Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
If you go to a rural school in Africa or you go to one of the most high-end private schools in Sydney, you're basically going to see the same thing, which is this teacher in front of a classroom model of education. Kids should be learning life skills.
They should be learning the skills that are going to help them be successful, like leadership and teamwork, financial literacy, entrepreneurship, public speaking, storytelling.
Mackenzie Price is building the future of education with Alpha School, an AI-powered model that claims to double learning speed.
What does success look like at Alpha School? Do you have a grading system?
Report cards and grades have become meaningless. We have known for 50 years the science of how people learn best, that one-to-one mastery-based tutoring allows students to learn 10 times faster than students who are sitting in a traditional time-based classroom. And what we see in our schools is that our kids are learning twice as much and they're doing it in only two hours a day.
What I'm worried about is that kid that's in grade 12 right now, what does that kid do right now?
I think it's going to be so important to be AI first in whatever it is that you do. Kids today are so trained to become consumers.
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Chapter 2: What are the flaws of the traditional education system?
We want to create creators and contributors, not consumers. Using artificial intelligence to do the subject matter expertise for students is allowing us to raise human intelligence in two ways. First of all,
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Mackenzie, Sonia and I are extremely excited about this conversation today. Let's start off. Can you explain why the traditional education system is failing our kids?
Well, I am so excited to be here, and I love that question because I think there is nothing more interesting or important in our world than how we educate kids.
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Chapter 3: How does the '2 Hour Learning' model work?
In fact, I believe that human potential is our greatest untapped resource, and it all starts with how we educate. And also what's interesting about it is we all have a personal experience with education, right? We all went to school or we've got kids or friends. Kids, friends, you know, friends of kids that went to school.
But when you think about the way that education has been done, it really hasn't changed in a couple of hundred years. Right. You think about a school. It's one teacher teaching a group of kids who are at like one. wildly different levels of knowledge.
So you've got a fifth grade class, you know, take a bunch of 11-year-olds, and some of those kids are very advanced and could be doing work above grade level. Some of those kids are behind, and they could be behind one, two, three grades even. And a teacher has no choice but to teach the curriculum that has been assigned for that grade, no matter where it hits kids.
Chapter 4: Why are report cards and grades considered meaningless?
And it's just a wildly inefficient model. And one of the things that's really interesting to think about, you know, you're in Australia, I'm in the United States. If you go to a rural school in Africa...
Chapter 5: What skills should kids be learning instead of traditional subjects?
or you go to one of the most high-end private schools in Sydney, you're basically gonna see the same thing, which is this teacher in front of a classroom model of education. You know, the building might be a little nicer in one or the other. And the challenge for that is that it's very hard for kids to learn when they're not given material at the level or the pace that they need to learn.
And for me, this turned really personal at two different points in my life. First of all, when I was growing up going to school, I was one of those kids who was actually very good at school, but I hated it. What about you guys? Did you guys like school growing up?
I hated it.
I hated it as well. You did. Okay. So we're kindred spirits in this thing. And, you know, when I was growing up, I was always that kid who would like raise my hand and ask the teacher, like, why do I need to know this? You know, what's the reason for needing to know this?
And unfortunately, it was actually very hard sometimes for the teacher to give a response that I actually, you know, believed in. But I also, because I was motivated to do well in school, because I really wanted to go to this specific university, I knew how to get the grades.
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Chapter 6: How does personalized learning enhance student performance?
I knew how to play the game of school. But I just wasn't very bought into it. And so fast forward a number of years when it was time for my husband and myself to send our two little girls to school. We sent them to our local school that was kind of down the road. And I very quickly saw... that nothing had changed in the way that classes were run during all of this time.
And that's, again, it's been true for a couple of hundred years since the Industrial Revolution, which is to be clear, the reason that schools in that kind of one size fits all classroom was created was to teach kids how to be compliant, to be rule followers and to do what they were told because they were getting ready to move them into factory work.
Totally. Look, I think you're taking the entire audience back to their schooling years right now. You've taken me back as well. And what I remember now is that when I was in English class and I was in a higher level English class, I was kind of the king of the classroom, right? Because they would say, come up and do an oral. I would stand up.
I would love being at the front and talking to the class and kind of presenting to the room. In mathematics, I was the failure in the class and I was kind of shunned to the back and always a bit like, that was where I was embarrassed. So I would go through school some days feeling great and sometimes feeling like an absolute failure. So I guess, is that what you're working on now?
Yeah. I mean, think about that, Simon. What you said is so true. Our identities get so wrapped up in how we perform. And I was actually one of those people, too. I wasn't very good in math. So I grew up saying, OK, I'm bad at math. I'm not a math kid.
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Chapter 7: What role does AI play in the Alpha School model?
I'm not a I'm a I'm a girl who doesn't do math. And I will tell you, there's been a lot of research studies out there. And there's never been a study that says girls are not actually good at math. But it's the way that we go.
And the challenge and the reason that Simon, you and I both had that experience of not being great at math is because when you're going about the process of learning something like math, you start at the fundamentals. You start with addition and subtraction, multiplication and division. Eventually, you're working your way up to algebra. Pretty soon, you're doing calculus.
If you don't have the fundamental concepts really, really solid, it gets very hard to work upon, you know, more sophisticated concepts. So think about like a tower, if you're building a tower, and if you have holes in your academic knowledge, it's really hard to do well on that.
And so that's part of the reason that we're seeing such a problem in our education system globally, and it's gotten even worse since COVID happened, is that you can't take a fifth grader In a traditional classroom and say, hey, let's go back and review some second grade, third grade, fourth grade knowledge that you missed so that you can understand fifth grade.
And I will tell you, it's one of the most exciting things that we see in our schools is when we can take kids and we put them in the level of. of knowledge that they need to be learning at the pace that works for them, it totally changes the way they see themselves. We believe that competence leads to confidence. And so that little girl who was just like me suddenly goes, you know what?
It turns out I'm not bad at math. I understand math now and I'm good at it. And it totally changes the identity of how people see themselves, which we sorely need.
Mackenzie, I wish Alpha School existed when we were growing up. Can you talk us through why that traditional teacher model, like the teacher in front of the classroom, why that doesn't work and what sets Alpha School apart? Do you guys have teachers?
Well, I think a great way to think about it is, again, think about the experience that Simon mentioned he had. Or, for example, my daughter, when she went off to kindergarten, when my daughter Peyton started in kindergarten, she already knew how to read. But a lot of the kids in the class didn't.
And so the teacher would would show alphabet and say, this is an A, this is a B, this is a C for cat. You know, it makes the sound. And, you know, Peyton was already at a reading level. So she had to kind of sit and twiddle her thumbs board. Right. Now, when you think about a teacher explaining a concept. A teacher explains a concept once.
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Chapter 8: What is the future of education according to the guest?
And that's what we're really seeing there. And I'll tell you what, guys, you It is amazing to see what kids are capable of. We believe at Alpha that kids are limitless. And so our job as a school is to provide an environment that helps really unlock that potential. And when you give kids the ability to say, first, most importantly, time. Thank you so much for having me. crazy awesome things.
And that's true even at the pre-K level for four-year-olds that we're seeing. Kids are just doing awesome, cool things. And so what we're seeing is our students, by the time they're in high school, they're starting to create businesses that are making money. They're building out things that just wouldn't have been possible.
And it's partly because they are AI native and they know how to use these tools, again, not to cheat, but to give them superpowers.
Mackenzie, if your students are already building businesses and I guess in the workforce, so to speak, how are parents reacting to this? Are they overwhelmed by how much like the amazing achievements these kids are doing?
They, they are, you know, it's interesting. So when people first hear about what we're doing at school and you probably were in this camp, you know, at first you're like, this sounds like this weird dystopian robot terminator, no adults, no human interaction, a bunch of kids just sitting on their screens, you know, completely isolated.
And then when people hear more and they understand what the environment is like, it totally blows the roof off of what, what they've realized is possible. Um, One, you know, just getting to see the amount of human interaction that these kids are getting to spend time doing and building life skills, but then getting to build out these things.
So we we constantly get I get notes probably every day from alpha parents just saying, hey, I wanted to let you know. My kid is a whole different kid since coming to Alpha. They're thriving. It's amazing what they can do. They've inspired me to go out and build and iterate and create.
And that's, by the way, another topic that I think is really important for us to think about kind of when you think about on a larger level. Kids today are so trained to become consumers, right? It's like sit and scroll TikTok or play video games all day. And one of the things we believe is that we want to create creators and contributors, not consumers.
And so when we were able to teach kids, okay, instead of playing video games all day, why don't you learn to vibe code and build your own video game and then host a shout casting tournament where you work on your public speaking skills.
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