Dr. Kapil Mathur | Steering the Future of Education: Moving Beyond a Standardized System

Thank you so much for the welcome.

I'm in Orange County, California.

I'm actually in my home office because we're in the middle of a move to expand our organization.

I understand.

I see that you're growing and that's wonderful.

So now you have a very interesting background and it didn't start in education.

So do you want to tell us a bit about yourself and how you went from all the other things you've done in your life to ending up opening a charter school?

Yeah, so I think the common thread across my career has really been a focus on how people learn.

So prior to being in education, I was doing consulting work for the U.S. Navy, working on how does their workforce function? learn to use technology, and how do they innovate in their own fields with the use of technology? So everything from working on standardized coding to how laptops are rolled out in deployed areas.

And the thing that really interested me the most was people learn in different ways, and they have different experiences that they bring to the activity of learning something new.

And unfortunately, most of our methods of educating people are very standardized.

Sure.

And so they don't take that variability into account.

And they don't actually create, they don't allow people to create their own internal framework connecting the various pieces of knowledge that they collect.

And so I was really fascinated by really trying to understand is there a way to personalize learning in such a way that students can master material, and in the process of mastering the material, that they can actually connect it to the things that they already know.

So when I was in college, I did a project for the Orange County Department of Education where we were looking at how do K-12 students learn science and can we connect science to the real world? Then, you know, after college, I entered my career of doing this work with the military as a civilian contractor.

But then, you know, it was a very demanding job.

It required a lot of travel.

And that was great when I was single.

But after I got married, priorities change.

And you want to not be that person that has a packed suitcase in the trunk of their car, not knowing when you're going to be home next.

So I went back to college.

I went to UCLA.

I got my MBA.

And I was fortunate to connect with a group of other MBA students who were all trying to engineer their own career transitions.