Rethinking Work & Education via Montessori Schools - Matt Bateman

[00:59] Paul: Welcome to The Pathless Path. I'm Paul Millerd, and in this podcast, we examine the invisible scripts that run our lives and dare to imagine new stories for work and life. Today I am talking to Matt Bateman. He is a deep thinker around all things education. He is an early childhood educator. He is a philosopher.

He has taught at universities. He's taught young people and thinks deeply about the role of education in our lives. He's also the founder of Guidepost Montessori, which is a collective of schools all around the world. And I am excited to explore with him today. He said one of his favorite topics was work before we dove in. So this is definitely going to be fun.

Welcome to the podcast, Matt.

[01:50] Matt Bateman: Thanks for having me, Paul.

[01:52] Paul: So the question I always start out with is, what are the stories and scripts that shaped your reality growing up and how you were thinking about the world?

[02:03] Matt Bateman: Yeah, you know what's interesting is, I mean, the, the, um, how few scripts I had growing up around work, I think kind of to a fault, um, and that largely stems from attending pretty typical public schools in the Southeast in the '80s and '90s. And just like the kind of ethos was like, you go through, I mean, as is often the case in traditional school, like you, you're supposed to be good at school. And like many gifted kids, I don't want to kind of wade too far into gifted kids discourse, at least not in the info intro, but it wasn't that hard for me to kind of do well in school. And so one of the, I don't know if you'd call this a script, but one of the kind of premises or patterns that I learned was things aren't that hard, things should be easy, and I can do them without trying. And that is a completely false script in life.

And you know, the kind of first time you hit resistance to, a lot of people get that. And I, like many people, the first time I hit resistance to that and like, college and my first jobs and then graduate school, it was like very hard to deprogram that. I'm like, oh, like, I like, what is this effort thing that I have to put in and how do I make it not terrible for myself to do these things that I think I want to do? So there's a lot of thinking around that, that, that I did in my 20s. And I don't think I still struggle with it. Like, I don't think that I have like the best work ethic in the world or anything like that.

And I think a lot of the reason is school and the kind of patterns around school. On top of that, I just, I don't, I wasn't raised with like a strong work ethic, like, you know, get up early, stay up late, like put in, put in, put in the, put in the effort. I was raised pretty religiously. Um, but not, not kind of from that perspective of like the good old-fashioned Protestant work ethic. Um, so yeah.

[04:01] Paul: Yeah. It's interesting. I, I grew up with a similar, it's almost like an invisible script. I was similarly good at school and therefore like you sort of get a pass on everything.

[04:13] Matt Bateman: Yeah.

[04:14] Paul: So nobody was like challenging me or making me think deeper about stuff. And I sort of created this game for myself, like, how can I get the highest grade with the least amount of work?

[04:24] Matt Bateman: Yeah.

[04:25] Paul: So I had this very cynical stance toward education and that went throughout college and even work. And It wasn't until I quit my job like 7 years ago that I actually stumbled upon work I liked. And that sort of dissolved a lot of the cynicism for me. And it's just like, I look back and it's like, man, I wish like somebody would've just like challenged me or been like, yo, you're not really taking any of this serious.

[04:55] Matt Bateman: Yeah. Or even just having had like, if I had had one subject where somebody was like, Matt, you're smart. You're not living up to your potential. And kind of like grabbed me by the collar and was like, like, even if it was something that I like history or something and just like, you want to, you want to like, you could pass the test in the Civil War. No problem. Like you really want to understand it?

Like read these 7 books and like write me something that's not a 5-paragraph essay and, um, or a 3-paragraph essay. I, I would have, I think in retrospect, I would have really benefited from that. And I did kind of have some experiences like that and they were, really beneficial. I would also say one other script that was the, that really was my salvation growing up, which was again, like not a script, but it was, it was latent is, um, I really grew up with the internet. Um, and I mean, I, I first got on the internet in 1991, 1992, like, like a little bit before the World Wide Web was really a thing. Like there weren't web browsers yet.

Like, um, and, uh, and all of it was self-taught and I really loved it. And I found like BBS communities and then forum communities and Usenet communities. And I mean, I was a kid, I was like 10, 11, 12 years old. And I learned how to do a lot of things. Like it, there was no, like AOL didn't even exist. Like to do these things, you had to kind of like be a little bit technical and figure things out.

And, um, I've, I don't work in tech. I've never really worked in tech. I've had kind of more and less technical jobs, but that experience of like, this is something that I love that I have to learn to figure out and that can, is not irrelevant to like getting money and providing value and capturing value. I think has, I don't think it was, it wasn't until like my mid or late twenties that I was like, oh no, this is really, this counts. Like, this is really awesome. Um, but I, a lot of my thinking and psychology are tied up with like, I just have a very positive view of the internet and, and kind of the, it, what it affords children and what it has afforded me in life.

[06:58] Paul: I sense there's a broader group of us, like I actually grew up with a similar story. I, and I think it's because everything was so new, like nobody saw it as a serious thing. It's like, oh, you could turn this computers, like there wasn't like a software engineering job that existed and parents weren't like, keep doing this so you can become rich as a Google software engineer.

[07:24] Matt Bateman: Yeah.

[07:24] Paul: Um, and I sort of— and that's actually the coolest thing about my childhood. My parents just let me use the computer as much as possible, and I did all these self-directed things. And but similarly, I was so like, I just never put the pieces together. It's like, oh, you could do stuff on the internet and actually, um, do things like share writing online.

[07:47] Matt Bateman: It was like, oh, I need to go get a real job. If there's one thing that I wish I could have told my 10-year-old self, it's this internet thing. It's fucking serious. Like it's meaningful. It's significant. It's important.

It's like the biggest thing that's come along since, you know, the early 20th century. Like it's like a huge, it's a new age. Like it really is the dawn of a new age. And there's something to be said for getting into it and valuing it and messing around with it. Like, I don't think I really understood that until way later in life. And if I, if some, if I had just like, to me it was like, I wanted to play, you know, Warcraft with my friends and like, okay, like that's a video game that I like and now I need to set up an IPX network and nobody knows how to do that in order to have a LAN party.

And so I had to figure that out. It was like that kind of thing was what drove me. But like, of course everybody in my life was just like, oh, Matt's playing video games. Like, just don't spend too much time on it. Like that was the kind of attitude, you know?

[08:41] Paul: Yeah, it's, it's so, uh, and how do you think about that now? I mean, I know you have two young kids. The way I hear people talk about technology is so black and white. It's like good or bad, right? And like you're saying, a lot of these unexpected side effects of just playing around with the world are really hard to anticipate. And we have no idea what the world's going to look like 20 years from now.

[09:09] Matt Bateman: Yeah. Simon Sarris had this tweet a few days ago where he said something like, kids these days aren't digital natives. They're media natives. Like millennials are digital natives. Like they actually understand because they grew up like in the way that I just described, like they had to like figure it out. Like, like what is a network architecture?

And like, what, you know, what is this online thing and how do you hand code a website and things like that? Um, and now the surfaces of things are much slicker. Like it has been, not necessarily a bad way. It's just that there are trade-offs to it. Like I can give, I mean, my 3-year-old is pretty good at using an iPhone. Um, and it's the surf, the interface is so intuitive.

It's so intuitive. You can do it with your fingers. And she started figuring out before she was 1 year old. And, um, like, I'm kind of like, I'm kind of like, you could, you could get pretty far. On the internet and using the internet without understanding anything about it. And I do worry about that.

Not that everybody has to be a coder or in IT or have a technical job or really be that, that deeply interested in their lives. I think that, I mean, to some degree, I think kind of all values are optional and I don't want to impose that, but you know, the digital age is part of our life and like, if you don't The question has occurred to me, like, does it matter if you don't understand it, but you're really adept at it and it kind of seems like magic and you just end up taking it for granted? Um, compared to what I had as a child, which is like, you know, curiosity and delight every time the modem made a noise. And like, I was like, what is that sound? And like, I just had to figure it out. And that's, that's like very different than like, I can ask my dad for any video and it gives it to me and I never— and it's just like magic.

And, you know, like, so I do think about it. But I mean, I don't think about it kind of skeptically. I think technology is of value and I'm glad my children are growing up in a world with technology and I want them to have access to it. It's more like, how do I help them not take it for granted and how important is that?

[11:16] Paul: Yeah, it's hard to know because I mean, if I remember my aunt, telling me about punch cards in college. He's like, you guys have it so easy. You don't know how it's like, right? And that sort of got abstracted away and you didn't have to worry about that anymore. And like fixing combustion engine cars, probably going to be totally different 15 years from now. So do you need to learn?

But I think it's not about the particular—

[11:46] Matt Bateman: It's never about the particular skills. It can't be because those things change so rapidly. And you can't know which ones are gonna, so it's not like I want my child to learn Python because they need to get a job coding in Python. It's like the odds of like who even knows what dialects or even if we'll think about programming languages or coding in the same way in 20 years or whatever, when they're gonna get jobs. It's more like I actually do, I think the same way about combustion engines. I'm like, should my child, like, is there some kind of spark of curiosity where it's like, Okay, the car goes somewhere and cars are omnipresent and whether or not they switch to electric versus combustion.

But like, you know, do you want to understand something about how motive power is generated and transferred to wheels and directed and stored and why all this infrastructure exists? Or is it just like cars go and my dad buys cars with money from the money tree and like that's just like the world and it's just part of the furniture of the universe. And that kind of attitude does, again, worry. Like, there's such a thing as industrial literacy. That's like why it includes digital literacy, but it also includes many more things, like knowing that when you hit the light switch or plug anything in, like, that is powered by a magnet spinning somewhere. And the question is just what causes that magnet to spin?

Is it steam? Is it water? Like, what is it? You know? And, you know, I don't think most people know that.

[13:14] Paul: And it's like kind of odd to, or even ask that question, like, So yeah, it's our, our world as it becomes smoother, we sort of lose the, the deeper connection to how things work and how the world operates. It's, it's even— I mean, I think about this all the time. You just like take a step back and like even just this room, the amount of technology and like the amount of just knowledge required to do all this is pretty— it's overwhelming.

[13:49] Matt Bateman: It's overwhelming. And you can't learn everything. And my question is, like, can you learn a general perspective that you're kind of on the premise of asking where things, especially man-made things, human-made things came from, including things like language and like, you know, including traditions? Like, I've got this friend who was like, did you know that most last names came from the Middle Ages? And I'm like, no, like, that question has never occurred to me. But just like, you can't learn everything like that, kind of where everything came from, but just being like on the premise of like, you can ask where did it come from of any kind of human artifact.

And that I feel like, I feel like I do have that now. I didn't always have that and I would've benefited from having it earlier. And it seems pretty important to me.

[14:32] Paul: How did you get drawn into education at first?

[14:36] Matt Bateman: Yeah. I mean, my, I guess there's kind of two things, two threads. So one is like, since I was like a, like some of my first jobs, you know, were babysitting. Um, and I've always loved little kids. I've always been like the boy babysitter. In college, one of my jobs was working in a preschool.

I was the boy assistant teacher at a preschool. Uh, it's a very gendered field. So like, this is, this is how people kind of refer to me. And so it was kind of like, A, I had this interest and B, it was kind of like thrown in my face from very early on that it's like, oh, you're kind of like a little bit of a weirdo for having this interest. but I didn't care. I, I just, I've always really loved kids.

I've always really wanted kids. And that's, that's been true for as long as I can remember. Like, I can't remember a time when I didn't have this fascination and interest with growing up and growing children. Um, and then the second thing is, um, I went into philosophy, um, academic philosophy. So I, I got a PhD in philosophy and, um, I did it because my kind of initial motive was like, I love this subject. And I want to learn more about it with experts.

Who knows what comes next? I'll probably try to be a professor. But, you know, at some point when you're a grad student, you're like, okay, it's like time to teach your class. And somehow it hadn't fully occurred to me that like being a philosophy professor means a lot of teaching. And I was terrible at it at first. And I had this real kind of, I don't know, crisis of faith, crisis of conscience, crisis of like, is this my goal?

And I was like, if I'm going to be in this field, like I have to like get good at teaching and learn to like it, or else what am I doing here? There's basically no such thing as a philosophy professor that doesn't teach. And I worked really hard at it, really hard at it. And I think I got very good at it. I was like nominated for teaching awards and hired on the basis of my teaching. And I do a lot of teaching today.

And that was like, that was one of the first things that I did where I felt like this did not come naturally to me. I did not necessarily naturally want to do it, but it made sense for me to do it. And I learned to do it really well and I learned to love it. And then what— so those two things intersect. Like when I decided like academia is not for me, this isn't working, this path isn't working out for me. But I, I've— one of the things that I've learned is that I really love teaching and I've always really loved children.

And I have this opportunity to go and observe in a Montessori school and work in a Montessori organization. I was like, oh, this is kind of like— I didn't plan it this way, but like, you know, the Steve Jobs thing, the dots only connect Looking backwards, I was like, these dots are really connecting. And I really fell in love with Montessori hard. And it just, it lit up like every pattern in my brain, the kids pattern, the education pattern, which I've always thought was important. And also the philosophy pattern. Montessori is a philosopher.

Like you can study her and read her like a philosopher. She's a historical figure who has a body of work and I'm trained as a historian of philosophy. And so I've done a lot of that. So, um, yeah.

[17:29] Paul: Yeah. And so what was, what was the step from there to like, did that lead to what turned into Guidepost?

[17:39] Matt Bateman: Yeah. So the kind of instigating thing was like, I wanted to do something other than what I was doing in academia. Like it wasn't working for me. And the question was what? And I reached out to a lot of people on my network. I'm like, I don't know what's next.

I could, I've done some kind of technical things, some IT things, some design things, I could do that. I love kids. I could do that. Um, you know, just like I could teach in a high school, like what, you know, what is it? And one of my friends was running a Montessori school network. And, um, he showed me a Montessori, a very good Montessori classroom.

Um, I don't know how, how, I don't know if he knew how good it was. Um, but he showed me, I mean, to this day, like, I'm like, wow, that was like exceptionally good, that classroom. Um, and I really fell in love with it. And then, um, so I started working with him. And, um, some dramatic things.

[18:29] Paul: What does that mean?

[18:30] Matt Bateman: What was that?

[18:30] Paul: A good Montessori classroom?

[18:33] Matt Bateman: So the simple way of explaining it is just that it was a good classroom.

[18:38] Paul: You know it when you see it.

[18:39] Matt Bateman: Just imagine, imagine like, like the range of classes that you've had in school over the course of your life in college. Like some of them were better and some of them were worse. Right. Um, and you could say like, I had a good math class or I had a bad math class. I mean, Montessori is a, it's a pedagogy, but it's a whole approach. And I think it's a very powerful approach, but there is such a thing as like poorly implemented, partially implemented.

I mean, purists in Montessori tend to be like, if, like, if you get the pedagogy right, then the classroom is necessarily good. You know, and there's something to that, but I continue to think that like the majority of, the majority of a classroom quality comes down to the quality of the teacher and the kind of what the pedagogy is, is it's a, It's a kind of like superpower that you can give to the teacher. And some teachers like are excited about that superpower and take it up and really own it and implement it well. Others less so, either because they lack the competence or just don't understand it, or because they're coming in with kind of fixed premises about what education should be and they don't think that this is right. And so, um, yeah, I mean, it's just— there are better and worse Montessori classrooms for sure.

[19:46] Paul: Yeah. And so what Yeah. Talk to me about like founding that. Was it, it seems like it was an existing collection of schools and you're sort of building a community around that or how did it—

[20:00] Matt Bateman: No. So, so I was at this company working with these people and Montessori was very new to me. I was like just getting my feet wet. And also, by the way, like entrepreneurship was new to me. I was like, oh, I have to manage people and like give them performance reviews and think about like burn rates and stuff. Like I didn't know anything.

And I was learning, I was trying to learn as fast as I could. And, um, various things happened to the company that led a core group of us to believe that the only way forward was for us all to leave at the same time and start from zero. And that was the birth of Guidepost, the Guidepost School Network. Um, and, um, that was in 2016 and it was there were 10 of us, 11 of us, 12 of us. So I'm on the founding team of that, of that group. And it was just a team and a dream.

And we got some seed investment and we did at the time, we didn't even know, like, do we, like, we've run schools before. Do we want to run schools in the future? Like, what is this? Is it a school network? Is it a platform? Like if, even if it's a school network, like what is the business model?

Like, I mean, there were all these complicated considerations and we eventually through lots and lots of trial and error and figuring it out, we're like, we're a school network. With a training center, with a kind of backend that supports the school network and especially including teacher training. I mean, teacher training is, I think, the thing that we have really done right in terms of internalizing that, that part of the quality control and that part of the process. So we have 140-something schools and train, I don't know, we must train 1,000 teachers a year.

[21:39] Paul: How do you train good teachers? So this is probably a much deeper question.

[21:46] Matt Bateman: Well, I mean, there's all sorts of things about what makes a good training. And a lot of my job was teacher training. I left Guidepost, by the way. I kind of took a leave, stepped away to— I'm working on a book now. So I'm kind of mixing the present and past tense because that happened very recently. But I'm still on the board and still working with them in various ways.

But I mean, my job when I was there full-time was a lot of it was teacher training. I mean, the core thing that you need is practice. Like, like you're delivering a certain curriculum and a certain pedagogy to a certain age range. Like it just nothing beats deliberate practice. Like, and that is the kind of core of our training. That wasn't what I did in the training.

I did the kind of theory element and my job was to say, like really the way that you're thinking about education needs to change. Like, like this is a, this is a very different approach. You're going to bring a lot of preconceptions and misconceptions and your own perspective into this. And like this, this is a really philosophically radical approach. It might sound familiar to you. The more familiar it sounds to you, the more nervous I would get in terms of like, oh, like probably this resonates with something that's not quite it.

And like, and so I basically taught philosophy. Kind of philosophy of education. But all this is like a long preamble to say there's a lot that goes into teacher training. The reason to have teacher training is so that you can hire whoever you want. It's so that you're not stuck with like, oh, like, you know, we've got to hire a trained teacher and the pool of candidates that we're getting just isn't that great in terms of like, they just don't have that spark of desire for kids or they're not kind of curious enough or they're a little bit dogmatic or something like that. But you're stuck with them.

Because these are the only trained teachers and we just did not want that problem. We wanted to be able to hire people on the basis of character and mindset and, and train them. And that's what the training lets you do. It lets you pick people who like have the souls of people who are good educators, and then you can give them the skills.

[23:43] Paul: And what, what are the core— you have these 3 values on, on the website. I'd love to hear just a little bit more around those and how you arrived at those.

[23:55] Matt Bateman: I can pull it up. There's a bunch of different values that you could be thinking of, but, um, um, I was thinking one was agency.

[24:03] Paul: I think one, uh, yeah, a vision for human flourishing. Let's see, I had it up before.

[24:12] Matt Bateman: So, so I think that, I mean, the exactly what the values are has kind of like changed and evolved over the years. I think that there are four things It's work, knowledge, agency, and the last one is humanism.

[24:26] Paul: Yeah, those are the four I was thinking of.

[24:28] Matt Bateman: And, um, those, those are the things that I want to impart to children. It's like, those are the, those are the kind of core values, kind of like underpinning, not like it's like, you know, today is a lecture on knowledge and the value of knowledge. It's more implicit than that. It's more latent. It's like a design principle. Um, but those are the things that I think are really important in life.

[24:50] Paul: And how do you, how do you define work?

[24:54] Matt Bateman: Work is the effortful pursuit of a purpose that you have conceived and set. The core of work is that it's, it's goal-oriented. Like there's a real goal. There's something that you're trying to, there's a little dent that you're trying to make in the universe, even if it's just washing a dish. And then it's effortful. It takes, it takes some, effort.

It takes calories for you to do it. It's, it's, um, and, um, and there's a bunch of different things that you could distinguish work from. You could distinguish work from play. You could distinguish work from, um, um, relaxation. Um, but, and I also think it's very important in my conception of work that like you're the one setting the goal. I think that Montessori thought that it was also very important.

Um, but the core of it is like effort plus purpose. It's like, are you persisting towards some sort of end? Are you driven by a final cause and not just like what you feel like doing or nothing at all or, you know?

[25:52] Paul: Yeah, and it, like, I talk to a lot of people around work and I notice over and over again that growing up, people did not have a positive relationship or an idea of work and sort of get stuck they either end up doing things in which they're sort of like, I'm supposed to do this and don't actually wanna do it. And so how does it look like people that sort of go through the Montessori program, how do they have different relationships to work when they are young adults?

[26:31] Matt Bateman: So just the kind of background premise of mine is that the work is not naturally unpleasant. It's naturally effortful, which, which an effort, expending effort, maybe, maybe there's some sort of like strand of unpleasantness in there. It's like the effort of kind of like going and doing something, but it's not that work is naturally joyless or work is naturally something that you don't want to do. So there's a, and I think that of all people, of course, um, not just children. And of course people don't experience work like that. People kind of come to have pathologies of work, as you described.

But, but children don't have those pathologies yet. Very small children don't have those pathologies yet because they're almost all developmental and learned. And so what you find with young children is that they want to work. Even, I think even babies want to work in the sense of they have a goal and they want to put forth effort into achieving that goal. You see this with babies literally learning how to grab. They're lying on their backs.

And they're learning how to grab like a toy on their mobile. That is, you can watch a child do that for like 20, 30 minutes and they really want to do it and they're really trying and they're really struggling and they're really kind of like adjusting what they're doing a little bit. That is the child's work. And work in that context, there's a little bit more that you would want to say about it to be like, why is this work? For a 3-year-old or a 2-year-old even, children want to help. They want to do real things.

You've got, How old is— you've got kids, right? One kid?

[27:57] Paul: Yeah, 11-month-old daughter.

[27:58] Matt Bateman: 11-month-old.

[27:59] Paul: Yeah, she's, uh, she's doing the standing, pulling herself up hundreds of times a day. She is.

[28:05] Matt Bateman: So you're about, um, somewhere between 2 and 6 months away from like, your child will want to fill the dishwasher. Your child will want to— my 13-month-old, the other day I was building a fire in an outdoor fireplace. And I was throwing wood into the fire and my 3-year-old was helping me throw wood into the fire. And my 13-month-old, who is just now walking, not yet talking, saw us doing it. And once the fire was raging and it was completely dangerous, he like desperately wanted to grab a little wood chip and throw it into the fire because he had seen us do it. He wants to help.

He wants to kind of do things, imitative things that are real things. And it's hard as a parent because it requires a tremendous amount of patience. Like children don't help when they're helping. Um, like it's, and you can't, I don't think you can think of it as like, wow, like my 16-month-old is really contributing to the household. They're obviously detracting from it in the sense of it would be easier to do it without them. But the, the kind of developmentally giving them that kind of space and patience, it goes from wanting to help around the house to like wanting to prepare their own meals to wanting to help get dressed.

And there's all these things that children naturally want to do that we think of as trivial, but that for the child, if you let them do it and let them approach it right, it's a tremendous source of confidence and self-esteem. And it's also a tremendous source of the premise effort can be worthwhile. You know, that there are things that I can want to do that are worth the effort. And thousands and thousands and thousands of examples of that are what you need to grow up into an adult that thinks like, there is stuff that I want to do. Like, I really want to do it. If I could do anything today, you know, it might include, you know, not just lying on the beach or doing nothing, but like there are projects that I want to do and that's work and that counts and it's good.

And hopefully you can get paid for some of it. Um, so that's what it looks like for very young children. And then I think as you get older, it's different. It's, it's not this— like, I don't think that a 6-year-old naturally wants to do dishes in the same way. So, um, but we could talk about that.

[29:58] Paul: But yeah, yeah, it's, it's really fascinating just to think about that. And the stories I adopted growing up around work— the, the story I had was that work, you have to learn how to work. Work is not going to be fun. You sort of have to develop this stance towards the world to power through it. Right. And it's like I got a job at a gas station when I was a teenager.

And the whole point was like, you need to learn how to work in bad jobs. And I was doing stuff like I, I always have written, like I wrote in college and it was super fun, but that was not serious to me, right? The serious stuff was the stuff I had to like grind at. And it's just fascinating to think back and wonder like, oh, if I had just noticed these are natural urges.

[30:55] Matt Bateman: It's tragic. And I think it's a double tragedy. So one is that, triple probably tragedy. One is that you were doing things like writing and it didn't count. You know, like writing is work. Like you have a goal.

Like you want to put something down on the page and make it good and express yourself or make an argument or whatever you're trying to do, create a fictional world. Um, that, that takes effort. Like it doesn't happen automatically. You don't just like sit down and relax and jot down what it— like it's insanely hard work actually. Um, I, I've written like 1,000 words a day every day for the last 20 years or something like that. It is not easy.

Um, even though I really love it. Um, so A, like why didn't anybody tell you that? or what, you know, what were the blocks to figuring that out? Another block is just school. Like you get a bunch of writing assignments and they're very different from the writing you kind of want to do. And those are the things that count.

So, you know, it sucks. The second is, um, what's wrong with working at a gas station? Just, I just, just the kind of adult attitude towards, you know, labor or menial jobs. It's like, like, even if it's not your favorite thing, there is dignity in that. People fricking need gas. There's nothing wrong with like, like working for a company.

And, um, and so it's like a thousand— these— both these ways and in a thousand ways, um, thousands of ways, either work is generally just not valorized, or most work is denigrated, and like a tiny subset of work is— it's like if you're a doctor or a lawyer, or like, I don't know, like a climate activist or something, like there's like certain things that like have a certain kind of dignity, and everything else it's like, oh, you're kind of preparing toasters or you're just labor or it's low status or something like that. And it doesn't count morally. Like I just, like what a teenager needs to hear is like their first job at a gas station or Baskin-Robbins or whatever it is like that has a kind of dignity to it.

Even if it's not your favorite thing to do, you should learn it and take it seriously and like think about what it means in the context of society and like value whatever there is to value in it. And it's no less than like being a lawyer. It's just, It's paid less, but it's like, I just, it drives me nuts. And this is so omnipresent. Even people who are good in education, even Montessorians for crying out loud, they're like, you should join, like we're setting kids up to join the creative class. I'm like, what is the creative class?

Like, and why is that the good class? Like, what about everybody else? You know, like most of our, it just drives me nuts. So, um, yeah, I think it's a huge issue. Growing up and developmentally?

[33:27] Paul: Well, I think we've— it's sort of just an abdicating the value system to the market, right? I remember growing up and I just absorbed this idea. I don't think it was even from my parents. It's just like, you're a sucker if you're going to go be a teacher because you're going to be poor. And like, just thinking back Like nobody was really thinking all that deeply around work. And I don't really fault anyone either because I think it was just a lot of adults who didn't really like what they were doing either.

Right. And a lot of my story of what I write about is I was literally shocked about a year after quitting my job when I sort of noticed I was writing every day and having so much fun. I was like, oh, it's like I am experiencing this state which is so connected, so alive, and so meaningful to me. And it was always here, it was always there, and I missed it. Yeah, like 33 years. And I think that's what fires me up so much about it, is it's sort of this message of like, there's this state that can be found and it's worth actually searching for it.

And the mistake I see a lot of people make in the modern world is this ikigai chart of what can be paid for and what it's like. The thing that lights you up may not pay you.

[35:01] Matt Bateman: Yep.

[35:01] Paul: Like, I don't think that's a valid starting point for actually searching for something. Like, one of my friends, the thing is surfing for him. That doesn't really pay, but he's built his life around making that happen because it's so meaningful to him.

[35:15] Matt Bateman: I also think, like, if you— I think part of what helps is, um, excuse me, um, part of what helps people who have either, like, just like straight up work projects that just you're not going to get paid for, like a stay-at-home parent, for example, or— I mean, that's in my mind, that's just, that's a job. It's just a job that has a very complicated remuneration. Like, it's It's not a job that you have a W-2 for, but it's like, it's just a job. Like, it's not different from other jobs in any meaningful way.

Or you have a really serious hobby, like whether it's like there's a kind of like, I mean, I kind of have dabbled in the climbing community and, you know, the kind of joke in the climbing community is like the average climber either makes like, like the average 5.10 climber makes like $100,000 and the average like 5.12 climber or 5.15 climber or whatever makes like $10,000 because I mean, it's just to get really good at it, to be really serious at it, you kind of have to have this bizarre nomadic lifestyle. So if you, if you're going to do something like that, you still need money unless you happen to luck into it somehow. Um, and so often you end up getting odd jobs or working part-time or working some of the year or something like that. And I think part of what's important in those cases is that you don't resent the part-time jobs.

Um, that, that you think of it as like, this is, it's good that like you're con— you're contributing value in this other way, even if it's not exactly what you'd like to be doing. And you do some thinking about why it's about— you don't just, you don't pick something that you think is morally reprehensible or that is just a fake job. Um, you do something that you think really adds value, like whether that's like part-time gas station attendant or teaching or babysitting or consulting or whatever it is. and you kind of think about your life as like an amount. It's not like this is like a tumor on my life that I would excise if I could. It's like, no, these things fit together.

Like I do a lot of surfing or whatever it is. Um, and I also have this other thing to pay the bills and, you know, I have other hobbies and interests too. And like there's a way that I can kind of make it all fit together. Um, I think, um, there's a, there's a lot of ways I do. I have met a lot of people who are like, you know, professional climbers or whatever, hobbyists of different sorts that resent the need to work to make money to pay the bills. And I don't think that that's good either.

It's, it's, it's, it all fits together and all work is good work. Montessori has this quote, all work is noble. I can, I just, I really believe that.

[37:49] Paul: Yeah, I love that. It's, I think when I, when I first quit my job, it was like, let me do as little as possible freelancing to fund my life. And I realized that was not actually a sustainable mode. I needed to actually design the work I was going to get paid for to be things I would actively want to participate in. Now, some of them are more exciting than others. Like, if it was up to me, I would just write all the time.

But, um, it doesn't mean I want to just do something I just despise. To make money. So there, there are some constraints I put on that and I've been able to find like a good balance in it.

[38:30] Matt Bateman: I think, yeah, there's, and there's always prefer— like there are things that I'd rather not do. Um, even I got paid a lot to do them. Um, but, um, and that's fine. It's just the point is not like you have to like everything. The point is don't be on your high horse. It's not like a moral fit.

Right. There's not a kind of moral ranking of jobs with some jobs kind of having superiority to other jobs. I think that that's the poison pill. That's the poison pill that— that's what was in your script, I think, growing up of like, you need to get like a, you know, professional middle-class job or whatever it is. Something that— something kind of a well-paying desk job. And like, if you can't do that, that's like, you'll be part of the hoi polloi, the masses who like their lives don't like— their success doesn't count.

Their lives don't really mean anything. I mean, that is a message that's out there. It's— I think it's very un-American and very bad, but It's, it's out there nonetheless. And like everybody has to grapple with it.

[39:26] Paul: Yeah. How, how are you thinking about like school and your kids? Um, now I, they're 3 and about 1, you said.

[39:35] Matt Bateman: So yeah. So both of my children are in schools that I've helped build and design and that's awesome. Um, and they've both been in school since they were 3 months old. So our, our programs start very young. And, um, I love Montessori. I mean, the Montessori approach is— it's very work-centric.

The kind of whole premise of the approach is that children want real things and they want real opportunities. And if you set up the environment with real opportunities and kind of present them with that environment in the right way and then give them a tremendous amount of freedom, they will naturally want to do things that we think we have to chastise them to do. Um, and, and, and they will develop a lot of good like the small muscles of agency get built up by that process, by them coming in, choosing work, concentrating on it, persisting with it against distraction, and then deciding to do something else. The system was also very academically strong. I mean, Montessori was known— she was a kind of pioneer in literacy and math in particular. And I see that in my children.

So I'm very excited for them to have it. You know, we have schools that go up through middle school and high school. That's my plan is to keep them in our system. But I have thought about like, you know, what if the company falls apart? What if, you know, what if we move to a place, Gina gets a great job opportunity, I get a great— my wife is Gina. I get a great job opportunity somewhere that doesn't have these schools.

Like what would I do? And I've gone pretty far down the rabbit hole of like what would a homeschooling process look like? What would a microschool look like? What would it How would I like find and design a community of peers for them? What would their day look like? How would I integrate that with my work?

And, you know, I could definitely end up doing that in some way, you know, it's not, it's not the path that I'm on, but like, I don't think that you can have a plan beyond 5 years in life. I think 5 years is the event horizon beyond which you cannot see. So.

[41:27] Paul: Yeah. Even, even 5 years seems pretty far now that I have an 11-month-old.

[41:33] Matt Bateman: It's like.

[41:33] Paul: Let's wait till she walks. But yeah, it's fascinating. I think one of the most interesting things I've experienced is since having a kid, everyone asks, what are you gonna do for school? And no one really asks like, what are you gonna do for learning? Or like agency or personal relationship to work and all these things. And like a lot of these things get so simplified.

I'd actually suggest to people on the Montessori site, I'll link to it. You guys have an amazing exploration of the history of education. And a lot of these modern scripts are not actually like the full story. Like I think there's this meme that, oh, it's industrialized education for factory workers. I've dug into that in the past and there actually was some experiments that were trying to do like hundreds of kids in a room.

[42:37] Matt Bateman: Taylor.

[42:37] Paul: And yeah, around, around that time. And it was pretty much abandoned. So it's actually this very different tradition, which was pretty interesting to read about again. And I think you guys do a pretty good job of capturing that. But it might be interesting just to share a bit around some of that history. There's, I mean, there's tons on the site, so you don't have to go into all of it, but.

[43:03] Matt Bateman: Yeah, I mean, the kind of like skipping way ahead to modern times, basically the way that I think about education and parenting and not schooling and like develop, supporting development, supporting your children's development is that it is not a fully solved problem. It is one of the great, frontiers that I— I mean, people say things like, this is what like a good education used to look like, and they're like— I don't— there was never a golden age of education. I think education is bad right now and that it used to be better in certain ways, but there was never really a golden age of education in which we had it all figured out. Um, but the kind of— I mean, the interesting thing about modern schooling and modern education is that for 2,500, 2,600 years, education was most fundamentally about values.

It was about raising children who were good, who were citizens, who were pious, if you were religious. I mean, the values change from location to location. But the thing that parents were most overriding concerned with was, I mean, philosophers, like, wrung their hands. It's like, wow, like, this seems like a really good guy, but his children suck. His children are really— So it's not like good people have good children. So that, and that's scary.

Like, what if my children turn out rotten? That can be really really mess up your life and mess up their lives. And so people were really interested in this question. And so that was most fundamentally what education was about. And the second thing that it was about, and this is where school comes in, is school, the advent of schooling just coincides with the advent of literary culture. Like it's just about literacy because it turns out that learning how to read and write is just not natural.

I think you can do it in a kind of more natural way, but like everybody learns how to speak. But if you want to learn how to read and write, especially if you want to learn how to read and write before punctuation and spacing and capitalization have been invented, where it's just a scrawl on the Phoenician alphabet or ancient Greek script or whatever, it takes a lot of drilling and— or people thought at the time it takes a lot of drilling and practice and deliberate work. And you want to assign a tutor to this and you want a collection of students and you want to charge for it. The schooling infrastructure really comes around literacy. And then these two things get unified.

So it's like, oh, in teaching the child how to read and write, we're selecting texts that are morally elevating, that really convey what it means to be an Athenian citizen or what it means to be a, you know, pious child in Byzantium or whatever it is. And so the canon gets imparted through this intense, really intense literacy education.

[45:32] Paul: And if you—

[45:32] Matt Bateman: if the more advanced you get, the more moral education you get. I mean, it's like, oh, now you're doing your own writing now. You're doing rhetoric and speeches. Like you're imitating the speeches of Pericles. You're imitating, like you've memorized the Bible. Like you've memorized the speeches of Jefferson and Washington.

Like you kind of have this moral canon that you're referencing. So that was always the standard for school basically until the 20th century. And now school is not about, it is still about literacy, but it's also about other things, other kinds of technical skills. Have in modern times come to compete with literacy as valuable economic things. It's like you should learn some math and science. It's not just we live in a literary culture now.

We live in an industrial culture. And the other thing is people are very skeptical. And this is the new thing, the new, new thing. People are very skeptical that education can help you become good or that it should help you become good. And that is the kind of like modern aberration that like requires thought and explanation. And I think it's wrong.

I think that education is about values and there's a question as to what that should look like. I don't think it should be propaganda. I don't think it should be indoctrination. I don't think that it should be classical education. Like I do think that classical education is basically propaganda, but classical education, how it occurred. Throughout most of history.

But, like, you just, how can you not think about that as a parent? Like, what is, what is this person? Does it matter to you what kind of, like, what the person, what kind of adult they grow up to be? You know, like, and then is anything that you do as a parent going to affect that? Like, I think yes, there's tons of things that, that you do as a parent that will affect that and tons of things that happen in school that affect that. So, um, that's the kind of history in a nutshell.

It's, it's about the rise and decline and then possible modern rebirth of the role of values in education.

[47:32] Paul: Yeah, it's, it's interesting to see, like, you, you saw this, um, shift at Harvard, for example, where they taught a very rigid— everyone took the same classes, it was this sort of standard education, and then there was this reform movement where it was like, well, everyone should be able to choose sort of their own practical things. And I mean, that's basically still the model we have, just a lot more, a lot more options now.

[48:02] Matt Bateman: Yeah.

[48:02] Paul: And yeah, like when I was in college, it was like, okay, here's like 4 gen ed classes. Now have fun and fill in the cracks however you wish.

[48:12] Matt Bateman: Yeah, and I actually think that that's not a bad— there's certain things about higher education, that model that I like. I mean, it's funny, like what you're referencing is like in 1860 or 1858 or whenever it was, the idea of electives in college was radical. Like it was like, whoa, like, you know, go back to your homestead hippie. Like here we teach Greek to everyone, you know? And now it's the kind of normal way to think about college and higher education. And I think that that's good.

And I actually think like, I think most of the problems with higher education are downstream of problems with K-12. It's not so much of the higher ed model as, well, I mean, I guess you could run the equation in both directions, but I mean, yeah, the model of kind of like there's general education and you also have choices and you also have a tremendous amount of latitude as to like when you study and how you structure your time and maybe you can get a job throughout college. Like that, I mean, that kind of basic structure is not bad.

[49:09] Paul: Yeah. And like, what was the effect of that shift? Because I think Montessori was sort of reacting to this and trying to integrate. Um, and I think you sort of point out that Montessori gets grouped in with this modern education, but sort of is a completely different way of looking at education. Yeah.

[49:29] Matt Bateman: Yeah.

[49:29] Paul: So like the practical and work connection.

[49:32] Matt Bateman: So kind of in that 2,500-year period that I described, the method of teaching children how to read and write, how to speak, and also moral values, that whole package was very rote. I mean, years of drills of cop— like, here's the— like, the teacher gives you the model and you copy the model. That's the ba— I mean, it gets more complicated. It gets watered down, not watered down. It gets moderated, I guess, by some thinkers. And the Enlightenment, so it's not quite as like corporal punishment driven.

But the model is like, you know, the teacher tells you to do something, which is copying a model, and you do that thing and you do it enough times and in enough ways until you've internalized it somehow. And students have always hated that. Always hated that. I mean, we have letters from students in Hellenistic Egypt complaining about, you know, their school. And we have letters from parents to the teachers in Hellenistic Egypt being like, if my son complains again, beat him, you know, like That was the kind of— and that model, when education started to get in the modern world in the 18— there's this kind of period in the 1850s to the 1900s where a lot of countries start institutionalizing school and professionalizing the teacher class. That's the basic model that gets institutionalized and professionalized is a pretty rote, rigid model.

You know, one rod, one rule, one curriculum for every child. And that is— I mean, Montessori is very much reacting against that. She does not think that this is how people learn. She doesn't think that this is how school should be. And a lot of people agreed with Montessori on this point, on this particular point of like, there's got to be a better way. We've got to be able to make it more enjoyable, give children more freedom, allow them to exercise their agency somehow.

The thing that makes Montessori a little bit different is that Montessori also thought that the stuff that you learn in school, like math and literacy and history, was in fact really important and that there should be a way to have a kind of curriculum that everybody works through in a pretty rigorous way in a context where there's also a lot of agency and freedom and choice. And, um, I mean, you see, you see this debate play out today. Like there's unschooling people who think, I mean, unschooling can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people, but there are kind of progressive modes where it's just like Montessori is way too much structure for them. They don't like that there's like a curriculum and you're supposed to use it in a certain way and go through it in a certain sequence.

And, um, even if it's individualized, the pace at which you do it and the times at which you do it, like that, that's too much structure on the progressive mode where it's just like, just leave the child be. And Montessori didn't think you should leave the child be. Um, so, um, there's a, there's an interesting debate there.

[52:20] Paul: Yeah. I'm, I'm curious, how have you looked into Asian education as much? Because I know, like, literacy just takes a lot longer.

[52:32] Matt Bateman: Yeah.

[52:33] Paul: And it is an intense period of rote memorization. I mean, my wife grew up in Taiwan, and just like, her schooling system is still very tied to sort of that approach, even through high school.

[52:47] Matt Bateman: So I have looked into this in China. We have 8 schools in China that kind of divested from them, but we built and set up 8 Montessori schools in China. And then we have Mandarin immersion programs in the US. It's freaking hard. I mean, the question of literacy in the Montessori system for like a non-alphabetic writing system is very tricky.

[53:13] Paul: Just takes a lot longer.

[53:15] Matt Bateman: It takes a lot longer. So the alphabet is very, like, almost like mathematically abstract, like the English alphabet. There are 26 letters and everything is made out of these letters. And there's, yeah, there's some spacing and punctuation, but basically, like, you know, you're mapping phonemes to graphemes and that's how the system works. That's not how simplified characters or traditional characters in Chinese work. But there are patterns.

It's not like, it's not pure, like, these are hieroglyphs and you have to memorize them, like different things and different Different parts of the character can mean different things and there are kind of rudiments that you can build up from. And so there are Montessorians who are doing very interesting work and trying to figure out like, what is a system? I don't— lots of people claim that they have, they have, we've got it worked out. We've got the Montessori system all applied, but they all disagree with one another. And so, um, I, I think it's an interesting question. Um, it's an interesting pedagogical question as to kind of what that looks like and how it looks.

Um, it might very well involve more. More practice, but learning how to read and write in English involves a lot of, a lot of, it involves a lot of rigorous practice. The question is just how does it have to be?

[54:18] Paul: Yeah. How do you, coming back to this whole like, oh, we're training people to be part of the creative class.

[54:24] Matt Bateman: Yeah.

[54:24] Paul: Like in the modern world, it is so hard to sort of separate anything from employment and sort of the status around different types of employment and money. Like especially in the US. And you see like a lot of these alternative schools. I see them in Austin and it's like, we will train your kid to be startup founders. And it's like, whoa, what's the, what's the underlying like belief system here? And yeah, it just seems like a trap to fall into.

In that regard?

[55:05] Matt Bateman: Yeah. So it's, it's, it's extra, it's, it's a very tricky trap. Um, partly because the person making the decision about their education is not the student until college, at the earliest college is one that the child typically, not the earliest, but that's when, that's when it typically happens. Um, it's the parent. And so, um, and there's a question as to like, what does it mean to be market viable? What is the messaging?

What do parents want? And I mean, parents want their children to be happy, but also successful. And that means something. Pretty specific to a lot of parents. It's also hard because I'm, I'm like a little bit, I don't agree with we're going to train your child to be a startup founder. I think that that's awful, but there's something to it.

And, and the, the something to it is we have a model of what a founder looks like that is positive and good and that they're entrepreneurial. They don't take things for granted. They go out and they solve problems. There's a lot of virtues associated with entrepreneurship and founding, especially if you're in certain social circles. And I don't think that we have terminology to describe what those virtues look like in the non-founder case. So let's say that you have somebody who's, I don't know, an accountant.

So you have a grown-up who's an accountant. There is such a thing as being a high agency accountant. And it doesn't mean that you start your own accounting firm and like you can, you can just do your job that you have decided that you like and value in a good way where you're thoughtful about it and you have your values and you, and you have your way that it relates to your hobbies and your family life that you have thought about and that you have chosen. And from the outside, like if you just kind of squint and look from afar, you're like this, like accountants are like this, this high agency accountant doesn't look that different. From like a typical accountant. But I just, I think that there is a huge difference.

There's a world of difference between people who approach their lives in this way and people who don't. And we don't have, I don't think that we have a good vocabulary for saying, no, no, no, it's not about being a founder. It's about being high agency. And yeah, that might mean that you become a founder, but you could do anything with that. You could be a barista and be high agency. Like people are just like, what are you talking about?

Like that doesn't scan to that. I mean, this is what I'm writing my book about. And so I can go on about this topic. But so I think what I want education to give is agency. They value work. They know things.

They love human beings. Like these kind of core 4 values. And the models, the concrete models for that tend to be exceptional people. And then all of a sudden, if you kind of start talking about exceptional people, then it's like the exceptional people are the ones that count. But what's the model for the non-exceptional people? The kind of normal, as in typical, person who is just unusually healthy.

And it's hard to describe. I mean, when you think about your— you say you have a son or a daughter, sorry, daughter, right?

[58:00] Paul: Daughter.

[58:01] Matt Bateman: When you think about your daughter and you think about what you want for her in life, it's not— there's more to, I suspect, I'm going to put words in your mouth now. There's more to it than just like, I want her to do whatever she wants and be happy. It's like, Like, yeah, but like there's a, there's a look to that. Like what? It's not just like I want her to be intentional, you know, I want her to be thoughtful. I want her to be honest.

And I want her to have some of these kind of like, I want her to be high agency in a certain way. She's the one in the driver's seat. She's the one deciding. So what does it look like to be in the driver's seat of your life if you're living a life that's not extraordinary? I think that that is a real question and people don't have vocabulary to describe that.

[58:43] Paul: Yeah, it's, uh, yeah, it's, it's something I think about a lot. And it's, it's interesting. You started with values in our conversation, and we've been starting to put together, like, what are the values we want to prioritize? And then when you do this, you realize if you're prioritizing values, you're trading off other things, right? Because you can't have it all. And once you come up against institutions, you are having to make these trade-offs and you're really just doing your best.

Like, I mean, I've only have one kid now, but man, I have so much compassion for parents trying to figure this all out. It's a lot and it's hard.

[59:28] Matt Bateman: I mean, here's what I would say to parents who want to do something radical but who are running into the real world. The kind of surface area of the real world and being like, oh, college and jobs and like, these are real things. Like, I don't think that people who are like, it doesn't matter where you go to college or if you go to college or like what— I think parents should be thinking about these things. I think that the white pill, the kind of truth that will set you free is that the only thing that matters in K-12 education for the standard path is the last year or two of high school. That's the only thing that matters. It's how, like, what does your transcript look like for high school?

Nobody's going to look at your elementary school transcript. Nobody cares if you went to like, like a hippie, a hippie Montessori school. What do your standardized test scores look like? I mean, there's other things that matter too in terms of, you know, what kind of person are you? What kind of projects have you done? But doing a non-standard educational path is better for those things.

So, so the question is just, can you get a look, a kind of like good test scores, good grades look going down a very nonstandard path. Yes, you can. And it's not that— it's way— it's hard, but it's not— it's way easier than probably most people think it is. It does not mean that you need to lock in to a certain path when your child is 6. It means that you need to think about when your child is in the 16 to 18 range, you know, who is this child now and what does their kind of exit look like? What does that exit ramp look like for them and how can we design for it?

If you think that K-12 education is really good at getting people into college because of what it does in elementary school, you're just— I think you're just, you're just wrong. Like, it's, it's much narrower than that.

[01:01:09] Paul: I love that reframe. Even as you're saying it, it's like, oh, that, that is so obvious now. And I mean, I've talked to many homeschoolers, and around 16 years old is when a lot of homeschoolers do decide to go to school, right, and participate in a high school, either for the social reasons or just— it's just a useful way to prepare to get into college.

[01:01:33] Matt Bateman: Yep. And it's— I mean, it's, it's even crazier that I'm saying, because, um, what really matters for most people is what college you get into. It almost doesn't matter whether or not you finish the degree. I mean, that's— so for some degrees it does matter, but it's like There's this period when you're 17 where like all of the status games like crystallize and come to a head. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it does help to think about that time. I also think you can have a good life not going to college, but, but colleges, college critics often greatly overstate their case.

Like there's a lot of good things that happen at college.

[01:02:06] Paul: Well, most of them have college degrees, right? Most of them have college degrees.

[01:02:10] Matt Bateman: Yeah.

[01:02:11] Paul: Yeah. Well, I think what they miss, I mean, my parents didn't go to college. I think what you get going to college is really this, like, you're tapping into this broader ecosystem of like jobs and how the world is working and how the global economy is working, that without that knowledge, it is just very hard to have flexibility and try things unless you have that guidance from other places.

[01:02:39] Matt Bateman: Yeah, there's a— it's a ramp to the world. Not a perfect ramp at all. I'm very critical of the ramp in a lot of ways, but it is a ramp to the world in a way that high school isn't. And the peer group that you get—

[01:02:51] Paul: Well, I think it was for me. It was for me because I didn't have that exposure. So it was like this overwhelming, like, oh my gosh, I didn't even know how the world worked before this. But could I have left at 20 years old without finishing the degree? Probably, but I didn't want to run that experiment.

[01:03:11] Matt Bateman: Right. Yeah. And also like the better the university you get into, the more valuable that is. Like if you've gotten into Harvard, it's almost like you can drop out. People know that you got into Harvard, right? Whereas if you got into like UT Austin, like I mean, UT Austin's a good school, but it doesn't have the same cachet.

[01:03:26] Paul: Though I am meeting more people dropping out of this default path.

[01:03:30] Matt Bateman: I am too. Yeah, I am too. And it's doable. Yep.

[01:03:34] Paul: Yeah, I've— and I'm sort of worried, like, people are taking my book and be like, I dropped out of college. I'm like, is it because of my book? Like, we hedge, hedge the exposure of my risk here. But they're very confident in what they're doing. And like, I'm always blown away by like just the determination of these people I'm meeting.

[01:03:56] Matt Bateman: It's fine. I mean, I think the worst case scenario for Most things are two-way doors. And I think a mistake that a lot of parents make in particular is they think of education as like a pretty narrow path that you have to walk. And it's like, you can drop out and re-enroll. Like, it doesn't, like nobody cares, you know?

[01:04:14] Paul: So. Well, I think that's the powerful thing I've been thinking a lot about because I talk to a lot of young parents now and the way they're framing it, the implicit assumption is that like you have to get into this path at 4 to 5 years old or that's it. Right. And that just seems crazy to me because you do talk to parents of older children and everything is a lot more flexible. You're going to adapt to your kids' needs. And there are a lot of choices in today's world.

[01:04:44] Matt Bateman: Yeah, there are a lot of choices. I think, and the illusion of needing to lock in early is exacerbated by very specific school markets where that has some I don't think it's true in these markets, but it seems more plausible like in New York City or Hong Kong or like, I mean, there's kind of very well-developed institutional old money driven paths to the Ivy League. Like that's the— those are the places where it's truest that like if you kind of play your cards right and set your child up, you know, it's pretty likely that they'll get into Yale or something. And if you get into Yale, like, as a parent, you're like, I got my child into Yale. Like I've done my job, right? The rest is up to them.

It's an easy trap to fall into. I don't think that's strictly true of those places, but it's kind of more true than it is elsewhere because there's just a limited number of schools and there's especially a limited number of schools that have these kind of like reputations and feeder percentages into ultra elite colleges. But I just, I don't think that you have to or should think of your children or life that way. Like what's going to get them into Stanford? I would strongly discourage parents from thinking about I'm going to optimize for getting my child into Stanford. That is—

[01:05:57] Paul: well, I find it funny too. It's like I'm mostly focused on just helping her poop right now. It's like the problems and challenges of the week, it just changes so much. I'd love to hear more about the book. What if you had to say like one question that's alive and what's driving the thread for the book? What, what is pulling you there?

[01:06:21] Matt Bateman: I want to, I want to write a book about values in education. That's fully my view of the values that matter. And that's also fully my view of education. And, um, and there's all sorts of, if you think that values are important in education, there's all sorts of very tricky questions that come up about whether you're trampling over your child and imparting them with values. Isn't the high agency thing to do to let them kind of figure this stuff out and develop their own value system? And the answer to that question has to be at least sort of yes.

And so I think that where a lot of educational movements that I think are doing good things that I like and respect, like the kind of neoclassical movement in education, you know, is interesting and worth looking into. I think where they fall flat is they are value-centric, but they're also traditional in a lot of ways. Like it is pretty ideologically explicit to the students kind of what's going on. It's not like a kind of implicit system in which they're allowed to navigate things themselves. So I don't know. I mean, this is a long-winded way of saying my book is about what does the good adult look like?

And what does an education that will actually developmentally support a child on that path look like? So it's a book about ethics and the philosophy of education. And I think, I think even just asking the question of like, what does the good adult look like is a lot of, going to be a lot of the value of the book. I just, I mean, I've talked to hundreds, if not thousands of parents and educators about this and that, that the question of what kinds of adults are we trying to create is usually not top of mind.

[01:08:05] Paul: Yeah. I love that question. It's, I was talking to somebody and he said, don't worry about the school or the things like this. Ask the question of what kind of humans are these places creating consistently, right? And I thought that was such a, it's just such an interesting frame to look at things and sort of go backwards from that. And you start making some different trade-offs in how you're thinking about things.

Pretty quick from that starting point.

[01:08:37] Matt Bateman: Yeah. And the kind of scary thing is once you start thinking from that starting point is that even schools that claim to have nothing to do with values, we just teach your kid math, like, you know, or we offer vocational skills. Like there is a value system there. There's really no getting away from it in education. Like whether, like, I mean, you're teaching children what to love is implicitly is the creative class or academic achievement or something like that. There's something there.

And like, a lot of— even though I think modern school kind of explicitly disavows values, my whole critique of modern school and my whole schooling experience and the schooling experience that you described is there is a value system there. There's a script, as you put it, and it's bad and it's taught to you very effectively.

[01:09:22] Paul: Yeah.

[01:09:23] Matt Bateman: How do we—

[01:09:23] Paul: grades are more important than everything is sort of the value.

[01:09:28] Matt Bateman: And there's a rat race and there's a system and like your status, your place in that system matter. That's what's important. And even if nobody says that's what's morally good, what they're conveying is this is what matters. This is what's important. This is what you should value. And like, if we're going to uproot that script, what are we uprooting it?

What are we changing it to? I think, you know, you have to be very conscious about that. And then what does it take? What does an education system that actually does that look like? I don't think it looks anything like traditional schooling. And so, um, you know, I also don't think it looks like unschooling or classical education.

I, I think, I think it really is like, you know, Montessori 2.0 or something like that.

[01:10:06] Paul: So I love that. Well, I am so glad you're working on this, um, a little ahead of me with, uh, the ages of the kids too. So hopefully you're leading the way and sort of shaping new ideas around this. You're continuing a long tradition of people that just continue to ask this question. And I love how you pointed out, we don't have the answers to this. We're just continuing to ask the same questions people like Aristotle were asking thousands of years ago.

[01:10:39] Matt Bateman: And literally, I can give you passages from Aristotle where he's asking these questions. I mean, it's amazing. And I also, I probably sound like I have all the answers. I don't think that I have all the answers. All the answers. I have a kind of direction and a perspective that I'm confident in, but there's so many unknowns.

[01:10:57] Paul: So I actually pulled the Aristotle quote from one of your lectures I was watching before. It was like, at present, there are differences of opinions as to the proper task to be set, right? And then it goes on and confusing questions arise out of the education that actually prevails. And it is not at all clear whether the pupils should practice pursuits that are practically useful or morally edifying or higher accomplishments, for all these views have won the support of some judges. It's like, wow, that is— we're still asking.

[01:11:33] Matt Bateman: I mean, what are we— like, what is it? Is it education? Vocational training? You know, professional, useful, practically useful, as Aristotle puts it. Is it moral training? Is it like, is there some sort of elevated exercise of— I mean, in the Athenian aristocracy, it was like philosophy and politics were like the highest aims.

And so we should educate people on those who are capable of them. I don't think that modern schooling has an answer to the question of what education is for. And if you look at the websites, some school websites like private schools will be better about this. But if you look at the websites for like district schools or school districts, Um, in the US it'll be like, our school, our fundamental value in education is vocational success plus critical thinking plus, you know, um, growth mindset plus, uh, you know, the joy of athletics. Like, it's like the kitchen sink. They have no perspective on what it is.

And so they just kind of say everything. And, um, there, there, there are always trade-offs. And even where there aren't trade-offs, there's a question. There's an important question for parents and educators, which is What is fundamental? Like, what is— like, it's not— it can't just be that everything is equal and we give everything a balanced time of day. It's like, what is— what do you actually think is driving education?

[01:12:44] Paul: I love that you're exploring these questions. It's a beautiful question. Where do you want to send people to learn more about what you're up to, some of your writing and things like that? I'll definitely link up to— like, The Montessori is such a good resource. Yeah. There's so much good stuff on there.

[01:13:02] Matt Bateman: So the Monocle website is like the kind of like crystallized collection of most of my writing, um, to date, most of my kind of essays. The best place to just follow me is Twitter. If you're a Twitter person, I imagine that a lot of your listeners are Twitter people. I'm @mbateman on Twitter, like M as in Matt and then Batman with an E in the middle. Um, Bateman. Um, um, I mean, I post all of my new essays and new work and book updates and whatnot there.

So in addition to various pictures of my children and whatnot.

[01:13:32] Paul: So fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Matt. It was a lovely conversation and I will be following your work.

[01:13:42] Matt Bateman: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. This was a delight.