Steve Levitt

It was only when I graduated that

and went and worked in consulting that I realized that I actually liked ideas and I was curious about ideas.

Do you tell that story to these would-be high school students of yours?

I have not told that story to the high school students.

Well, you're right.

It's really hard to convince people.

And the only people who really came to our school were people who were so deeply dissatisfied with traditional education, mostly because they were bullied or they felt like they didn't fit in.

But I think really the people who will ultimately benefit the most from my approach to education, if it ever takes off,

are the talented people because this rat race that is taking such a toll on the mental health and on the creativity and on the joy of the people who are succeeding is really destructive.

And the subtle thing that we do at our school that I think is maybe the single most powerful thing we do is

is we celebrate a much wider array of accomplishment.

So in a typical school, there's only one way to succeed.

You get straight A's, you get to be the valedictorian, and that is the key to the elite schools.

But at our school, kids are writing their own music and producing it or making stop motion films where they're building with their hands

devices to measure particulates with mechanisms to turn on a fan that sucks the air pollution out.

Or a novella.

One of our students is writing a novella.

You can write an awesome novella and everyone else around you can cheer and say, that is fantastic.

I'm so glad you did that.

Without having at the same time, each student think, oh no, I didn't write a novella.