Thomas Arnett from the Clayton Christensen Institute joined me to once again explore why families and students seem to be quite willing to try innovative microschools in the K–8 grades, but considerably more resistant when it comes to high school. Traditional high school experiences, particularly social and extracurricular elements like sports and common rites of passage, continue to hold such strong appeal for most families, even as innovative, personalized, and lower-cost education models expand. Drawing from personal anecdotes and research, we talked about the social and developmental needs of adolescents, the trade-offs families make when considering alternative schooling, and what it might take for disruptive education models to achieve mainstream adoption without reproducing the conventional system’s limitations. I continue to think that thinking through these questions is among the most important facing the emerging sector of innovative, low-cost schools with disruptive potential.
Michael Horn
Welcome, everyone, to The Future of Education. I’m Michael Horn. You’re joining the show where we’re dedicated to creating a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live lives of purpose. We have a repeat guest. I don’t know if guest is the right word anymore, but Thomas Arnett from the Christensen Institute, friend, and someone I love to geek out on various topics about the future of education. Tom, welcome. Good to see you.
Thomas Arnett
Good to see you too, Michael. It’s always fun to be here. Always love these conversations.
Debating the Purpose of Education
Michael Horn
Yeah, we’ve got a meaty one today. And I’ll just say, like, we’ve been exploring a couple times on this podcast already and in a lot of our one-on-one conversations as well. Something that I think has stood out to both of us, and I’ll set the table this way and then you can amend it, which is I think we’re both intrigued in a world of education savings accounts that as low-cost private schools, often micro schools but not always, come into the world, that there’s actually a real potential disruptive innovation of schooling as we’ve known it, the creation of new value networks and so forth. And then some of the things we’ve been sort of wrestling over is, okay, they come in at the low end, if you will, people who are overserved by all the offerings of comprehensive district schools. They want a more tailored, customized experience. And now that, you know, they’re sort of government funding, if they don’t choose it, it’s sort of an opportunity cost, if you will, of not taking it. And so these low-cost, at least private schools where you can afford them and then have more money for some other, you know, tutoring, piano lessons, whatever it might be around the sides. Feels like it could be a real disruptive innovation.
And certainly the enrollment numbers in a lot of these states that have ESAs have been growing pretty rapidly, Florida, Arizona in particular. And one of the questions we’ve been puzzling over is, okay, so that gets its start there. What’s the upmarket climb such that you can start to serve more complicated problems, more families that require more services without replicating all of the cost and centrality of the school district model where it’s sort of everything for everyone. And in particular, we’ve been looking at this in high school because what I think we’ve seen is kindergarten, first, second grade in particular, there seems to be lots of willingness to make choices that are not in your district school. Middle school, there’s certainly a lot of people willing to do that because middle school in many parts of the country is a pretty bad experience. We don’t have fond memories of it. And then high school, though, a lot of people sort of snap back into a traditional high school. We’ve seen it with our friend and colleague Heather Staker, even like she moved her whole family to Austin, Texas from Hawaii, of all places, to attend Acton Academy for her kids.
And then the oldest got to high school and was like, nah, I want football and sort of the traditional high school experience. So, so even there. And I think one of the things we’ve been puzzling over is how do you replicate a few parts of the high school experience, or replicate’s the wrong word, but sort of learn to serve or offer those things that we think people are clamoring for. And I think they fall in a few buckets. One is there’s certainly college fears and pressures, like if I go this alternative route, will I get into a great college? I think the second one is what I would label Friday Night Lights and prom, but it might be better thought of as cultural nostalgia, or we framed it as coming-of-age experiences, rites of passage in a conversation we had about this topic a few months ago with our friend Tyler Thigpen. And he talked about how at the Forest School and Acton Academy in Georgia, they handle this. But what we’ve also noted is it’s not just that, like there is certainly nostalgia at play, but it’s also this sort of clamoring for common experiences that seems to hold people back. And so then the longtime commentator, former schoolteacher, writer, great thinker, Robert Pondiscio, had this very intriguing piece a few months back in May on his Substack that he titled Schooling Alone. It was his commencement address to people at a classical education high school who were graduating.
And I guess it struck me because he talked about, his piece was more about the commonalities in curriculum, which we can talk about, but it did strike me that one of the things that I think maybe people are resisting when they, you know, don’t choose different models of high school that might be more personalized or might better engage them or whatever else, it’s maybe that they’re clamoring for commonality. And so— How’d I do on setting the table? And what do you think about that sort of comment? Obviously, Robert’s piece was titled Schooling Alone in a not very subtle homage to Bowling Alone by Robert Putnam. But I guess I wondered, maybe, you know, he’s worried about all the personalization in the curriculum. I guess I wondered, hey, maybe actually people are clamoring for commonality, which is slowing up some of this growth and disruption of some of these new models.
Thomas Arnett
What do you think? Yeah, I think that sets the table really well and catches anyone listening to this up to, hopefully up to where we’ve been talking about a lot of the things that we’ve talked about. We had to do a lot of table setting about like, here’s what we’ve been thinking about. So the thing I found interesting when I read Robert Pondiscio’s piece was I think schooling for maybe its entire history has had this, it has many purposes and people debate the purpose of education and it’s kind of complicated because we layer so many purposes of education on top of each other. But I think one that traces back a long time is this idea of having a common experience. Now, sometimes that gets, I think, framed unfavorably of like, in the 1800s, it may have been more about cultural assimilation, about getting immigrant groups, minority religious groups to conform to the mainstream American culture by saying, no, you will go to these schools that are going to teach what Protestant kids should learn. But I think a more generous approach is kind of what he talks about in that piece, students need to have, to some extent, he’s arguing they need to read the same books as everyone else and they need to think about the same big ideas so that when we’re having conversations in our civic and political arenas, that we can be speaking the same language and have the same vocabulary to talk to each other. So I find that really interesting, but it was framed in, I think, as someone who thinks a lot about policy and thinks about society and society’s wellbeing, what would you want if you were taking that almost paternalistic role of how do we make sure education is serving our society? But I think there’s an adjacent and very similar, but at the same time really distinctive piece that is related to that, which is just the common experience kids want. So where I think, to me the contrast was like, Pondiscio was talking about we need to teach certain books in school so that we have common literature. And I look at schools that I’ve visited, places I’ve interviewed, the schools my own kids attend, and they want a common experience too, but it’s generally, they’re not thinking about, do I read the same books? Did we all read Mice and Men? Did we all read Animal Farm? It’s more of—
Michael Horn
This is where I say I have not read Mice and Men and I have to admit it.
Thomas Arnett
Let’s not say that. Yeah. Okay.
Michael Horn
I watched the Animal Farm movie. No, go ahead.
Thomas Arnett
Which version, right? Yeah.
Michael Horn
The original. Yeah. Not the distorted new one.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. But, you know, when I look at my own kids, a lot of it is like, I want to be able to talk to other kids my age and feel like I’m part of the in-group, that I know what they’re talking about. And it shows up in like really funny and subtle, like funny for me to laugh about as an adult, but really important things. Like my kids come home with vocabulary like, you know, that’s low-key fire. I don’t know if your kids are—
Michael Horn
What does that mean? No, they don’t. What does it mean?
Tell me. Yeah.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. I don’t know if I’m a good translator, but lowkey is like, like it’s not, it’s cool, but we’re going to like downplay that it’s cool, but it’s really cool. And fire is like, oh, that’s awesome. You know, or buns is like, oh, that’s buns is like, oh, that’s awful. I think, I mean, this is, this is a 40-year-old man trying to translate.
Michael Horn
They had a great segment on Instagram with Peyton Manning translating the speak, so I’ll believe anything.
Adolescents seeking status and respect
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. But I think that’s a lot of, you know, it’s. That is what a lot of kids are getting out of school is, and I think of David Jaeger’s book, 10 to 25, that I read a couple years ago and has one of those books that’s really stuck in my mind because it had some really deep insights. But he talks about adolescents have developmental objectives that are just wired into their biology and their genes. And just like a baby needs to learn how to crawl, needs to learn how to walk, needs to learn how to talk, He frames it as the developmental objective of adolescence is to figure out how do I earn status and respect? And the reason that’s so important is because humans by and large have, our ability to thrive is strongly connected to our ability to work together, whether it’s a local hunter-gatherer tribe group or whether it’s big corporations or big nations that build the pyramids, that kind of stuff. And so your ability to figure out how do I earn status and respect in a group is essential for you to figure out, how do I contribute to a group such that the group values me, such that the group wants to keep me in so that when the group succeeds, I can succeed with the group? And I think that’s what a lot of this is about that we just underappreciate is that, yes, students want a common experience, but for them, it’s the common experience of figuring out, how do I fit in with other people? How do I feel like I’m a valuable member of the social circles that I’m a part of? I think of homeschooling too. One of the longstanding critiques of homeschooling is like, oh, your kids will be weird. Well, I don’t think that’s necessarily true. It’s not that kids who homeschool don’t learn how to socialize, and there’s plenty of ways in which I think homeschoolers get supplemental experiences that aren’t just, we’re sitting at home all day having our own family culture, and that’s all the world they see.
But I think this is what a lot of people are pointing to when they make that critique is like, your kid may homeschool and race ahead in the academics and get all sorts of neat experiences, but they’re missing out on being able to talk about prom, being able to talk about the football game, being able to have that common experience that other people go through so that when they go out in the world, they can fit in with those other people and be parts of teams with those other people and be, you know, fit in in companies and organizations with those other people. So anyway, I’ll pause there because I got—
Michael Horn
No, no, I have so many questions for you out of that. One is in the conversation with Tyler, in terms of the fit-in part of what you just said, what I took away from it is like they could actually engineer a bunch of those opportunities for students that actually might be better curated and more meaningful, still have friction to be clear. But more meaningful in helping understand, like, learn about who am I? How do I fit in? What do I want to, you know, what’s my mark in the world, if you will, those sorts of questions and purpose.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. But I think what I hear you saying is like, what you’re saying is like focused on like the individual identity and individual purpose, right? Do you think, I guess, do you think there’s a distinction there?
Michael Horn
I guess that’s what I was wondering, it sounds like that can be solved for, but does even that still, you know, and it’s certainly within a community, right? It’s like, there’s a lot of other students in the school. They interact with other schools. There’s athletics and stuff like that. I guess my question is, to your point, are they still missing out on some larger cultural zeitgeist that some kids are saying like, hey, I, you know, actually my discovery is I don’t want to be part of that. But maybe it’s still not enough for others who are sort of clamoring that common experience. Yeah, let’s, let me hold it there and get your take.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. Well, I think one thing we should probably complicate the conversation a little bit by saying like, this isn’t just a monolithic, like there’s one mainstream culture and then there’s people on the margins. Like even within conventional high schools, I mean, the whole, all the stereotypes about different cliques within a high school are different versions of people saying like, well, I don’t fit in with that, so I need to find my own group that I belong in. So I don’t think it’s so monolithic.
Michael Horn
But is that part of the element also? Like, right, there’s fascinating research on nostalgia that in some ways we have when we have pretty bad experiences and we sort of reformat the story in our mind to tell a story of growth and sort of togetherness, whatever. And so maybe some of that navigation and some of that nostalgia is about the fact that like, oh, I just couldn’t make it with that group, but I found my tribe here.
Thomas Arnett
Right.
Michael Horn
I don’t know.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. Well, I think struggle is a key part of this story. So when I look at micro schools or when I look at even within school district systems, the alternative schools, the hybrid virtual schools, the programs made for homeschoolers, in my research, what I see really consistently is that the people that often pick those programs are making a trade-off.
Michael Horn
Right.
Desire for alternative education options
Thomas Arnett
And it’s a trade-off they’re willing to accept because there’s something about the conventional school that isn’t working for them, whether it’s the academics, whether it’s the social scene, something’s not working for them. And that struggle drives them to a point where they’re willing to accept, I am giving up something. I’m giving up that Friday Night Lights, that mainstream socialization experience and other things. Maybe it’s also like AP classes or whatever, but I’m giving that up because I want something different. And the struggle is strong enough that it compels me to go look for something different. I just think that that’s not most students. So this is where I think the field could get kind of caught in an eddy if these things may exist that right now are on the margins, but I don’t know that they go mainstream if they always see themselves as distinctive from, different from the mainstream.
Michael Horn
Yeah.
Thomas Arnett
And that’s not necessarily a criticism. There’s value to be had in just saying, look, we have this diverse ecosystem that includes a lot of these niche environments, and people find the niche that works for them. But at the same time, I just think it’s important to say to the people that are building those niches, but those niches are never going to become the mainstream. or the main, they’re never going to become the new normal or become mainstream until somehow this gets solved for to where people don’t look at the niche and say like, uh, that’s, you know, some kids, not every kid, but some kids saying like, that’s for the weird kids. I don’t want to go there because I want to be a mainstreamy normal kid.
Michael Horn
Let me step out of my lane on something I’m not, I don’t know enough about, but I guess I wonder about charters in urban areas, if they’ve figured out something around this, or if maybe the cultural pull is just less right in some of those areas of the commonality as we frame did, at least in the straw man that we framed in this conversation. Because it does seem to me, you know, there’s lots of students who enroll in charter schools that don’t have football teams and, right, like, look like the comprehensive high school. And maybe to your point, the trade-off is like really clear there, right? Like, I don’t want to be in that environment, the district environment, whatever it might be. It’s not safe. It’s like, I got to get out of that. Like, this is my ticket out, whatever it might be.
And so therefore it’s like so clear, but if that’s the case, that would suggest also a different sort of growth strategy, if you will, for this low-cost private school unbundled sort of world that’s emerging. I think, what’s your thought on that?
Thomas Arnett
That would be my guess. Like, I feel like that’s a little bit, I don’t have enough firsthand experience to speak clearly to that of like, why do families that go to some of those charter schools in urban areas that often serve lower-income students.
Michael Horn
Or even some public schools, right? It’s a high school network, right? And we know that they’ve been oversubscribed historically in most of their schools. So people are certainly running to it.
Discussing mainstream versus niche experiences
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. Well, I don’t think oversubscribed necessarily has to contradict mainstream. You can have a lot of people that want to exit because they’re struggling, and it’s still not the normal. It’s still not the thing that. I think the thing to look at is like, and maybe this is more true in the suburbs or in affluent communities than it is in urban areas, but I think there’s a lot of people that still want the mainstream experience. In fact, I was on a camping trip with some people from our church last week, and I was trying to explain what I do for work, which is always a challenge. But in the middle of that, I thought like, well, let me just open with asking them like, what did you think of your high school experience? And the other men, the other dads that were on this trip, one of them said, well, it depends on which piece you’re talking about. And he was like, if you’re talking about the academics, it was meh.
And they all kind of nodded their heads like, yeah, the academics was meh. But they’re like, if you’re talking about my experience on the baseball team or on the football team, that was awesome and I wouldn’t give that up for anything. So I would never pick a different schooling experience if it involved giving that up. And I think this is the reality as much as we kind of talk to people that are in the fringes that are pushing the frontiers. And the people that you and I often talk to see the value of these new models of schooling and we’re excited to see them move forward. I just don’t think that’s most people. I think most people, if you talk to them, they’d say, yeah, high school is meh. At least some of it is, but some of it is a formative experience I’d never want to give up.
So yeah, I’d stick with the conventional wisdom.
Michael Horn
So the meh is worth it. That’s a trade-off worth it to be part of this And I hear in that both formative sort of rite of passage, right? Glory days, but also common experience of like, I know what a comprehensive high school is and what that means. And I guess, you know, the question we asked, right, is can you have, you know, town baseball and sort of town football and other ways to plug into it that are maybe distinct from the schooling piece? But I think what I hear you saying is actually that’s connected though to the schooling piece because it’s sort of you jockeying for position and trying to understand where you fit in within a larger mosaic of society. And maybe actually pulling it out as a separate thing, while it solves for part of that job, actually doesn’t solve for the whole job of an individual.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. This is where I feel like I’m pushing my depths in terms of understanding sociology and how that all works. But let me give a quick anecdote. So my middle son, He’s just finished his freshman year in high school. And with both of my high schoolers, I have consistently tried to bring up the topic of, hey, look, you don’t have to go to the regular high school, the high school that’s right across the street from our house. Because they often come back and they’re like, yeah, class is so boring. We do nothing. We just sit around.
Can we just skip school? And so I bring up like, hey, we could do different things. We could enroll you in the district’s hybrid virtual program and you could do classes at your own pace and you could do a dual enrollment at the community college and you could have way more flexibility to do the things you’re excited about or to go get a job. And they always push back and they say, no, I don’t want to do that. And in fact, our district has programs where you can do those things and still participate in the sports teams that my kids are on and still go to the prom and still do all that. Yeah, the Tim Tebow rule.
Michael Horn
Yeah. I know you’re in California, but still.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah, we don’t quite have Tim Tebow rules, but if you’re within the district, you can do these alternatives within a district and still do some of the mainstream stuff at the regular conventional school campus. But they don’t want it. And when I really pushed one of my sons on it, he was like, well, that’s not where my friends are. And the kids that go there are kind of different. And I don’t see myself as like those kids. I see myself as like my friends. And even if class is boring for 6 hours straight, I get to see my friends at lunch. I get to hang out with my friends before school.
I don’t want to—
Michael Horn
Well, so let me ask you this, which is if they had, they did a little bit for a few years there, go to the not district option in the beginning. and they got pulled back into it. I guess I was wondering if like you saw your tribe as the kids who don’t go to that school, might they have had a different reaction? But that actually was the tribe in which your kids were and they still got pulled back into it.
Thomas Arnett
Well, I will say when my kids were going, so this was during COVID when they were doing virtual schooling, you know, they were young enough that they didn’t really have that same tribe identity. Like David Yeager’s book is 10 to 25 and they were under 10. And so I don’t think they had quite the same pull. And for their tribe, it was like, Hey, our family, Nana and Papa across the street, people like friends we know from church. Like it was a small circle and that’s all it was. But I will say like when schools were reopening and the option came up of like, do we send the kids back to the conventional school or do we keep ‘em in this virtual school? My wife and I loved the virtual school ‘cause like we went and visited my sister in Hawaii for a month ‘cause we both worked remote. The kids could go to school. It was awesome, right? But my oldest son in particular, the 2 younger kids were like, eh, sure, whatever.
They were kind of indifferent. But my oldest son just came to us and he says like, mom and dad, I need to be around friends. It’s not enough to just hang out with my brother and sister and then have some other homeschool kids come over a couple times of the week to play and hang out. I need to be in school.
Michael Horn
He wanted it in the water. He wanted it in, right? Not the, you arranged for socialization. It was like, no, I’m in socialization and I’m navigating that.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah.
Michael Horn
Yeah. It’s interesting. And it’s, it’s certainly true at that age, kids become just like the social, the need for social connection just explodes, right? In a way you just, it’s, it’s fun to watch. Yeah.
Thomas Arnett
And I think David, gently just make a plug real quick. I think Jaeger’s book just explains that so well. I recommend people go read that book.
Michael Horn
All right. Well, let me ask this then, which is, so we talked about a bunch of elements here. I guess, where does that leave you in terms of your thinking today, knowing that it’ll change tomorrow of like this burgeoning sector?
Thomas Arnett
Which is a good thing, right?
Michael Horn
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like what does upmarket against these things? I think you and I are increasingly thinking that upmarket in some ways is less like, oh, you know, we got technology better so we could better teach this subject or whatever else, but it’s more about all these things. that somehow this burgeoning new sector, if it actually wants to not be niche, has to figure out without replicating entirely the one-size-fits-none architecture of those environments as well. And maybe that’s a trade-off like that just isn’t ready to be broken yet.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah.
Michael Horn
And so there isn’t enough market climb there, or maybe there are some ways to start to, you know, continue to sort of take the next rung, if you will, in the steel mill story of jumping into Angola and sort of get, we’re not at cheat still yet, but maybe we can go beyond the lowest rung, if you will.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m of a couple minds on this, so I don’t, I’ll just lay out my different thoughts on this. And let’s see, you tell me which ones seem reasonable and which ones don’t. I mean, along that trajectory, I think it is valuable to lessen the trade-off. Like I mentioned, my kids didn’t want to go to the district non-conventional program, even though they could participate in sports and things.
Cross-participation in education programs
Thomas Arnett
But I think that that ability to cross-participate does matter to a lot of people. So I think finding ways to, if it’s a program within a district, make sure that the students can get the pieces they want from whichever side of the conventional and innovative realms that they want. Or if it is a private microschool, finding ways to partner to try and offer those comparable types of experiences, recognizing that some families are happy with the trade-off. In fact, your initial adopters are going to be happy with the trade-off, but recognizing also that to become more mainstream, you have to lessen that trade-off for people. So I think that’s important, but I will say, I think where it’s really going to tip has less to do with the program you design or the technology you develop, and it really is more of just a social tipping point. So another book that’s been deeply influential on my thinking is Change: How to Make Big Things Happen by Damon Centola. He’s a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, a sociology professor, and he talks about whenever people— he kind of dispels the common notion that people adopt an idea through just exposure. If you just pay for enough billboards, pay for enough ad space, get enough influencers to talk about your thing, people will get on board.
And the point he makes in that book, or one of the key points, is that’s true for memes when there’s no cost of sharing, but whenever people have to make decisions that really involve risk and uncertainty, which education clearly is that kind of a decision, The biggest predictor is not how people weighed the pros and cons and how people weighed the features and benefits. They may tell you that’s the reason they made a choice, but the real reason comes, like the best predictor is, did they look around their social network and see other people like them doing the thing? And that social proof is really the selling point. And so in some ways, I think some of this just has to come from these programs that are on the margins, like growing and growing over time until eventually, in that book, he talks about a tipping point that’s around 20% adoption. When you look around and you see 20% of the people in your social network and people that are similar to you on the dimensions that matter, when you see 20% of those people adopting, that’s when you really start paying attention. And I think some of this is just, it’s going to happen that way. So what that makes me optimistic about is these innovative on-the-margins kind of programs don’t necessarily have to figure out, well, how do we copy football and how do we copy band and how do we copy prom? They may come up with different things than what the conventional system offers, but those things won’t become appealing until they reach kind of that in any given community. So this is where it’s interesting too, is like it doesn’t have to be 20% nationwide. You could see in any given community when you’ve got 20% of your people making those choices, all of a sudden that choice goes from being like, oh yeah, that fringe thing that some people do that are trade-off acceptors to like, oh, that seems kind of normal.
That seems kind of mainstream. It doesn’t feel so risky and feels like I’m missing out if I’m not paying attention to it.
Michael Horn
Super interesting.
What I hear in that, I’m going to put in jobs-to-be-done language. Forget about the push and pull for a second. Let’s talk about what’s impeding the change, the switch, or the progress. Habit and anxiety. Habit is the status quo, commonality, football, prom, et cetera. This is what we do, what we see in the movies. But the anxiety is connected to the, are there people like me who are doing this? And it’s more about, it’s less about increasing the pull perhaps of these solutions, and it’s more about reducing the anxiety. And I think in my head until this conversation, I framed a lot of that reduction in anxiety around parents, but for high school, it might be actually reducing that anxiety more around kids’ peers.
And that maybe is what we’re not spending enough time
Thomas Arnett
Yeah, I think that’s true. I think that’s a perfect crosswalk between those ideas of the social proof from that sociology research is a powerful lever for addressing that anxiety and the jobs-to-be-done framework.
Rethinking Early Education Narratives
Michael Horn
Yeah, this is super interesting. One last thought back to the curricular one, because it’s just been on my mind because I’ve been reading a bunch of stuff around what happens in the world of AI with jobs and things of that nature. And one point that stuck with me, Noah Smith wrote this piece on Substack And made the point that humans, yes, far fewer of us do agriculture and in factories, et cetera, et cetera, over time. But actually economic history has seen a huge diversification and explosion in the number of tasks that humans do over time beyond what we could always ever imagine. And so I just say that in terms of if you think back to the 1800s or early 1900s schoolhouse, there was always a dichotomy of developing the individual versus common for society. I think that’s still a thing to navigate, but in terms of connecting people to economic opportunity as part of that equation, you really, I think, do need to acknowledge the explosion in terms of human tasks and prepare for that. And I do think, particularly in K-8, and maybe this is wrong because of what we just said around desire for some commonality in high school of kids, but I do think in K-8 we can do a much better job of the common sort of frameworks that are so important from a paternalistic civic perspective. And I don’t think we do particularly well right now on those in intentional ways.
And I just think if we spent a lot more time on narrative building in those early years, and then as you start to get into middle, particularly high school, it can become more exploration and personalization of not just how you learn, but what you learn, and that there actually may be an economic imperative to do so. I know that’s the flip, that’s back to the curriculum part where we started with the Pondiscio prodding, if you will. And I think we’ve done a good job of teasing apart that this is actually a different aspect of it. But I did want to make that point as well and see how that lands for you, because I do think the circumstance is somewhat different now.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it’s valuable not to think in dichotomies. And I think that’s what you’re pushing us on is like, it’s not everything should be common or everything should be personalized. Like either of those are maybe not good.
Michael Horn
Yeah. Yeah. And actually I love Khan World School on this, right? Like they do great books, curriculum in high school, and there’s huge room for personalization. Right. And it strikes me that both of those actually are probably quite important because maybe, you know, K-8 is Maybe my sort of narrow view of this, uh, that I just sketched out is a little overly simplistic. I’d readily concede that.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think that I’m pausing because I don’t, I don’t feel like I have anything to add. I think that’s the—
Michael Horn
No, that works.. That’s, I feel like I learned a lot.
I feel like I learned a lot in this conversation. So let’s leave it there. We’ll keep chipping away at this, but I think where we came to at the end hopefully provides a roadmap for those entrepreneurs, not just schooling entrepreneurs, but others working in the ecosystem. to think through how they can pull just a couple more families into this world and lessen the feeling of those trade-offs, if you will. So Tom, thanks as always.
Thomas Arnett
Just give one anecdote. The thing I look forward to that to me is the sign if this is going that direction is think about all the TV shows and all the movies where the conventional high school is just the thing. In fact, funny little story, we live in California. We don’t have the conventional high school building where you have the hallways with the lockers because all of our buildings, the doors open to the outside. Right.
Michael Horn
The outdoor design.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But my daughter, before she got to middle school, she— well, when she first saw the middle school that my sons went to, she was shocked. She was like, wait, where’s the hallways with the lockers? Because that’s what she’d seen on TV. But to me, the sign of things really tipping is when you start seeing more TV programs that will show different models of schooling. There’s a XQ Institute had an email that went out, I think this week about a TV program called Murder 101 that’s on Amazon Prime now about students at the, I think it’s Elizabethtown in Tennessee.
Michael Horn
Okay.
Thomas Arnett
That were like, their class was, their sociology class was a project-based class of like, we’re going to try and solve this 30-year-old cold case serial killer murder. And, you know, you, the building still looks like a conventional school, but the way they’re doing school is very different. And I think that’s, that’s the thing I’m looking for is like, when do we start seeing more of that showing up in like mainstream TV, mainstream movies?
Michael Horn
Yeah, goes back to Pondiscio’s argument. Are we even watching the same things though? But, I think actually, I actually think at least in terms of entertainment, there still are shows. They don’t occur at the same times, but there still are shows, right, that we’re all told to binge, that my kids somehow find out about and they binge as well on Netflix and so forth, right? And so that, I actually think there is more cultural currency that is common there than we sometimes acknowledge.
Thomas Arnett
Maybe from just not necessarily from school. Is that what you’re pointing at?
Michael Horn
Yeah. Not just necessarily from school. And yes, it’s not like, you know, it’s not 5:30 on every weekday we sit down and every, you know, every kid’s watching the show. Yeah. Yeah. Or, you know, or nightly news or like, yes, that stuff is not happening, but there are a lot of shows that escape the zeitgeist and do seem to capture, um, Not everyone like it used to be, perhaps. It’s not Friends, I guess, and Seinfeld, but nevertheless, there are plenty of shows that jump into that stratosphere of everyone talking about it, I think.
Thomas Arnett
Yeah. So, yeah.
Michael Horn
All right, Tom, we’ve covered a ton. Huge thanks as always.
Thomas Arnett
We’ll leave it there. Yeah, this is always fun.
Michael Horn
Yeah, no, no kidding. And we’ll see y’all next time on The Future of Education. Thanks so much.
