to approach the education system a few things really shocked us. . So the first thing that we did when we went to the educational system is we wanted to get a read of the predominant educational system.

Malcolm: Like how good is it? Where can it be tweaked? And when we first started noticing about the research. Is that it was bad. And actually this as a science is really interesting. If you, if you look at people who get PhDs in education statistically you compare their IQ across like different PhDs. You can get they have.

Malcolm: I think the lowest are one of the lowest average IQs of all PhD categories. So I guess this is why they like weren't using proper controls and stuff like this. But anyway, so we were like, oh, this is really shocking. Well, okay, so we have to start performing some of our [00:05:00] own research in the space or start, gathering evidence from different areas in the space to try to get a feel of how good education is.

Malcolm: We do it right now because it seems really silly the way that we're doing it. They were like sending people to a room and then sit and then somebody's lecturing to them. That doesn't seem like It would be a good system now that like the internet exists. So anyway we, we said, okay, well, how can we create a control for the education system?

Malcolm: And this is where unschooling became really important to us. So unschooling is this educational movement, which is different from homeschooling and that kids have literally no structure. There, there is no test for them. There is no anything like that. Just go do whatever you want. So this researcher in this phase, he, he looked into these kids and what he found is doing literally nothing ended with these kids having higher educational outcomes than kids who go through the traditional school system.

Malcolm: They were getting into college at higher rates, they had better mental health, and they were graduating college at higher rates. [00:06:00] And yes, These studies that he did, didn't control for socioeconomic groups. So that probably plays a pretty big role. But doing literally nothing should not be even close to better than this hellish thing we call the public school system.

Malcolm: In addition to that, we then said, okay, so we saw all this and we go, okay, well then let's go out there and see what better systems exist. And this is where we really began to panic because what we realized. is people just really hadn't experimented with that many genuinely novel systems in the education space.

Malcolm: And when they

Simone: did, they weren't even necessarily looking at Do these people have successful careers? It is, what was it? It was self esteem that they were checking for.

Malcolm: Oh my God. Tell me about the study that you read on self esteem and like how it doesn't. No,

Simone: no, no, no. It's just the most of the, a lot of the research was looking at, at kids self esteem as an outcome.

Simone: Like how was their self esteem [00:07:00] instead of okay, now they're adults. What is their average earning earning? What, what is.

Malcolm: This is, what's really interesting about what you said. So you shared with me that study, I guess you don't remember sharing it with me. A terrible memory. But, simone is really good at finding studies and sharing them with me.

Malcolm: And then we, we talk about them and synthesize them. But anyway, so one of the studies you showed me on self esteem, it one showed the percent of educational research that is optimized around self esteem. It was high. It was like, I'm just remembering off the top of my head, but I just remember reading it and being like, that's a comically high amount of the research.

Malcolm: Yeah. It doesn't make sense. But then they looked at these self esteem measures because all these. The papers were using the same tests and they tried to correlate them with life outcomes, like mental health as an adult, career success as an adult. Oh,

Simone: right. And there was like no core, they were at least very little correlation.

Simone: Yeah.

Malcolm: Like the entire field is optimizing over a useless, feel good metric. Yeah. Oh my God. Anyway, it gets crazier. It gets crazier. So, so then we're like, okay, so what are people actually optimizing for when they're trying new systems? [00:08:00] And then what you find is they're optimizing around their own ideologies.

Malcolm: They're not optimizing around outcomes like the Waldorf system or whatever, where it's like some commie utopia thing where all the students get to vote and, and I don't know, whatever. It's not actually, it's feel good vibey stuff. It's okay, I get what you're going for, but like it'd be cool if you spent a lot more time focused on like student outcomes in terms of what you're studying.

Malcolm: And then there was this other thing. Oh, my God, it was wild. Where they'll do something different, but it's really just moving a slider and right that they really love to move is how much control do we have over the student's life so you know unschooling might be one extreme of this and like military school might be the other extreme of this, but outside of moving this slider.

Malcolm: They really don't change much in the educational paradigm. And so then we go and we're like, okay, so then who's tried like really different things. Yeah. , like one of the best systems out there right now in terms of like educational innovation is [00:09:00] Montessori, which is comical because it's literally over a century

Simone: old.

Simone: Yeah, yeah, that and the only other thing that seems to be new. And I would, I mean, arguably Montessori is just more like freedom, freedom to explore your curiosity. Right. And then the other really big innovation is project based learning, which is great on an individual level. But only really when you have a lot of money, it's not scalable. So it's not like you could do this sustainably at the public school level and make it spread

Malcolm: everywhere.

Malcolm: And the problem is, is that when they do it in public schools to make it sustainable, they put people on big teams. So you're working on a project, but it was like five or six other people. So the teachers have to grade less. And talk about, you have a lot to say about working in teams.

Simone: Oh, gosh. I mean, group projects are completely the worst and I can't believe people, people use them at all because it really just teaches really conscientious students to just hate working with other people.

Simone: And then it teaches freeloaders to just be freeloaders. It's it's, I think it's [00:10:00] good for everyone to go through a couple group projects just to learn game theory essentially, and to learn how to avoid working with freeloaders and to destroy them in the future and know how to pick teams well.

Simone: But I mean, in terms of actually encouraging people to work, motivating people and encouraging them to learn really what it means is like 70% of the people on the team, aren't going to learn a thing. And then 30% of the people on the team are going to be really stressed out and angry at other people.

Simone: And that's what they're going to learn. No one learns about the actual thing. It is so frustrating.

Malcolm: But anyway, so back to the system. So then we're like, okay, so are there any genuinely innovative we're not just going to tweak the public school model, we're going to do something totally different.

Malcolm: And I say there's really only one system that I have any respect for outside of our own, which is the Acton school system. Yeah, they're awesome. Acton is a good school system. I think ours is better, but Acton is solid and replicable.

Simone: Well, what they have running, going for them is that they're like live and teaching students right now and we're currently in [00:11:00] development.

Simone: So I think they kind of totally take the cake. Well, they,

Malcolm: I mean, they, they've been around longer, but yeah, I'm just saying it's not like everything, but it's wild to me that there aren't like more like genuinely different attempts at education that are based at. Scalable approaches. So not just we're going to give everyone a private tutor who gives them a bunch of project based learning things to do and that are focused on results.

Malcolm: This is just not something they see. So we then we're like, well, dang it. Are we going to have to do this ourselves? But before we get to that, let's talk about the existing school system and why it sucks so much.

Simone: Yes. Shall I kick us off? You kick us off. So we argue that the, the What we'll say either is the legacy or industrial schooling system was created during the Industrial Revolution at the height of the British Imperial Empire.

Simone: And it was optimized around something that actually worked really well at the time, which was creating interchangeable cogs to employ in the British Imperial Empire. They

Malcolm: had just [00:12:00] created replaceable parts, replaceable parts with a new concept at the time. And it was this really exciting. Oh, can we basically turn humans into replaceable parts?

Malcolm: Great concept. Because we're running this big imperial system, yeah, and

Simone: you need to be able to run it very smoothly, and you need to be able to replace people easily in this way. If someone had the same grade and same degree, they were essentially the same part. You could switch them out. One dies of malaria in one of the colonies, and you just replace it

Malcolm: with the same grade.

Malcolm: Yeah, oh, he's got the same grade. Okay, yeah, he's replaceable.

Simone: And then of course, actually that, that continued to work. Yeah. In, post post colonies in a world in which there were these like big lumbering bureaucratic corporations with lifelong corporate jobs. Like again, you need to have those replaceable parts.

Malcolm: We call this the era of the skyscraper corporation and the skyscraper corporation, and this is why skyscrapers were so important during this period of industrial history was before the internet before phones were everywhere or easy to use.

Malcolm: How did you get that sort of human connectivity where you could have [00:13:00] lots of humans vibing off of each other? You basically. All have to work out of the same building. This hugely restrained the geography from which companies were recruiting from. So it meant even if the concept of replaceable parts was no longer the concept they were vibing off of, what they were vibing off of was this idea that you needed sort of blank slates that you could then train up and you needed some system for judging the Quality of the blank slates you're getting so you know where to put them in the hierarchy, in terms of like where they start and this was the era where, you'd have a shoeshine boy at one company or a mail room clerk work their way all the way to the top of the company, which just doesn't really happen anymore because I mean, that, that really made sense in this blank slate is system where people didn't.

Malcolm: travel a lot. But now it makes sense to begin specializing almost immediately. So now someone go to our current system and why this replaceable part dynamic is so

Simone: bad, right? So, I mean, obviously that [00:14:00] worked when all of these things could not be automated because essentially they were turning humans into machines as sort of part of this industrial revolution mindset that totally works when machines can't do what humans do.

Simone: Well, guess what? First, I mean, well, first we, we really had outsourcing, right? And so first people were getting offshored and outsourced, and that wasn't very good for people. So if you're

Malcolm: this replaceable part, you are literally the easiest thing to outsource. Yes. You, you, you are literally the most disposable part of our economy, and yet our entire educational system is optimized around this.

Malcolm: Yeah. And now, with AI, as Simone points out, Nobody's safe. You've got to completely throw out the book and rethink everything about what you're teaching kids. And a lot of people will be like, Oh, you won't have AI in your pocket wherever you go. And it's okay, first of all, b***h, I already do. Second of all, I remember when you told me this about calculators.

Malcolm: What a lie. What a

Simone: lie. That was one of the big lies. Along with that lie that like, Oh, having the light on in the back of the car is [00:15:00] illegal or we can't drive that way. These are like the two big lies of childhood.

Malcolm: Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That they I wonder if kids these days even know that one, because we would read in cars.

Malcolm: Okay. Growing up. And when you turned on the light it made it harder for the driver to see. And so they would tell this. Lie that like, what was the version of it they told you?

Simone: Honestly, I don't think it makes it that much harder for you to see. And they were like, oh, I can't drive with the, with the light on in the back.

Simone: Or it's illegal, like you can't do it. And a lot of kids were told this lie. It's such a thing. But you know, that and that along with this,

Malcolm: these are the big lies. So, so we've got this system that is creating this useless output that is just not at all optimized. And, and the research in the field is terrible.

Malcolm: It's done by... Well, I know this is horrible. We're going to have like educational researchers who are like learning out and they're like,

Simone: they're making, to be fair. I was just looking at this ranking and early child development is even worse. So

Malcolm: should I, I should, I [00:16:00] should post this on this pull it up, Simone.

Simone: I have to find it. I have to find it. It's, it's a little

Malcolm: depressing. I don't mean to insult your field. I'm just saying objectively. I'm just saying

Simone: the majority of your colleagues are stupid,

Malcolm: not you. No, but in education, they've determined IQ doesn't matter. I wonder why they came to that determination. I don't know, you're going to hell.

Malcolm: Despite it having this really high correlation with economic outcomes, with success in the workforce, with oh god, all sorts of other things. Anyway. No, but IQ doesn't matter. Whatever. Shh, come on, man. That's nonsense. So anyway, we got to be based, right? Based camp. And I got to say it in a camp way.

Simone: That's your camp. That's camp. Okay.

Malcolm: Right there. I got it. Okay. Okay. So Simone.

Simone: Malcolm. Hi.

Malcolm: Where were we? So we're coming to this and we're [00:17:00] like, wow. And this is so weird when we like approach a new field and we're like, genuinely, this is one of the single most important fields. Like a community. This is where we're sending our kids to be trained for the future.

Malcolm: And it's become this horrible system. So why doesn't it update? This is a question a lot of people have. A lot of wealthy people spend a lot of money trying to make the education system better, and it seems to have very little effect in terms of outcomes. Why is that happening? So there's, there's two core reasons. One is, is a lot of that money is going to educational experts, which unfortunately are trained in this field.

Malcolm: There was a great study done on this where they were looking at teachers who had learned to be like what was actually associated with a degree that we associated with educational expertise. And it was something like 70% or 60, it was some like number that scared me percent of the classes they were taking was just like.

Malcolm: [00:18:00] social justice. It was, I think I saw this too. It was basically just on how to better ideologically. It was ideological indoctrination. That's what the actual college degree was. It was your ideological doctrination course. It was not like, this is how you do research in the space. This is how you advance the space.

Malcolm: So you've got to keep in mind, most of the people who are managing the funds, they haven't been educated outside of the system. Just completely ideologically indoctrinated and if you suggest anything that threatens the teachers unions, you get thrown out of, and not just the teachers unions, but the most entrenched bureaucratic teachers.

Malcolm: This is why Teach for America is struggling so much right now. We know some people inside Teach for America and they just can't get people to join anymore because. They were actually making a really big positive impact, but then the old entrenched bureaucratic teachers didn't like that. Some young upstarts were coming into their districts and and showing that things could be done better.

Malcolm: So they vilified Teach for America. And now the only people who [00:19:00] they could conceivably get to work for them are conservatives. But you know, that's not gonna happen. So, and the organization isn't gonna rebrand so they can't get enough teachers. And so they can't function anymore. So Whenever somebody's working on genuine innovation that in a way that could disrupt the way the system is working right now or the unions.

Malcolm: They get absolutely blasted. And this was really clear to me. So Zuckerberg did this huge donation. I want to say hundreds of millions to the Newark public school system. And it was to try to innovate things and something like 30 or 40% basically went to a bribe to the local teachers union. To allow them to change anything to allow.

Malcolm: And they got very little changes.

Simone: And I recall that the primary change to was, was basically incentives, like increases in pay based on student outcomes. So there was a ride being placed. for the privilege of paying good performers. But how dare they? Because all teachers should be paid a crap ton regardless of their actual performance.

Simone: Well, I

Malcolm: wouldn't say [00:20:00] a crap ton, but, but all teachers must be paid equally or based on seniority because that determines their dedication to the union. And the union is what really matters. One of my favorite quotes here is from Al Schenkner, who is the president of the American Federation of Teachers.

Malcolm: And he said, when school children start paying union dues, that's when we'll start representing school children. And I think that really shows the mindset of these unions. This is why, despite, if you look at the research, school voucher programs, charter schools are just like obviously superior.

Malcolm: But there's been like this narrative created that it's like maybe a toss up as to whether they're better or the academics aren't sure about whether they're better, but you can just look at the research and see they're much better. And it's because. It threatens these unions, which are a very important voting block for the Democratic Party.

Malcolm: That, that's really the end of it. They're just an incredibly important voting block, and the Democratic Party, that is why the Democratic Party will never advocate for the best interests of students. Because they can't, they can't, they're, they're captured. If I [00:21:00] wanted to be a Democratic politician, and I wanted to do this, I could never get through a primary.

Malcolm: I wanted to in any way meaningfully improve the school system, or even experiment with improving the school system, or experiment with Pay based on results. They're like the ability to fire a teacher when they molest students. Oh, sorry, you didn't know that was a thing? Yeah, there's this teacher that's been getting over a million dollars so far in pay for the New York school system who was caught molesting multiple students.

Malcolm: They weren't able to fire him because it's so hard with the unions, so they just kept paying him and stopped having him go to school. It's a thing. Still a problem. It's horrifying how evil

Simone: the unions are. I mean, I would say that there are in some states, and this is not the norm, but there are some superintendents that are enacting reform.

Simone: And we do have help, like when it comes to school choice, when it comes to slow but sure reform. But of course, the norm is a lot of adverse incentives of teachers unions, a lot of corruption.

Malcolm: Yeah. And a final point I want to make is I want to be clear that we are not saying that like people who work in education. are in any way not interested in the best interest of the [00:22:00] students. Oh my gosh. They're super

Simone: interested in that.

Simone: That's why they're there. They care

Malcolm: what we're saying and often taking lower pay, often taking just horrible conditions. What we are saying is that the system as it's structured now, specifically the unions are motivated. To make the lives of the teachers who actually want to improve the quality of education and improve the lives of the students and make , genuine system reform happen, their lives hell.

Malcolm: And those are the first ones that get pushed out. Are the ones who want to make things better. The ones who get elevated are the ones who like the bureaucracy and thrive in the bureaucracy.

Simone: Exactly. Yeah. Yep

Simone: And so we Basically, this is all to say, we need an education reformation, and that's one of the reasons why we're involved in education reform,

Malcolm: people Can we do another video on our system?

Simone: That would be a great Yeah, we could do another, another one on our, our system at some at some point. We want to explain why this matters. And also why we're so obsessed with creating geniuses also because here's the thing [00:23:00] now, like one, this really matters to people have essentially done it in the past.

Simone: Like they've proven it just as people with like limited resources, modest means that they can do it. Yeah. And three, like no one's trying, no one's even innovating or trying or testing anything. This is one of those really meaningful places where. People who choose to put some skin in the game can actually change the world.

Simone: Yeah. How can you not want to be in on that, people? I mean, oh my gosh. So, anyway, hope we got you a little excited about this space. And yeah, we'll totally talk about what

Malcolm: we're doing. And to add to what you're saying, Simone, if you're a young person and you're not, particularly technologically inclined, but you want to work in an area where you can transform the future of our civilization education reform and Collins Institute is the project we have in this space.

Malcolm: Collins Institute. org. We put a lot of our disposable income into this. Actually last year it was 43%. We donated a

Simone: charity of our,

Malcolm: and a lot of it went to developing this system. [00:24:00] So,

Simone: Well, and I mean, and here's our thing, like with entrepreneurship in general, or with making a difference on things in general, you want to go into spaces where not all the world's small smartest people are going.

Simone: So if you want to end the creative business and really kill it, don't go into crypto, don't go into VC, don't go where all the smart people are going. You have to compete against all the smartest people. Go where there isn't innovation, go where there's stagnation, go where all those smart people aren't going, because that's how you can make a big difference.

Simone: That's where the arbitrage is.

Simone: Woof. Right. Well, I look forward to talking about this more with you. I love you so

Malcolm: much. You're amazing.

Malcolm: We could talk about this all day, because we

Simone: do. Yeah. That's what I love about you. All right, child

Malcolm: gorgeous. Oh, no. I said something foreign.

Malcolm: Why'd you do that to me? That's disgusting.

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