Sep 23, 2026 · 24 min · 10 segments
In this week’s Wednesday Night Live, I dig into what parents should actually be looking for in their child’s education, and why allowing kids to fail in a low-stakes environment is one of the most…
So this question of what you're looking for in your child's educ- education, and can you define it? So if you can define it, you begin by asking what is it that you're preparing them for? What does a prepared adult look like? There's a beautiful quote, and it comes from the movie The Big Short.
And the significance of this quote is that he said this when the entirety of Wall Street thought he was mad, thought he was crazy, and he predicted that the global financial crisis was gonna happen.
And the quote goes as follows: "People want an authority to tell them how to value things.
They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar." Authoritative and familiar.
School is reputable, reputable because it's normal, despite the fact that there are low test scores, there are even less capable graduates, there's school violence, and there is a woke agenda being pushed on the children in this current age.
The students themselves, they tell us as such in many different ways, but because it's reputable, because it's safe, it's common, we continue flocking back.
So if you look to build in parallel and you decide that what's currently on offer isn't suitable, then what is? What kinds of thing are you looking for? What skills do you want your children to have? What virtues do you want them to hold? What knowledge do you want them to graduate with? And I don't say knowledge in terms of specific facts or specific knowledge about the sky and the nature, when this war happened, or insert anything like that.
The knowledge that I perceive as valuable is more down the lineset of what skillsets do they actually hold to gather knowledge, because knowledge is gonna look very different based on where you are geographically.
Geographically, knowledge is of value, but the skills that they're able to obtain to take them for forward into adulthood, that is of significant importance, 'cause it gives them the ability to learn and unlearn, and acquire new skills and bits of knowledge as their life progresses.
These virtues, what type of human are they? Are they honest? Are they honorable? Do they act with integrity? Are they loyal? Are they polite? Do they have compassion? These are the kinds of things that I want to instill in my child from an early age, so they're able to move forward into the adult world.
So when we ask, what is it that you're looking for in your child's education, that's where I immediately turn to.
And then your follow-up question might be, "Well, how do you go about that? Who's doing that?" Does this old paradigm of go to school, get a job, it's not really fit for purpose anymore, so how are we preparing them? What are the key skills? How do we teach those key skills? Thinking or knowing that it's not about a specific set of knowledge that they need to know.
The knowledge that they are getting is gonna be based off their day-to-day experience.
The children I serve, they have a lot of knowledge about- The creek that they hang out in day in, day out.
They have a lot of knowledge about the ocean because that's where they go on the weekends.
So this question of what you're looking for in your child's educ- education, and can you define it? So if you can define it, you begin by asking what is it that you're preparing them for? What does a prepared adult look like? There's a beautiful quote, and it comes from the movie The Big Short.
And the significance of this quote is that he said this when the entirety of Wall Street thought he was mad, thought he was crazy, and he predicted that the global financial crisis was gonna happen.
And the quote goes as follows: "People want an authority to tell them how to value things.
They choose it because it seems authoritative and familiar." Authoritative and familiar.
School is reputable, reputable because it's normal, despite the fact that there are low test scores, there are even less capable graduates, there's school violence, and there is a woke agenda being pushed on the children in this current age.
The students themselves, they tell us as such in many different ways, but because it's reputable, because it's safe, it's common, we continue flocking back.
So if you look to build in parallel and you decide that what's currently on offer isn't suitable, then what is? What kinds of thing are you looking for? What skills do you want your children to have? What virtues do you want them to hold? What knowledge do you want them to graduate with? And I don't say knowledge in terms of specific facts or specific knowledge about the sky and the nature, when this war happened, or insert anything like that.
The knowledge that I perceive as valuable is more down the lineset of what skillsets do they actually hold to gather knowledge, because knowledge is gonna look very different based on where you are geographically.
Geographically, knowledge is of value, but the skills that they're able to obtain to take them for forward into adulthood, that is of significant importance, 'cause it gives them the ability to learn and unlearn, and acquire new skills and bits of knowledge as their life progresses.
These virtues, what type of human are they? Are they honest? Are they honorable? Do they act with integrity? Are they loyal? Are they polite? Do they have compassion? These are the kinds of things that I want to instill in my child from an early age, so they're able to move forward into the adult world.
So when we ask, what is it that you're looking for in your child's education, that's where I immediately turn to.
And then your follow-up question might be, "Well, how do you go about that? Who's doing that?" Does this old paradigm of go to school, get a job, it's not really fit for purpose anymore, so how are we preparing them? What are the key skills? How do we teach those key skills? Thinking or knowing that it's not about a specific set of knowledge that they need to know.
The knowledge that they are getting is gonna be based off their day-to-day experience.
The children I serve, they have a lot of knowledge about- The creek that they hang out in day in, day out.
They have a lot of knowledge about the ocean because that's where they go on the weekends.
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