119: Amir Nathoo | Outschool: Passion, Not Curriculum, Is the Future of Education

AUTOGENERATED TRANSCRIPT

Jesper Conrad: 0:10

Today we are together with Amir Natu, who has founded Outschool, so, first of all, welcome. It's good to have time with you today.

Amir Nathoo: 0:18

Thanks so much. It's great to be talking to you.

Jesper Conrad: 0:21

I am curious about how your project started, but maybe you should give like a one-minute short. What is Outschool? So people know what we are talking about.

Amir Nathoo: 0:32

Absolutely so. Outschool provides online classes for kids, and these are classes that meet live over video chat, and they can be one-on-one classes with a student and a teacher, or group classes, so kids can join from anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world, and connect with teachers and other students who share their interests, and we offer it as a marketplace. So teachers create a very, very broad range of classes, everything from core academics to enrichments and everything in between, and this is for ages three to 18.

Jesper Conrad: 1:10

Yeah, but what was your interest? How did the idea occur? Are you yourself inside the homeschool movement? Because a lot of homeschoolers started out with finding your service. So what happened in your life that led you down to creating this?

Amir Nathoo: 1:27

I founded the company in 2015. And there was a lot of influences, including my own personal experience, but I had a very traditional education in England growing up. I went to an excellent state-funded school and then I studied engineering at Cambridge. But I also had two parents who were teachers and they really helped me pursue interests outside of school. And as I grew older and saw the changes in the world and went through my entrepreneurial career, I started to realize how important that had been for me All the learning that happened outside of regular schooling. For example, they helped me pursue my interest in computers with computer science lessons, and this was before it became clear that programming computer science was going to be a really big deal. I just did it because I became interested to learn how to program games after playing games and I started to realize that what I wanted for my own kids and I now have a six-year-old and a three-year-old was actually different from the traditional education that I received.

Amir Nathoo: 2:32

Because of all the changes that I've seen in the world of work and the trends that I saw happening in the world, I just no longer believed that just going to a traditional school and getting good grades and going to college was what was needed for the future for my kids to be happy and successful.

Amir Nathoo: 2:48

And I also started to think if I'm thinking this way, I believe many more families are going to start to feel this way, and over the last 10 years, you can really see that happen. Our world is changing so fast and it's accelerating, and in order to future-proof our kids' education, we can't just expect that sending them to an institution whose design has not fundamentally changed in hundreds of years and with centrally set curriculum is going to work. That's not how to future-proof your education. I think even for families who haven't yet taken a step to act on these ideas, the feeling of anxiety is rising. They can sense it, we can all sense it that these traditional models just are not going to be applicable for the future. And that got me thinking about well, what does a future-proof education look like? How are we going to deliver this? And that was a key inspiration behind OutSchool.

Cecilie Conrad: 3:42

Do you think we really can future-proof an education?

Amir Nathoo: 3:47

Well, it's hard right, because if you believe in fast change and acceleration, then how are you going to design an education today that you can guarantee is going to meet the needs of the future in 20 years' time? And I think we need to have much more humility than we typically do in education. We have to realize that our assumptions about the skills and the knowledge that are going to be needed in that time frame are probably wrong, and I think that's the core insight. We can't expect to define a curriculum with specific skills and knowledge and expect that to get it exactly right, or even mostly right, for the needs of the future. So that's where our mission comes in and how we think about it.

Amir Nathoo: 4:32

We think that if it's very hard to predict the future, the most important thing we can do for our kids is make sure that they love learning, that they have the confidence, the motivation, the ability to learn, so then whatever they need in the future, they're able to learn for themselves, and that's far more important than learning any particular subject or gaining any particular skill. Now, that's not to say it's not important that kids get the experience of getting mastery in something, but the purpose is the process of learning, to build confidence in that process and their own ability to exercise that process. And so that's in practice is why we build the product the way we do because to provide this tremendous variety of learning opportunities allows kids and families to customize, to pursue interests, to go down different and differentiated paths and, as a result, increase their love of learning.

Jesper Conrad: 5:28

I have a question, but first a short anecdote. When I grew up I talked with my dad about education because I wanted a more creative path, a path down filmmaking and I made an amateur feature film when I was 16 and an animation film that were in a lot of festivals. And then I started writing inside journalism and I talked with him about it because it would have been a normal trajectory for me to go to high school and university and down that road. But I talked with my dad. I was like I'm not sure I want to go to university and he said the field he ended up working in wasn't invented when he was educated, which made me look at education in a fun way, because it's the same with what I do.

Jesper Conrad: 6:20

I work inside online marketing and when I grew up there was no such field. I started working online when there was a CD-ROM and there was no loudspeaker, so if you wanted to make a multimedia project online, people wouldn't be able to consume it. And now here we are talking over Zoom some 30 years later, and it is just working.

Amir Nathoo: 6:43

At the start of my college experience, no one had mobile phones, or very few. By the end, four years later, pretty much everyone had a mobile phone, but no one yet had computers in their room. And then, a few years later, all the students have computers in their room and Facebook was a thing. And this experience that you point out is going to become more and more common when people are getting jobs and having careers that did not exist when they're growing up, and that's, you know, that's a function of acceleration.

Jesper Conrad: 7:10

And I have a question to you about. You started this platform before you were a father and now you have stepped into that arena some years ago and have this changed what you are offering on the platform? Have they changed your own perspective on learning to see them grow up right there in front of you?

Amir Nathoo: 7:33

It was so fun on my son's third birthday, which is the youngest age that can take classes. This was about six years into building the company he took his first out-school classes and fortunately he loved them. But this was a very risky moment for me because I'd spent all this time building this company and having all these classes in the hope that it would be my kids would actually like it. Luckily, now they both do, both my son and my daughter, my six-year-old and three-year-old. So it was wonderful to see that play out and I think that our strategy and fundamental kind of core beliefs, which I've shared a little bit of here, haven't really changed. But I think there's been some punctuation points or some new revelations for me personally as my kids have engaged with the platform and as I've started to have to make decisions about my kids' education. One of those was that, as alternative, as my philosophies are, to really make a decision, to take a different path for your child, it's very hard to let go of the worry that I use, even when you believe everything that I do and you work in the field. And at the start of this journey, before having kids, my wife was familiar with ideas behind homeschooling and alternative education, but wasn't as extreme as me. But now she has almost become more actually seeing our kids.

Amir Nathoo: 8:54

But the decision to send our son to a very alternative school was a hard one. We said are we crazy here? We're not going to send him to the excellent traditional school. Down the road we explored building a micro school with some friends, so essentially a homeschool co-op. But then we luckily found a very alternative, self-directed school in San Francisco.

Amir Nathoo: 9:15

But even believing everything, I do just the emotional burden and the feeling of risk. But that's actually one thing that was unexpected about how our platform, outschool, can help with that, because I also started to realize hang on, if I'm really worried about his math or his cool reading, I can just have him take an online class for that. It doesn't mean I have to send him to a traditional school. I can just mitigate my worries. And fortunately he likes math, he likes numbers. So I just got him a math class at our school and so with very little intervention I could both satisfy my worries and give him a learning opportunity that fit his interests and that is delivering immense results. So you don't need to gear a kid's entire schooling around the kind of fears of the parent. You can flip it on its head and say make most of your decisions from the point of view of the kid's self-direction and their ability to pursue projects, and then, insofar as you, the parent, have remaining concerns, find other ways to help them. So that was one kind of relation for me.

Cecilie Conrad: 10:22

Well, it is wild, the fear and concern thing and how it affects us as parents, and I think there is a huge momentum going on from the context that we all live in and the historical wheels just keep turning, with everybody's been in school, schools it's such a big deal. So if you start doing it in a different way, it really rocks the boat and we we all have that experience of worry and we need to get over that. I think it's. There are many ways. I don't know, you know, but we are unschoolers and we have now teenagers who would have been graduated high school if they had been in school. So we're like the other end of that. So we worked a lot with this thing.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:06

I think the core thing, the really important element, the future-proofing thing that you talked about To never stop loving to learn, to support our children in their passions around what really makes sense for them and how. Learning is not actually about the future. It's about really wanting and learning needing. Being so absorbed in the thing right, you can't stop talking about it, you just want to explore it. I think for us it's been very important that our children don't need to explain why they need to learn something. It's not because I want to be an engineer or because I want to whatever. It's not about career and future. It's about passion.

Cecilie Conrad: 11:54

I happen to be in a field that was invented at the same time as our species and will go on being the same. I'm a psychologist. That doesn't change. I mean, the context changes, of course, but and I enjoyed my 10 years at university I'm very traditionally educated. I love being an academic and I think there's a case to be made for this whole thing. But it all came from the passion of learning. So if we can keep our children in that passionate space and maybe we do our inner work with the fear, I think that would be.

Cecilie Conrad: 12:31

I do my part and they do their part. And out-schooled has a good Lots of people in our community use it because we are an unschooling family and I can only help my children so far in learning the things they want to learn. There are things I know nothing about and, more importantly, I cannot find a passion for it. Lots of things my kids want to learn. I can find a passion for it and explore it with them and be like, yeah, totally, let's dive into this, whereas some things I can't give up, you know. And then I have platforms like Outschool and other resources. You know. If you want to learn this, please go over there, where you can find someone.

Amir Nathoo: 13:13

Absolutely, and that's the kind of flexibility and support that we want to offer to enable kids to follow different paths, to provide families with the option to add supplements and add to their kids' learning experience, but do it in a flexible way that doesn't require you to enroll for a whole semester or you can commit subject by subject or teacher by teacher, or smaller or larger commitments. That flexibility is critical. I think a key problem in our world right now and you see this in education is that we built all these structures in our human society, these really complex, static structures, in order to enable humanity to scale in various different ways, using the technology of the industrial revolution, and we've turned ourselves and our society into machines, because that was what was needed. That was the kind of winning strategy for the technology at the time. But now we have AI and I really think we're coming to the point where human society is coming to the end of that road. We can automate all the repetitive stuff at a much lower cost than ever before, and that trend is just going to keep on continuing.

Amir Nathoo: 14:28

So then, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to add value for each other as humans in a world of AI and I really think it's going to be a massive accelerant of this realization that we have to tear down these structures that have served us wonderfully as humanity to get to a certain point, but they're going to get in our way. We don't need humans who are machines. We have machines that can be machines now, and humanity and humans used to mimic. The machines then automate themselves away, and that was a great strategy for humanity to develop. Now that automation can go off and automate itself it's great it's great, we get to do what's really important.

Cecilie Conrad: 15:13

Now we get to step up and be clear on, because ai can only take us so far. We actually do have to think for ourselves. In the cacophony of all the stuff out there, ai can keep spamming us with ideas and lists and reviews and stuff, but we are the humans and we are the ones to know, with our head, heart and body combined, what's up with this life and where do we want to take it and what are the real challenges we have on this planet as humanity and how can we? We need a lot of brain power to solve the problems that we're facing. Let's I'm not trying to be super negative, but, but I mean world peace would be kind of nice and green grass for our great-grandchildren would also be.

Cecilie Conrad: 16:04

I prefer to look into a future like that and we need to work on that. I think it's great that ai can do some of the heavy lifting or some of the boring stuff. I mean even small things like transcripts. Oh yes, I almost start crying when I think about how many hours I put into transcripts at university and now you're just done. Yeah.

Jesper Conrad: 16:28

One of the things I really love is learning from people who are passionate about something. I believe that every person actually can have something to teach you, and it's wonderful to listen to people if they're knowledgeable and passionate about it. For example, in the homeschool environment in Denmark, we often hung out with someone who had a kid at the same age and one of the people there. We didn't have a lot of interest in common. This guy was a programmer and I was like, ok, I need to ask him about something he's interested in, because our normal conversation didn't flow. So I ended up asking him about what he was working on and it showed that he had figured out that there's a radio signal on modern cars' tires so it can tell the car when it runs out of air. And then he had put up something and measured the cars driving by him and then every half year could see when someone went from winter tires to summer tires.

Jesper Conrad: 17:24

And I'm just like this was so weird but so fun and the details of what I learned from that conversation was wonderful. But so what I'm trying to lead over to is when people are passionate, listening to them about what they want to share is fantastic. So my question to you is what is the most outlandish weird cause on your platform that you have seen where you have been like? Is there really anyone who wants to teach this? And there's people who want to learn this. What's going on?

Amir Nathoo: 18:36

oh wow, at most our language, that's hard right because it's positively meant, it's not I can share some things because we tell our teachers teach the way you've always wanted to teach the things that you're passionate about, because how do you create love of learning and great learning experiences when the teacher really cares? So I totally agree with all that passion. I always like to cite the science of farts. We saw a first class on the science of farts. We saw a first class on the science of farts.

Cecilie Conrad: 19:01

You recently. Yeah, take the same class. We've got a new client as of today. Yeah, we'll take it.

Amir Nathoo: 19:08

It's turned into a category Now there's multiple ones. And then my son took this class when he was on holiday break. It was about urine and saying the composition and cultural history of urine and he found this hilariously funny and it was good science as well. It was good science and the parents loved it too. It was just like oh well, the kids want to take science of farts and learn about the human body and then also the chemistry and the health elements of it. It's exactly that kind of thing that's excellent. It's also a little bit edgy. That is going to hook a kid in.

Amir Nathoo: 19:41

I also love citing the kind of cat anatomy taught by a vet. So this isn't a traditionally qualified teacher but just someone who professionally knows a lot about the subject. And many kids are passionate about pets. You know. Some are interested in pursuing kind of medicine or learning more. It's very attractive. Financial stock trading like mock stock trading for kids. I mean I don't think they're allowed to do it on these payments platforms, but I think if kids were to form a hedge fund, they'd run rings around adults. I mean, if you think about how good they are at games compared with adults, I think putting in kids in charge of a financial system might yield results. These are the kind of things that stand out to me.

Jesper Conrad: 20:18

But also just the fact that there are people who want to learn it and people who want to offer it also shows something about how limited the schools have been during our lifetime. I remember talking with a lot of people who are curious about homeschooling, who come from the same kind of background as I did. I went to a public school in Denmark and I, when Cecilia suggested it, was like hey, homeschooling, that's weird. The public school was good enough for me. Why should we do something else? That's a strange thing. Let's just go down the normal path. But the schools we were in when we were young are not the same as they are today. They have become narrower and they have less time and they have more and more control of what the teacher is teaching, when, as you said, it has almost become more machine-like.

Amir Nathoo: 21:14

And this is why I think people forget that the way we categorize human knowledge into particular types of subjects and the way and the ordering we typically learn it, this was all man-made, invented by someone, and it's a map, and hopefully the map bears some vague relationship to the underlying reality. But I think this is a map that's old it was created a long time ago and we're so wedded to the map today as a society that we forget that this is not reality. And it makes me wonder what opportunities we're missing in human knowledge and human understanding that stand at the border between subjects or outside of the typical areas of study and knowledge that we typically think are important. And again, I think AI is really going to force a confrontation with this.

Amir Nathoo: 22:07

There's some people who are pessimistic about AI, saying, oh, we're going to automate ourselves away.

Amir Nathoo: 22:14

Ai is going to be able to do everything so much better than humans. And I'm actually an optimist about AI and maybe you can tell me this is more like faith, and I'm not sure I have the scientific backing yet, but I have a sense that what we will discover with AI is there are very large parts of the human experience and our brain that we have been ignoring and that we have idolized a narrow view of intelligence, and now we've automated it and are calling it artificial intelligence, and we've forgotten that our brain is capable of so much more than a certain type of intelligence. And words like wisdom will come to the forefront, our understanding of the value of feelings and instincts and intuition and what you alluded to earlier, the connection between mind and body and heart or spirit, is going to become all the more important, and what we may discover is oh, we humans do have some additional capabilities and additional value that we've been largely ignoring in this world, where we've idolized intelligence and a particular view of rationality.

Cecilie Conrad: 23:27

And these are qualities that we very much. It's so beautiful. We very much need them in this day and age, and we will also benefit on a personal level to have so much better lives if we take these things into the forefront our wisdom, our alignment, mind, body, soul, spirit, heart whatever word doesn't offend anyone Instinct, intuition, creativity could also be an interesting thing to throw in there. If that takes census stage and becomes what we really can work with as humanity, that's actually an explosion of options and a catalyst of real change, which I think, with all of the mental health crisis and all of the environmental crisis, the political crises that's been going on since maybe forever, is needed and it gives me a lot of hope that, oh, it might sometimes look really dark, but it doesn't take a lot of light to spread all that dark. It could be easy, could be right in front of us to solve all these things.

Amir Nathoo: 24:42

I agree and I see a connection between what I'm trying to do in education without school and decisions that I'm making for my own kids and the crises that we see in humanity right now and these old systems. And I think humanity does have to undergo a transformation, which is going to be very hard and very difficult, and we should be trying to create a different kind of future that has to be holistic. In order to actually address those crises that are on the table and unfortunately, there are people who are defeatist. I think we have to leave this planet and go to Mars, or that somehow technology alone will save us, or somehow that reversion to the past will save us, and what I see in that is, with acceleration, it puts people into a mild state of shock that they might not even realize and you grasp for some sense of stability and that can lead to reactionary, backward-looking thinking. And what we actually need is new ideologies, new structures, and we have to get much more comfortable with abandoning the old and building towards the new.

Amir Nathoo: 25:51

And I wasn't able to articulate it or have a theory around it when I started out school, but I think this is what attracted me to the alternative education and homeschooling community, the realization that this is where the future is being built and that it was necessary to kind of reject historic structures until they are ready to transform and instead build for the new. And so that's why I continue to be so inspired about speaking to homeschoolers, unschoolers, people who have had the courage and conviction to do that today, because I really think you and your audience are the trailblazers. I was really learning from serving this audience that resulted in what we have as Outschool today, and we hope to continue serving this audience to build for the future in partnership with unschoolers and homeschoolers.

Jesper Conrad: 26:40

And Amir. I think it could be really interesting to dive deep into this, but we have a hard back end because you need to go into a call and we were, as it is late, because we are at a world school pop-up in Budapest together with 120 teens, 65 families Amazing experience, but also just so overwhelming that I had a time in my head and forgot when we were supposed to meet. So this will be one of our shortest episodes ever, but I think it was deeply interesting and want to thank you for your time.

Amir Nathoo: 27:15

Thank you. We can talk more about the liberation aspects of homeschooling another time.

Jesper Conrad: 27:22

That could definitely be really fun to do.

Cecilie Conrad: 27:24

Thank you for this conversation. It's been a pleasure to meet you.

Amir Nathoo: 27:27

Thank you and likewise take care. Bye-bye, Bye now.