Catching Up! | Junior Republics, Global Flourishing, and Education Conductors?

In this episode of Catching Up, Nate McClennen and Mason Pashia explore Indiana’s groundbreaking charter microschools initiative, designed to re-engage students through public microschools, and the fascinating history of Junior Republics—youth-led communities that once offered immersive real-world learning experiences. The duo also examines the importance of project management skills starting in kindergarten, the role of empathy in leadership, and the potential for education to combat tribalism while fostering the common good. Additionally, they unpack insights from the Global Flourishing Study, discussing how education can better equip learners with the skills and mindset to thrive in a rapidly evolving world. Tune in for an engaging conversation packed with actionable ideas and inspiring reflections!

Outline

• (00:00) Introduction
• (06:33) Employer Collaboration in Education
• (09:37) AI in Education: Survey Insights
• (12:12) Deep Dive: Indiana Charter Micro Schools
• (16:14) Deep Dive: Junior Republics
• (23:49) Real World Learning in 2025
• (32:06) Purpose of Education and Tribalism
• (43:36) Signs of Human Expression
• (48:40) What’s That Song?

Introduction

Nate McClennen: Hey Mason. Welcome back.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, it’s great to see you. It’s been too long.

Nate McClennen: What are you covering this week? What are you thinking about?

Mason Pashia: So this week, um, I’m thinking about what can educators and managers learn from classical conductors based on a conversation I heard. Uh, super interesting stuff. And we also dig into Junior Republics, a pretty unbelievable part of American history that has been pretty much lost to time. How about you? How.

Nate McClennen: am excited to hear about that. I know nothing about Junior Republic. So, uh, I wanted to share a bunch of things on our deep dive. So really interested in Indiana Charter micro schools that have, uh, one launch last year and it’s, or a plan last year and it’s launching into next year. Um, and thinking about the purpose of schools.

Really small questions about tribalism versus the common good. And then I’m interested in this global flourishing study. Uh, and it can that be a common profile of learners. We’ll talk a little bit about that and the six different characteristics that they found when they surveyed everybody. And then we’re gonna dive into the importance of project management skills starting in kindergarten, uh, all the way up through grade 12 to really set up young people for success.

And we really just don’t do enough in that area. So it’s gonna be an exciting show today. Uh, if you’re listening. Bear with us. It’s a long show, but there’s a lot of good information in it today. So, uh, and then stick around for the music at the end.

Mason Pashia: As always. Yep. All right. Let’s jump in.

Nate McClennen: Let’s jump in.

We are catching up all catching up to futures. Brave, but also abrupt. The

Nate McClennen: How was your vacation? It sounds like you went backpacking and hiking and things like that.

Mason Pashia: It was really good. It was a lot of socializing, but also a lot of outdoor time.

Nate McClennen: What did you learn about the ecosystem you were walking in that you didn’t know before? Anything?

Mason Pashia: So apparently the fish in Washington are very hard to catch. My younger brother has been fly fishing a lot in Colorado and has gotten very good at catching them. And he caught none while he was up here and is like, this is and he bought specific flies. So I think that that is, that’s a pretty big learning.

I also. I had never seen as many starfish as I saw this break.

Nate McClennen: Starfish are really cool? Do you know how they eat? Have you, have you read that?

Mason Pashia: This is actually a formative part of my relationship with my wife. Yes, we were.

Nate McClennen: I can’t wait to hear that story. Go.

Mason Pashia: we, we were just out we were at Low Tide and there was a starfish there and I googled how do starfish eat? ’cause I had that question. I learned it, and it was pretty amazing. And so I was like, oh, Danielle, like, do you, do you know how Starfish eat? And she’s like, no, I don’t. And then as I start saying it, she just starts completing my sentence and she was.

I guess I did. And then like, it comes up all the time whenever one of us finishes the other person’s sentence. It’s just like, just like starfish eating. Yeah. They

Nate McClennen: they, like, they invert their stomachs, right? They, they put their stomachs out and then they digest and suck it back in again.

Alright. On that note that’s our learning for today. What are the things you’ve been seeing, learning what’s, what’s on your mind?

Mason Pashia: I, this will come up a couple times I think. So, building on something we said last time though, there’s this idea of like portals to the future, right? Where you sort of live the future now and that makes it feel more real and something that actually may come to fruition.

Or you could like prototype living there. I was listening to this conversation, which I’m gonna, I’m gonna bring back it was Tyler Cowen was interviewing the classical composer, David Robertson, and he was talking about whenever the, whenever his orchestra has, is struggling with a piece, he says something that his mentor taught him, which is like, in order to play the part of the song, you have to have it in your brain.

Exactly. Perfect. How you want to hear it, and then you will be able to play it. And I, I, I think it’s just so interesting when all these ideas sort of. When they coalesced later down the line, like the, the future portals thing. Very fun. Fun to live in a portal to the future, but something about the actual performance element of being able to do something only once you’ve been able to fully make how you want it to be so vivid.

Nate McClennen: There’s something about wiring there that must happen in our neurons, right, is that you listen to something long enough and that it gets wired in a certain, I mean, you and I both play music, and if I know this, obviously if you know the song, it’s easier to play it if you’re playing a cover for someone.

But there’s gotta, there, there has to be some interesting wiring that happens. But the idea of playing it back so. If you have to think in your head about what a song sounds like, and that sounds correct. That’s interesting to me.

Mason Pashia: totally. I agree.

Nate McClennen: interesting. Yeah. On, on, I’ve got a couple on my, just interesting things is I think you and I both met him, David Hirsh, who started this group called In Tandem, which is a nonprofit that’s really looking at allowing students to provide feedback to all sorts of things in education.

And that could be new products, new processes, whatever the case may be. Someplace where those who are working in education need. Feedback from students. And so he’s created this group called In Tandem that helps students work on project or, co co coalesce the students around projects that are needed in the environment.

So real world learning experiences, feedback groups, feedback sessions, and I just thought it was really interesting. I think it matches, we know that ASA Teen Voice is that async platform that allows you to get good feedback really quickly from, from teens especially, but, but students who are the main users and learners.

And it was a good reminder for me that, that the work that he’s doing, the work that a ASA is doing, it is easier than ever to get feedback from young people. And young people are the primary recipients of any changes we make in education. So we have no excuses to not work with and co-design with and ask good questions of young people when we’re designing for young people.

Make sense?

Mason Pashia: Totally. I think that’s a really great, a great learning and a good provocation for everyone in our audience.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. And we, you know, we need to do more of that. I love, you know, you and I have talked a lot about how do we get student voice in schools tours, for example. Like, how, how, how are we helping people see the schools from the students’ eyes rather than some sort of polished view of a school or district that says, this is the great things we’re doing, et cetera, but.

What is the real world vision of a student who’s going through the school on a day-to-day basis? And they, there, I know there’s a leadership exercise and I did it when I was a school leader, where you would just spend the day shadowing a one student. And that shadow a student day was super interesting ’cause you’d actually, you realize you’d go class to class and the breaks between class were a frenzy.

You ended up as adults being really, really tired at the end of the day when you truly shadowed a student, so, so that was early options of getting feedback. Of course there’s been surveys, but I love the idea of students who are getting either compensated for or building experience around giving their expert advice to those adults who are building in the space.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I love that too.

Nate McClennen: What else is on your mind? What else did you see this week or last couple weeks?

Mason Pashia: I just saw this report it, it made me. Curious and built on some stuff we talked about. So I wanted to highlight it since we’re sort of following certain trends throughout these conversations.

Employer Collaboration in Education

Mason Pashia: There was a report from EA UP U-P-C-E-A that was talking about the effect of employer understanding on non-degree credentials.

I think that is also the title of the report. And in general it was showing that organizations are super curious about credentials, but some statistic that stood out to me is that they really want to collaborate on making them. So it said that 73% of employers surveyed want to be extremely or very active in the curriculum design if they, and if they were to partner with higher education.

Only 44% of them had ever been approached by a college or university. So I think this is building on this theme of co-creation. And also something I saw a lot when I was researching more like sustainability jobs, is how much unions wanted to be involved in the actual teaching of. Skills and competencies, because a lot of the time they’re on the hook for how something goes.

So I, I just think that this, this is an interesting piece, this invitation the potential for community weaving kind of to build relationships between organizations in higher ed and hopefully K 12 as well. It, it just stood out to me.

Nate McClennen: It made me, it makes me think, I was listening to a podcast on, on state of CTE and how. The, the formal designation of high demand pathways is important in more and more states. So, districts get better points of students are graduating in a high, high demand pathway as determined by local industry or regional industry or state industry, which makes total sense.

But the, the barrier there was that the, the, the process to determine what is a high. Need pathway was really slow. So it was like two to five years process. And so there was no industry can change really quickly. You could have a new company or a new industry emerge in a state, and that’s gonna be faster than maybe a two to five year shift.

And so this, this goes back to how do we. Reduce the bureaucracy so that when an employer says, Hey, I, I wanna be involved because I have a pathway that needs to exist, or a credential that needs to exist, or curriculum that would be really helpful. How do they quickly, kind of like in tandem for the student’s version, we need an in tandem version for employers where they can constantly be putting feedback into a, a school district to say, Hey, this is what we need right now.

Then the school district has the ability, both policy wise and resource wise to pivot quickly to make sure that every student is graduating with something that’s meaningful in the moment rather than that was meaningful a couple years ago. So I I, it’s interesting connections and it’ll be interesting if, certainly there are solutions.

We know that there are employers that are talking to higher ed and talking to K 12, that’s not novel, but as a routine, I’m not sure. It’s super popular in the, in the ecosystem right now.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, no great ideas. I, I think you could also learn from, in that process, you could also learn as an employer or the person designing the credential, like what is working from other credentials. If you had this sort of employer in tandem and you could. Offer feedback, like, oh, we built one, but like we found out that this actually wasn’t a useful criteria for saying that they are capable of doing this work or something.

So long term, it could also shape what it actually means to be a credential as well as helping build these pathways, which I know you and I think

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Yeah, no, that makes sense.

AI in Education: Survey Insights

Nate McClennen: Hey, the last thing I was thinking about was Gallup did a survey, and this was reported out by the 74 million is that they, they were surveying the last year, so 24, 25 school year educators and, and on AI use. And so the data suggested that 60% of those responding used AI this year.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Nate McClennen: That, that saved up to six hours of work per week. The other data points that were interesting in the survey were that 19% of schools had an AI policy, so less than 20% had an AI policy. The other 80 did not, and then 68% of educators received no training. ai, I think the, the last two, the policies will emerge.

I’m not too concerned about that. I think there’s a lot of cookie clutter, cookie cutter work that can happen on that. And, and policies are gonna be pretty straightforward. And I think more and more outfits are out there doing development and professional learning on ai. So I actually don’t think that that’s gonna be a big challenge to overcome.

What I’m interested in is the 60% of teachers. Used AI and saved up to six hours of work a week. And so my question is to you is, and to our listeners is, all right, well, well, you’re saving this time. So what happens? And I see, I, I guess I see two options. One is, educators are already overburdened. This is gonna make their lives more realistic and more reasonable, and things like that.

And I, I applaud that. I understand that it’s really hard to be a teacher. On the other hand, if you start saving more and more time because of efficiency, there are opportunities, as you and I have talked about, building better relationships, doing more projects, doing more real world work, et cetera. So I, I’m very curious, as we see 25, 26 come across and 26, 27 is this, I suspect we’re gonna see more and more time saving to some sort of plateau.

But what are we gonna replace it with? So that’s one of the things I was thinking about as I was reading that particular blog post.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, no, I, I think that’s, that is the right question. Spending, sitting with this six hours of work, and even if you agree, I think a lot of this is probably extra outside of the sort of typical domain of teacher hours, like 40 hours a week or whatever. But how. Assuming you get those back within sort of your working day, does that actually make space for you to interface more with students?

Does that make space for you to implement more rigorous like project-based learning experiences? Yeah. Super interesting. Great survey. And I wonder like who did you happen to see who the participants are? Is this people who are sort of gonna be, does it have a good swath of districts

Nate McClennen: it’s, yeah, I think it’s distributed well, statistically relevant. I mean, Gallup did it, so I assume they’re,

Mason Pashia: Yeah, they, they do a good job.

Nate McClennen: significant across multiple demographics, et cetera, et cetera. But I didn’t look at the research, the actual research design of this particular one. So, all right.

Deep Dive: Indiana Charter Micro Schools

Nate McClennen: Let’s, let’s do a couple deep dives. Maybe I’ll, I’ll start out Mason. I am super interested in what’s happening in Indiana with these charter micro schools. And so let’s do a little bit of framing here. So we, we at getting smart, and you and I have talked a lot about micro schools.

In the last couple years, micro schools have really emerged in the private sector as, especially post COVID, as an r and d experiment, and well, trying to serve families better if their, if their kids weren’t being served in the either existing public or existing private systems. So they started these small little micro schools.

But really we’ve been pushing hard on this idea of, of public micro schools, right? How can you create similar scenarios but not in the private sector so that they can be accessible by all and, and Indiana. Passed a, a, a law that allowed a network of micro schools to be part of a charter network, which is the first in the country that has allowed this.

There are some other examples. So you could look at a SU prep, which is a charter school, public charter school in Arizona. They run a charter network. Some of those, they, they do have micro schools, but those micro schools are not standalone. They’re part of their A SU prep digital. Charter school, so Right.

So, so there are examples of that, but these are actually standalone micro schools that are authorized as charters. Another example that already exists is Purdue Polytech, right? Like they have their labs, their, their micro school that started it is a school as part of a charter network, so that’s a little bit closer to Indiana and probably based on a similar set of flexibilities, but in, in this case, the Indiana Charter Micro Schools.

Is going to be ideally a network of public micro schools that are available, community driven, available to all students, and they wanna have hundreds around the state of Indiana. So when you dig into this the first one is gonna open this fall, so month and a half from now. It’s in partnership with a public school district called Eastern Hancock Schools.

This is George Auer, who we know and, and doing really interesting, innovative work and. The, the sense was, is that there were students that were not coming into the public system and yet wanted some sort of schooling for that that was free in public. And so he, so he used this law in partnership with the Indiana Micro School Collaborative and, and Scott Bess and others on that team to say, Hey, we can actually create.

A public micro school, they’re calling it Nature’s Gift. Micro School is east of Indianapolis, and it’s in his district in partnership with his district. But it’s trying to pull students back into the system who may have pulled outta the system, either via homeschool or other private school options. And so it, it’s, it, I, I think it’s super interesting as an, as an opportunity I’ll be very curious to see if states.

Follow this and whether or not there’s a trend of ESA states following it, those who are with education savings accounts or non ESA states pushing and promoting this as an alternative to ESAs. So, interesting plays on the public school public micro school playbook that, that we co-wrote. And just think that there’s a lot of opportunity when you see policy starting to allow for really interesting models.

It’s exciting for me.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that, that’s incredible work. And we love George. If you didn’t catch the podcast that we did with them a couple months ago be sure to check it out. Just a super joyful and amazing individual.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. And it goes, it goes contrary to this idea that school choice is going, always going to be contrary to the interests of the local public school district. And I, I think there’s sometimes when they are at odds and they’re butting heads and, you know, and on my neck of the woods, when we tried to open a public charter school in the late nineties, it, it was approved by the local, it needed to be approved by the local district, and it, it just wasn’t.

There was not there was too much divisiveness around that. But, but I like the idea of how does everybody see it as an asset and especially those in bringing people back into the public system in a way that makes sense. ’cause that benefits everybody. I think

Mason Pashia: Totally. This fits into our abundance versus scarcity conversations.

Nate McClennen: this is absolutely an example of abundance. That’s exactly right. So, so that’s my deep dive. What’s one, what else is on your deep dive list?

Deep Dive: Junior Republics

Mason Pashia: Okay, so I heard about this another past podcast guest Rachel Davidson Humphreys. We had her on a handful of years ago from the Bill of Rights Institute, and I was hanging out with her and some other folks this weekend. And she told me about this thing called the Junior Republics. Do you know about these?

Nate McClennen: I have no, I saw it in our show notes and I have no idea what it is, so you gotta help

Mason Pashia: So you, you probably have some cursory familiarity of this being kind of in the Massachusetts area where you grew up. But there, a recent book came out, I think it was in like 20 21, 20 20 for Jennifer Light called the States of Childhood, and it’s from MIT press.

We’ll put a link in the show notes. There’s a free version online, but I’m gonna do a co a little bit of quoting from her because these things are awesome and I wanna get her words so. These these junior republics were the brainchild of the philanthropist William R. George, and the first one was the George Junior Republic from 1895.

So this happened turn of the century, two centuries ago. And in the, in the Bio Decker guides, it said, travelers should be sure to visit the curious community in Freeville, New York where boys and girls are in charge. The, this miniature Republic modeled on the government in the United States is well worth the detour to observe the legislator Courthouse, jail School, church and Public Library, which is exclusively staffed by citizens aged 14 to 21.

Most of them immigrants and impoverished youth in these towns, they basically made it. So you age out at 21 and you live there from the ages of 10 to 21. Sometimes you could be like five and younger. But they were a response to child labor laws. So they started up as a way to be like, Hey, so students aren’t working anymore, but like.

We actually think this is really important for building life skills. What we’re gonna do is create these environments that are safer because it’s all young people and also let them do these really real world skills. And these lasted for like 60 years and they had more than a thousand of these across the United States.

So they’re, these youth only, they spread to Europe. And they ended up having. These, that basically these young people made their own laws. They sat for civil service exams, they paid all the taxes, they constructed all the buildings, ran all the hotels and restaurants. They brought in news media to cover like what they were doing there.

And they’re just these full-time cities that are exclusively staffed by young people. So it came up in the context of agency, of course, as we were talking about it this weekend. And I just, I had no idea that these existed and it was, it was. So wild that we’ve come so far from that idea. Now to even suggest anything like this would be an absolute nightmare to try and like legislate or make the case for uh,

Nate McClennen: have so many questions, Mason. So, so, okay. So first of all, is it a, is it a, a boarding school situation where they, or are they living in their family homes with their families, et cetera? That’s my

Mason Pashia: No, it, it’s just youth. There is no family. So they all move out into the city. That has been built for young people and then the young people also build,

Nate McClennen: okay. What years was this again?

Mason Pashia: started in 1895 and then sort of petered out after the second World War. ’cause the student, the, these towns were very big on like. Providing a lot of wartime goods. It, it almost felt like a home economics, like, hub during the war for doing all kinds of canned goods, rations,

Nate McClennen: Okay. And did they, did they. Did they spend their entire days in these places? You’re gonna become an expert really quickly. ’cause I’m gonna ask you all these questions and

Mason Pashia: Well, I’m gonna, I’m gonna have to pretend to know them. They spent all their days in the places. There’s like very little research on these, and I haven’t read the full book yet. So I, I think that they were v versions of this, where it was an all year thing and sometimes in the northeast it would maybe be like a summer program where they’d send people up there.

And then over time they became. Something a little different. So they, they transitioned by the end, but specifically this first the George Junior Republic, which later became Freeville New York was was one of these places that was year round. All these people figuring it out

Nate McClennen: and then did they go home to their families AF at night, do you think? Or it was only They were, and there must be adult sup. Was there any adult supervision?

Mason Pashia: from what I could see, no. Aside from like media coming in on occasion.

Nate McClennen: Okay. It’s kind of, I feel like this is a little bit Lord of the flies possibilities here as well. I, I really wanna know research on this. I’m looking at AI right now, and certainly it’s like self-governance, civics engagement, economic independence, educational opportunities. You’re right, this would never fly today, I don’t think.

Really interesting and focused on students that impoverished or, or in the,

Mason Pashia: justice system.

Nate McClennen: justice system, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. What else do you know about them? Have you, what, what else have you learned?

Mason Pashia: I mean, I, I think that it, it was really interesting the ways in which, first, it was a response to child labor. As I said, this became a place to kind of do vocational school and also build life skills. From what I could tell, there wasn’t a lot of negative reporting on this. Like there weren’t a lot of places where this.

Really blew up and floundered. It actually was like a pretty great model. Such, so much so that, like I said, it scaled into Europe and that they kind of took it and ran with it much longer than the United States did. The people have tried to start it since then, and it just hasn’t worked for a number of reasons, like the ones that we’ve just talked about, whether that be safety, whether that be child labor laws, kind of questioning it again, but they said that it resulted in this kind of footprint of both being.

Almost entirely forgotten. Like nobody talks about this. And these scattered miniature community com scattered miniature communities. So I think I’m gonna butcher a German word, but it’s kinder SPI in Germany is a version of this that I think is ongoing. There’s some safety villages in Canada that are a version of this.

They’re like small scale. Villages so that young people can learn how to like navigate a city safely and how to do exchanges. When I was in elementary school, we had something called Exchange City, which was like a faux city in a building for like learning economics, but it much smaller scale. We went for like one day, one one time in elementary school.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. It’s like, it’s like classroom economies. There’s all these offs, spins of this where, where students are, are trying to mimic. I’m, I’m gonna use the, I’m, I’m getting a little bit bothered by the use of real world because I think students live in the real world. They don’t not live in the real world, but I’ll use the real world.

But just mimicking the adult world is probably the. Way to say it. All right. Fascinating. I think we need to both maybe read this book or listen to some podcasts by Jennifer Light, because this

Mason Pashia: I’m gonna have her on, I think, ’cause I have a lot of questions and truly poking around. Was there, there’s a fun video on YouTube I’ll put in the show notes that shows some early video footage of people navigating these towns and it’s just so funny how kids all dressed up like adults anyway, even though they were on their own.

So it, it’s very interesting how the time sort of bred young people, acting like older people, not young people having full agency to do whatever they want. But yeah, super, super interesting. And I just continue to be amazed that we overwrite things in history and then always think we’re inventing something new.

And it’s like, no, no, the most radical version of this already happened.

Nate McClennen: Think about all the things we talk about, right? So it’s all, it is the real world. So it’s real world learning in the, the ultimate sense of that word. It is gaining experiences, real world experiences full on agency. And, and when you think about where it sits, nineteen hundred and nineteen forty five, right?

You, it’s after the advent, a more sort of universal formal schooling. So some of this is probably a reaction to the industrialized model of every student doing, having really no agency and trying to create. The sameness across the education system and then, you know, disappears after World War ii. And we have sort of some times of ups and downs, some real progressive open schools movement, and then more back to the sort of basics and more, more traditional models of school.

Real World Learning in 2025

Nate McClennen: And now here we are in 2025, we’re talking about real world learning. Like, wow, real world learning. We should all do this. And yet, like you said, there are so many, I mean, all education was real world when it first started, right? Like when humans were during human evolution and early communities and tribes, et cetera.

But, but we, you’re right, tend to think these things are brand new and we have to just do some reminders to ourselves about, huh, what’s happened in the past before we start reinventing over and over again.

Mason Pashia: Absolutely, and I love the civics implications of this. The fact that the students were running the civic system and the sole electorate and like, and that’s why they were called republics, is ’cause it was all kind of self-contained within what these young people who they were electing, how they were going through that process.

Nate McClennen: We talked about World of Work programs all over the place, and this feels like the, the ultimate representation of World of Work. You actually are doing the work. You’re not just ex, you know, exploring it. So, all right.

More to come on that. I think that is something I, no idea and I love that when we catch up. All right. I’m gonna pivot to sort of this bigger idea of. And I, I think you just came back from this, this conversation around civic thriving

thinking about what is the state of civics in the United States and democracies, et cetera, et cetera. So I intrigued, I’m intrigued by this global flourishing study, and you can we’ll put it in the show notes. And they surveyed a couple hundred thousand people across 20 countries, and they asked some really basic questions about what’s the most important thing for you to thrive, right?

So, or to flourish. And so, and then they, they coalesced it into, and, and integrated into a set of six. Different elements, and they’re pretty, they’re, they’re pretty self-explanatory and I’ll just list them off for our listeners. And they’re self-explanatory and they’re actually kind of obvious to me.

This makes sense is that for me, when, when I read these li this list of six, it makes sense that I would be flourishing if I was at a hundred percent on all these. So first one is material and financial stability. I am financially secure. Second one is happiness and life satisfaction. I’m satisfied with my life.

Third one is mental and physical health. I’m safe and healthy. Fourth one is meaning and purpose. I find meaning and purpose in my life. Fifth one is character and virtue. I have a strong moral character. The sixth is this close. I have a close social relationships. I have strong relationships with people, and this ties on a lot of the research that you and I have talked about and then we’re writing about it.

Getting smart is, is how important different elements of this are. We need, we need to make sure that there is financial security. You need to have mental and physical health. There’s purpose, good character and moral set. And then social relationships and how, how do we make sure that students have the good connections that they need to thrive in the world?

So. All that being said is, okay, there’s a couple hundred thousand people across 20 countries. There’s some merit that this is reasonable for a, what I’m thinking about is, can’t we just have a global portrait of a learner with these and just use these six, so, so that we, we avoid some of the messiness of trying to create over and over again.

Now, I understand that it’s really important. To own the portraits that we create and the communities need to own them. But I’m super interested with how these six can really be a data form way to say, does your portrait of a graduate or a profile of a learner make sure that it is leading towards these six?

Because some of them really bend towards financial as a a, as maybe the only or the most important. I understand if you don’t have financial security, the rest of these are really difficult to have. I think that’s real and we need to acknowledge that, but I, I think it could operate as a little bit of, you used the word an earlier meeting today, a little bit of a calibration for portraits to say, Hey, are we actually headed in this direction?

So, I don’t know. You’ve probably seen this study, I think, in, what are your thoughts on it?

Mason Pashia: no, I think it’s a, it’s a really great study. I mean, I think similarly to you. The, the sort of unsurprising nature of it was what was surprising to me. I think anytime somebody sees something like this, they’re looking for an answer to something that they don’t have an answer for, which is like, and, and it doesn’t give you that, it doesn’t say, like, here, it doesn’t necessarily say like, these are the, the core, pathways to getting satisfied in your life like that. Those are not the, the real result of this, aside from you can extrapolate some micro data from things people filled in, but I mean, it, it made me think a, a long time ago, we had on the, the person who started the Gross National Happiness Index and Bhutan and, and I, I just ran it through Gemini as we were talking, but like these are super aligned with sort of how they.

Do that calibration. And I think that’s a really unique example of actually trying to codify this language into something that’s measurable to then say like how an economy or a place is actually doing on the whole how are, how is Bhutan flourishing? How are, how is the United States flourishing? I think we looked at something a while.

Back maybe covered it in like one of the episodes of this that we’d never published, but it was about like where the United States ranked on a lot of these kind of

flourishing metrics, and it was super, it was super low in a lot of the categories that we would not want to be low in. I’ll dig that up and put it in the show notes too, for lack of my specificity.

But no, I, I think this is interesting. I, one thing we talked about this weekend is how flourishing is a really bipartisan word. And, and right now I think there’s some people think it’s kind of a right-leaning word because it’s been in injected into a lot of, like the executive order on AI talks about human flourishing and like it started to be incorporated in those places.

But at, at risk of making it like too flat, it is pretty incredible that we’ve started with early American documents about the pursuit of happiness. We’re still keeping flourishing in there as this really core component of what it means to be alive and like sort of thriving, flourishing, whatever the word is.

You can kind of swap ’em out. But yeah, I, I was I think this is important work. I think it’s a global indicator. And one last piece on this, at risk of going too long, but. The poet named Ross Gay has a book called Inciting Joy. He’s sort of viewed as like this real, this real poet of joy, this person who’s always sort of exuding joy.

And the whole book is really complicating what the word joy means. It’s like grief is joy because like you had such a deep relationship with someone that it’s like such a beautiful thing to be able to do. And so I think one piece that gets missed a lot in this is the bidirectionality of some of these.

Like, I have strong relationships. That is not always going to be a good thing. Like some days that will feel really negative and some days that’s going to, but like at a distance, that’s like the reason that we live, like to share and to lose and to love and et cetera. So I, I just really, as I’m circling these conversations, I’m always trying to hold it in this sort of fraught, fleeting light of just like, this is, this is the beauty of life.

And depending on the day, even if a lot of these things feel true to me, et cetera. It won’t feel like that every day, even if technically they are sort of things that I have fulfilled, for lack of a better word, so,

Nate McClennen: I mean that’s really an important point, I guess, is that the idea is not that every person would feel like success would be every person on these six different parameters would feel a hundred percent all the time. It is a, it is a long-term target so that you are in trajectory moving in a direction that.

That, that you, you, you have stronger relationships with people and yeah. That, that comes with angst and it comes with sadness and grief and all those kind of things, but the idea of trajectory of moving from no social relationships with people to close social relationships with other people. Now, AI throws a little bit of a loop in here because I, I was listening to something the other day about an AI pro.

Predictor and they, they were just saying like, more and more relationships are gonna be AI relationships, the, the most important relationships for humans. And we’re not gonna, we talked a little bit about this, we don’t need to go into it now, but this idea that, how does AI play a role in this or universal basic income?

How does that play a role in material and financial stability? So, anyway, I, it just, I, I like the idea of something that feels more bipartisan. It feels like. Globally, people can agree on it. I, I agree. I’ve done some work in Bhutan in partnership with that country, and I’ve been over there a few times and it really is.

Gross National happiness shows up everywhere. It shows up in their curriculum, it shows up on the walls of the schools and it shows up in the policy. And so it truly is a lived experience that is embedded in the education system, which then becomes part of the culture of the country. And it’s a very different way to look at it ’cause it’s an opposite not opposite, but a, a much broader view than just say gross domestic product or GDP or something like that.

Mason Pashia: Yes. Very importantly. So, all right, Nate, take us into your next deep dive.

Shorts Content

Purpose of Education and Tribalism

Nate McClennen: I have a, a just a couple things I’ve been thinking about. This one sort of ties a little bit into this flourishing and maybe on social relationships, but I’ve been thinking a little bit about the purpose of education, really small topic, right?

Mason Pashia: Yes. Much faster than the other ones

Nate McClennen: yeah, that’s right.

So, but. But the, I’ve been reading a little bit about this idea of tribalism and thinking about groups that are different. And I am, I’m reading a book right now on the sort of the history of Israel from 1900 to the present. Right. Two. Right, right. Like 2023 or something. It was published in 2023 and, and how there was so many groups that evolved in that country and, and emerged in that country that were.

You know, more, more left-leaning or more right-leaning or from different parts of the world or whatever the case may be. No, no different than the United States and no different than partisanship and, and really no different than any human organization since humans emerged from the evolutionary landscape is that we, we, we formed tribes and, and tribes are around people with common beliefs.

And, and, and, or originally it was common location, but it’s more and more about common beliefs. And I guess I’m gonna present a hypothesis and ask, see what you think. Is that. Is the purpose of school to actually combat tribalism that’s evolutionary by nature. We, we, we clump with people that are the same with us as us, or they have similar beliefs to form diverse communities that are in focus on the common good across tribes because are we always combating this concept of.

Tribalism and is school, can school play a function, especially the public sector where everybody goes, can it, can it play a function when we do projects and we do think about impact and purpose and all these pieces, these are all common good type things we’ve talked about how do you become community minded rather than individual minded?

And I’m wondering if tribalism and individual mindedness is something that’s inherent in humans and by. Introducing school, especially school that is more common, good focused and purpose focused. We actually are combating that idea that, that we need to be in tribes. And one more caveat before you jump in is that I don’t think all tribes are bad either.

I think like there’s all sorts of tribes that are good. I just wonder if that’s a, a tendency that if we wanna get to the common good and make sure people really are thinking about the common good, we need to actually think about how are we moving across tribes in interesting ways. So there’s my hypothesis for you to, to take and pick apart.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, that, yeah, definitely a short section of this podcast.

Nate McClennen: Right, right. Super short.

Mason Pashia: yeah. I think a couple things. So I think in general, the theory of like the, we, what matters is what we measure, sort of. I don’t think we measure what we, what matters, but I do think what matters is what we measure in the end. And so, because all of that is individual achievement, I think that’s a pretty big part of this equation, right?

Like within schools especially, it is at the level of the individual for success. And that is going to have a a definite. Forcing mechanism on the broader picture. I also think culturally tribes can be

Nate McClennen: Yep.

Mason Pashia: really different depending on who you’re talking to. Like if you, I grew up in the suburbs of Kansas City and my tribe was like my nuclear family, pretty much like there.

There was not a lot of sort of village mentality to raising me or anything. And I think because we’ve set up some of these arbitrary. Smaller chunks into, into tribes, it becomes much harder to have like a permeable wall between tribes. And so the level of, like, if a whole school community formed a tribe and that included everybody in like the, the sort of the parents, the families, the other siblings, like, I think that’s actually kind of a beautiful result of school.

I just don’t think that that happens given both the scale of certain systems and because of the, the ways in which we have sort of walled off so many. Things into smaller tribal units. So I, I, I like the provocation and I think the definition of tribes is challenging because the grain size can be so, so different.

I, I think that this is, I, I do think, like, I, I don’t remember if we talked about this before, but I was listening to something about, the, the right kind of conversations to bridge difference. And the, the question that they always ask their family at like Thanksgiving or whatever is, who do you feel responsible to or who do you feel responsible for?

And I think that that’s like a really beautiful question that starts to gesture at tribes, this idea of accountability rather than the people that you always find yourself sitting by, like at lunch say. And I, I think that those kind of questions, it’s actually not. I think they should be asked younger.

I think we should be asking people when they’re younger, like, who do you feel responsible to and for? And if you just have like one to two answers, I think that’s actually something that you start to interrogate deeper and be like, oh, maybe this is the way that we don’t encounter the Thomas Putnam Bowling Alone challenge, or all these other kind of civic challenges we’re talking about now.

Nate McClennen: I was thinking a little bit about tribes versus communities. Is there a difference there? I think this is something we need to explore more is, I’m trying to find some through line around. It, why, why is it hard for us to always to, to think about purposeful and common good learning?

And we, and I think you pointed at one thing is that our system measures the individual success. And, and actually America as a United States, as a country is very much programmed around individual success. And that’s not true in all countries. And but in the United States it is. And, and I, I wonder if.

So, so that’s a national sort of mentality, but I’m also thinking is there a, is there a historic evolutionary thing that we’re pushing against here?

Mason Pashia: I think that’s true and I, I think that there’s a question that still stands, which is, which was brought up at this last weekend when I was hanging out with some civics folks, is like, what does it mean to be patriotic today? And what does it mean to be a witness of somebody else’s patriotism and like a different tribe?

So if like somebody raised the provocation that was like, Hey, I was recently at this event and it was a parade in a small town and like. The, the parade came down the street and there people were twirling, rifles and cheering and young, like kids had popsicles and like this classic image of a parade in a small town.

And everyone was feeling a certain way. And then she was like, and I was in Banff Canada, like I wasn’t in the United States. And does that, does that make you feel different knowing it’s Banff and like, I think especially in this moment that we’re in made a lot of people, people feel really different to know that was somewhere else.

They had like a little piece with some of that imagery. So. I, I think this idea of what happens when a tribe meets a tribe, or when a community meets a community and how do you make that a bridge rather than a division, is a really, really valuable question to be grappling with.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. It’s like all that the weavers work, right? How do you, who are the people in the community that are weaving together? And, and you and I have talked about this, and it’s, especially with the internet and social media and now AI amplifying the, the slot that’s out there is this is gonna become harder and harder.

So I think education institutions are gonna have to work harder and harder to help young people see that we can work across difference, that we can work, you know, you could be in a tribe and you can work in community towards the common good. So placeholder for that. Good pushback and, and thoughts and additions there. My, my only other one was just I, I was doing a little bit of work on our framework and thinking about the strategy part of our framework, which sits in the middle of our five different elements and strategy can happen when you are. Determining community vision. It can happen when you’re building outcomes.

It can happen when you’re building your learning model. Strategy happens all over the place. And, and I was thinking about the sub elements under strategy and the importance that, that you and I and at getting smart, we’ve talked about a lot, which we, I think collectively, we, I think we still have a deficit in, in the education system, which is around project management, is that if you are effectively going to take.

A vision and move it into actuality and, and through a strategy, you need people that have really good project management skills. So I dove into the literature and I was sort of interested in who’s done research on this. And there’s actually been a ton of research and, and project management institute we’ve worked with or partnered with or had, had relationships with in the past.

And they do good work about how do you. High quality project management, but it really hasn’t, I don’t think, permeated the education system either in educator development or in students in courses, with the exception of project-based learning. Right? So we do project-based learning, but I’m not sure how often in project-based learning, you know, we have, what’s the essential question and what’s the reflection time?

There’s not a whole lot in there around project management from some of the frameworks. And so, Angela, Evan, who we can put this in the show notes, who’s from Purdue University Global, wrote this article and, and the article was just about. Teachers, helping teachers develop project management skills would be a really good thing.

Good thing for the teachers, good thing for students who all of them need project management skills and will probably be managing AI agents in the future, which will need even better project management skills. But there’s some really good resources in there about the impact of when you teach students project management skills.

They actually gain in all sorts of areas. And so how do we become way more explicit in our instruction, in project-based learning or in any learning experiences that, hey, we’re learning how to manage a project here. What does that mean? It has concrete goals. We’re gonna set mar metrics and targets, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All those things that are really important that we use day to day. But I never was taught that in school. I, I learned that on the job when I first started teaching. I’m like, I better figure out how to manage this because this is hard to do. And so I, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about is how do we, we’re gonna amplify it and elevate it in our framework ’cause we think it’s important.

But just wondering if you agree with that. Have you seen other things around that you’re thinking about in this area?

Mason Pashia: I mean, I, I totally agree with it. And I’ll say I had a couple project based experiences in school, but all of them were very, well, I guess a couple of ’em were self-directed, so maybe I had a little bit of that. Like if I don’t work ahead then I’m working behind. But there is a lot of the time when you’re given a project, you have such set deadlines to have certain things turned in.

By that you’re actually not really doing any of the valuable project management work, of actually figuring out how to stay ahead, how to deliver on time. It makes me think of when I visited Redbridge in San Francisco. The, and they do really incredible project management education with like K two kids.

And it’ll be like you have to demonstrate a competency by x time. Let’s work backwards to figure out like where you need to be along the way so that you can deliver. And then the young person is able to demonstrate their, demonstrate their competency when they feel ready. If they finish early, great.

If they finish late, that then they have a conversation with the facilitator. But that, that’s incredible that they’re having K two students back map from a timeline to say, these are the things I need to do to get there on time. I, yeah, I’m, I really do think it’s valuable. Everything is going to be a complex, as Tom says, it’s a complex project with the diverse teams and smart tools, like we’re gonna, that’s a, such an important bridging and communication skill.

It’s almost like a new language for how you work with people and everything’s a project. No,

Nate McClennen: Yeah. And everything’s a project. And, and yet I, I, I think I would go back to my first claim is that we actually don’t do that well. And, and Redbridge is a great example and they, they have a lot that they could share and, and certainly listeners could go and check them out and, and connect with them if they want more.

But it should be like a lot of things we think that should be core that aren’t yet core yet. It should be core for every. Student in the K 12 system is that you start early, you learn about projects, you learn how to manage ’em, which then allows you to develop agency, which then sits nicely in a personalized classroom where you can think about co-design of your own projects as you get older and older and doing things that are purposeful and meaningful for you and the community, as we talked about before.

Things to think about.

Signs of Human Expression

Nate McClennen: Alright, let’s, let’s wrap here with signs of human expression. What are the things that, that anything on your end that you were thinking about?

Mason Pashia: Yeah, a thought and a question. So, earlier I referenced that conversation Tyler Cowen had with David Robertson classical music composer, and he was asking these really interesting questions about. Trying to take classical music into the field of management. So he was basically saying like, how do you communicate good job to your orchestra while you’re performing?

And how do you, like, when do people look at you? Like, when do people come to you for advice, basically during a performance, which is, so, I, I’m obsessed with the metaphor of the conductor for, I think it’s so interesting. But he said two things that I think are really beautiful and interesting, aside from the one I shared at the beginning.

He said one that a conductor must quickly memorize when they join a new orchestra, when each member of the orchestra looks up at a piece and every person looks up at a different time. So it’s like at the Be Right before someone plays, right after someone plays, when they’ve done something correctly, when they do something wrong, like your goal is to be eye contact at the perfect moment.

And I think that that is like. A really beautiful metaphor for what a, a good facilitator or a good educator does is it’s like, what is the kind of poetic interpretation of someone looking up at you and how are you meeting them in that moment? So I, I loved that. And then the, the other piece was on the subject of how do you tell someone something’s good when someone thing’s good?

He said like, in an orchestra, you, the players don’t look at each other. That’s like kind of not what you’re supposed to do. And so your role as a conductor is to basically emote so big that you can show the whole orchestra when someone’s done something well. So you’re always being this like channel of what is beautiful in front of you and happening.

And so you’re kind of elevating without language. Great moments and also meeting people in their moments of need or their moments of celebration. And, and it’s all improvisational and beautiful and I, I just loved it. So I, I’m sitting with that today. I’m curious if that, does any of that resonate with you on like a soccer field as a coach? Are you ever, like, what is that version of

this kind of live

Nate McClennen: interesting. I think it, the, the version is, you know, as a coach, unlike an orchestra I, I think that only the players near you actually get good feedback. Like, like direct in process or in game feedback because the field’s too big. So, and, and the position of a coach is on the sideline, so they can’t connect with all players.

In midstream, so it’s probably a little different. It’s probably different on purpose because a sport, most sports, but soccer where I, what I coach is improvisational. They’re making hundreds and hundreds of decisions on the field.

Whereas if you’re an orchestra and you’re playing the oboe, you’re reading this organism of music around you and the conductor trying to. Work with the organism rather than the individuals, even though he is he or she or they have to work on the individuals.

Mason Pashia: So maybe it’s more like a football or something where you are following plays and people are making decisions on the fly, but like it is sort of a scripted set of things that the players in the field are doing.

Nate McClennen: Totally, totally, totally. Cool. Super interesting. I’ll just finish with one that I, you know, I, I, I, I think I’m interested in this idea of what does good leadership look like and can compassion and empathy show up in leadership? And I think there’s some real discussions in the world of leadership. In the world of politics about what a good leader is.

And we go back and forth about, you know, do they have to be tough and non-empathetic and and stoic, or can they be empathetic and kind and be a strong leader? Leader? And so a couple different things here that, that struck me. One was I was reading an article about the ex-Prime minister of Ja Inda Arder of New Zealand.

And she was. Preaching just about that, that she’s really working on it’s okay to show compassion as a national leader, and that’s an okay thing to do. And, and she gets a lot of pushback on that. So that was inspiring to me about making sure that as humans were thinking about empathy. And then I was listening to Reid Hoffman and he talked about ai.

Being super humane because they can mimic empathy. And the idea that there’s a lot of people that get no empathy in this world, and that really struggles. And so this may be a positive. Output if, if you have someone who has, doesn’t have someone that’s compassionate that’s that you are in your friend circles or have no friends or whatever, that there is some part of AI that could serve that role, even though there’s all sorts of negative challenges with AI partners.

And I, I think the last thing was a research project was I was digging into empathy. About that, that empathy. In 2018, scientists discovered that that 10% of empathy is genetic, which, which to me means that 90% is environment, which means that that empathy can be taught to any human being. If only 10% is genetics.

And I think that was encouraging. So when you look at leaders that are saying, Hey, we can be a great leader and be empathetic at the same time what role does AI play and is it a, is it a positive part of this? And that the fact that research says is that this can be taught and developed and we can do that.

And that’s encouraging and hopeful for me because I think it’s something that’s really critically human, is this idea of empathy.

Mason Pashia: Totally and absolutely is relevant for our flourishing conversation. So that kind of means that anyone can flourish, which is great.

And speaking of flourishing, let’s go to our song

What’s That Song?

Song: Chalkboards gonna play by a screen, a classroom blow, a technical machine. The books are D, the desks look so bare. Where do the papers go? They are floating in there. We are catching up all catching up to futures. Brave, but also abrupt. The lessons change times won’t stop. We’re always catching up. Catching up.

The teacher’s voice now a pixel parade, holograms teaching math in the shade. The playground’s quiet. The kids all inside learning to code while they’re imagination’s high. We are catching up. Oh, catching up. The future’s bright, but so abrupt. The lessons change times we won’t stop. We’re always catching up.

Catching up.

Do they dream and binary or still count sheep? Do they want the past, have secrets to keep, but when the world spins fast, can they still slow down or will they lose themselves in the digital sound? We’re catching up. Oh, catching up to futures, right? But so abrupt. The lessons change times won’t stop. We’re always catching up, catching up.

Mason Pashia: Amazing. That is that’s outstanding. I’m, I’m very impressed. I feel like on most kind of live jazz combo recordings, you can feel the space between the instruments and sometimes the piano is kind of like weirdly quiet and feels like it’s over in the corner. And then sometimes it’s a little more front when they’re taking the lead.

And that bass was just like very present but also subdued. So impressive soundscape for an AI generation. I’m, I felt like I was there with the jazz.

Nate McClennen: My my, so you got it right, sort of jazz nightclub type thing. And my, my inspiration was that, that they do these free Shakespeare festivals in, in Jackson. And so Rachel and I went to one last night and it was 12th Night, it was set in a sixties to seventies.

Sort of beach resort with some castaways, like that was the setting of it. But then they had the, the singer at the beach resort was a jazz singer. And she would always come in and sing exactly that style of singing

Mason Pashia: I love it. I love that. Well, thank you Nate. Pleasure as always. And have a great couple weeks. I’ll see you again soon. Catch up more.

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Links

• Watch the full video here
• Global flourishing study
• Indiana charter micro schools
• In Tandem
• Angela Even
• Purdue University Global
• Research Gate: Project Management and Education
• Junior Republics

Guest Bio