A Practical Approach to an Idealistic New Social Vision

Legalizing markets in happiness and well-being

Aspirations and ideals are crucial to the psyche of Western civilization. Marxism exercised such an extraordinary influence over millions of minds because it promised a better world. Indeed, it boggles the mind that the need for aspirations and ideals was apparently so great that a movement that was more murderous than Nazism nevertheless continued to serve as an ongoing focus for idealism through 70 years of mass murder. It seems that we crave a vision for a brighter future. We need to be building something better.

Since the collapse of communism there have been no widely recognized aspirations for society. The nightmare of communism should not prevent us from having humane aspirations. Climate activism and identity politics—those movements in which the spirit of the Left lives on—are wholly inadequate as visions for the fulfillment of human potential.

Conservatives mostly fight against the woke left, or fight against the social changes of the last 60 years, without offering much of a positive vision of their own.

There is a large market for books and workshops on how to live a better life. The Chicken Soup for the Soul series and Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People series that became publishing empires in their time. M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled was on the New York Times bestseller list for longer than any other paperback. Apparently people crave guidance. In different ways Oprah, Tony Robbins, Tim Ferris and Jordan Peterson all advise people on how to live.

Many people, perhaps most people, would like to become more successful at the art of living. Although individuals may receive inspiration from quotations, inspirational speeches, religious sermons, works of art, or nature, very few individuals are able to learn the art of living from any of them. They must be provided with experiences in which the inspiring approach to life is constantly supported and reinforced. This is why many churches place an emphasis on fellowship. It is very difficult for us to create better lives for ourselves in isolation. We usually need peer communities to support our practice of the good, of wellness and of excellence, however we perceive such goals.

Beyond the genetic component, human beings become who they become based on the daily, moment-to-moment manner in which they live. They learn, or fail to learn, the art of living from those around them. We have no institutions in which young people may learn better ways of living. Schools at present are mostly institutions in which young people learn worse ways of living.

There is a lacunae in our existing set of institutions. Although there are universities that encourage the study of education and human development, schools that follow government rules, and churches and secular organizations that promote spiritual ideals, there are no institutions that allow for the ongoing practical development and implementation of better ways of living. We need to allow for the growth of a new species of institution in which better ways of living may be developed and transmitted to our young.

Reformers have long recognized that education is the solution to our problems. What has not been generally recognized is the equivocal nature of the term “education.” Exhortational billboards or worksheets on self-esteem do not change habits and appetites, norms, and attitudes. Inspiring, healthy adults, who build real mentoring relationships with the young people they supervise and who work together as a team to impart the practices of a coherent culture to the young can make a significant difference. We need to create institutions in which the power of such adults is constantly concentrated, enhanced, and developed as they learn those practices needed to transmit a coherent culture. We do not have such institutions at present.

In the absence of government schools and government teacher training (that is, training through state-accredited schools of education mandated by state licensure laws), at this point our society would have nurtured institutions devoted to the practical development, implementation, and continual improvement of better ways of living. Teacher training would have developed along a path that would have been quite different from what it is today, much more closely aligned with the optimization of human potential. Schools would be unimaginably different from what they are today, and would be much more closely aligned with the fulfillment of those human needs that would allow for the optimization of human potential.

I have many thousands of hours of experience in creating new classroom cultures (along with capable colleagues), in training others to create such cultures, and in creating schools in which new student cultures thrive. I have wanted to create new and better teacher training centers so that I could staff new and better schools reliably. This goal is not possible at present (though it may come into being at the new University of Austin).

To create superb intellectual gains, I realized that the ultimate answer lay in changing peer culture to be supportive of learning rather than hostile to learning. This is especially critical if one wants to improve intellectual performance among cultural groups that are not already performing well academically. In order for a school to make a consistent, comprehensive push toward changing a peer culture, the school director needs the freedom to focus directly on those variables that determine patterns of peer interactions.

When I directed a charter school, I worked for the government. My employer, the government, judged my work strictly by whether I hired credentialed teachers; whether my students scored well on certain standardized exams (exams that were not aligned with authentic learning); whether I followed the state procurement code (they actually specified the number of purchase orders allowed in each file folder); and other such trivia. The lawmakers who established these laws were not bad people. The state employees who enforce these laws are not bad people. The thousands of school administrators for whom compliance with the law is the primary focus are not bad people.

And yet, the strictures with which the law forces us to comply are at best very partial and misguided. A busy administrator soon finds most, if not all, of his or her energy consumed by compliance with dictates that utterly fail to reflect human needs and reality. It is not possible to raise young people well by means of general rules passed in the form of laws or bureaucratic decisions by distant legislatures and state boards of education. It is not possible to make the many thousands of adjustments for particular individuals, particular circumstances, and in a world of pervasive change, while adhering to many strata of inconsistent laws and regulations.

By means of such well-intentioned compliance with well-intentioned enforcement of well-intentioned laws, over many decades of public education, we have reached a horribly inhuman situation in which young human life is systematically distorted and starved for meaning and inspiration. These distortions and starvations in K–12 education contribute to much of the dysfunction of our society. In the last 100 years or so, compulsory mass public education has replaced individual human discernment of what the young human spirit needs with a bureaucratic system that has been utterly blind to the needs of the human spirit. We have preempted and then betrayed our deepest instincts, and we gradually need to rediscover how to raise our young so they may be happy and well in the chaotic world of never-ending change in which we find ourselves.

Creativity and the freedom to use it has given more people better, healthier, and more fulfilled lives than any of us fully realizes. The great tragedy of modern times is that the most powerful system for developing and disseminating ever more sophisticated products and services, the free market, has not yet been applied to educating our young. The great tragedy of modern times is that those who believe that only a fraction of human potential, well-being, and happiness has yet been achieved mostly don’t believe in the power of free markets, while most of those who do don’t envision an unlimited expansion of human potential, well-being, and happiness.

I want to convince those who believe that human potential is as yet largely untapped that educational freedom is the sine qua non for the realization of their dreams and to specify how to create those institutions that will allow for the realization of their dreams.

Many of those who believe in human potential believe that free markets are hostile to human potential and fundamentally undermine its development. What they don’t realize is that their assessment is, at present, correct precisely because we have not allowed a market in education to form. Current connotations of the term “free market” imply commercialism and consumerism because our current schools are utterly incapable of training appetites. Young people are completely vulnerable to marketing; a course in media awareness does not change the fact that young people today crave the kinds of stimulation that existing markets provide for them. The only way to change the vulnerability of young people to marketing is to cultivate their preferences, to instill in them individually a more valuable set of preferences, and to surround them with a peer culture that supports such alternative sets of preferences.

Initially perhaps, few parents or students will choose schools that develop the human spirit. But if you believe, as do I, that there are marvelous aspects of life that are being lost to contemporary young people because of the avalanche of destruction that has been let loose upon our culture, then perhaps I can persuade you that educators such as myself, and better, will be able to market the foundations for deep wellness to both parents and young people. I’m inclined to believe that the latent demand for education that satisfies the human spirit is enormous. In such a world, “sales” and “marketing” will have profoundly different connotations than they do at present. Instead of being inundated solely with marketing that appeals to our most shallow impulses, we will increasingly find ourselves in a world in which competing visions of well-being are put forward in tantalizing fashion.

The stage at which we now find ourselves is one in which the most important lesson that the young need to learn is how to live. We need experts on life, integrity, wellness, humor, kindness, love, accepting grace, finding courage, and on being human. We need model human beings who can create new, better ways of living together. We need artists of life who can blend together the astonishingly different cultural patterns, old and new, to create teen cultures devoted to new forms of human adventure that move beyond violence, manipulative and casual sex, bigotry, social cruelty, drugs, whining, self-righteousness, laziness, vanity, and self-indulgence.

We are now at a stage in which the work that is needed is not merely a matter of teaching algebra or grammar or historical facts. It is increasingly the case that the duller parts of all academic disciplines may largely be taught by means of technology. Increasingly, human educators will need to specialize in uniquely human abilities, those skills, habits, attitudes, and norms that technology will never be able to transmit.

If people knew they could do what they love and share what they love with others, while being assured of a modest salary, they would be crawling out of the woodwork to practice their artistry. We have entered the age of meaning. Now that most of us have had our basic needs for food, lodging, and security met, we long more than anything else to make a meaningful contribution to society.

Exercising our creative powers by means of sharing our individual uniqueness and brilliance with the young is far, far, more satisfying than is shopping or parties or gambling or doing most of the other wasteful things that so many people spend so much time doing. If we were allowed to create better learning communities, most recreation would come to seem boring.

More than anything, we need schools based on love. We need schools in which people passionately love what they are doing, love what they are teaching and love what they are learning. We need schools in which teachers love their colleagues, students love their teachers, teachers love their students, parents love the school, and everyone is joined by a passionate vision of excellence and human flourishing. Such schools cannot be mandated or created by force. They must be freely chosen by all parties involved.

In a world of educational freedom, parents, students, and educators will choose those educational communities that they love, communities that are based on love. For more than 100 years we have cauterized the love that mothers and fathers feel for their children by coercive educational models. We must now begin to heal from this violation of the human spirit. As a consequence of allowing love into the world of K–12 education, on a grand scale, we will begin to introduce love into the adult world, very gradually, on an even grander scale.

The Challenges We Face

For much of the twentieth century, social scientists tended to believe that human beings were creatures of culture. The Marxists believed that human selfishness could be eradicated in a post-communist utopia. Anthropologists studying exotic cultures discovered an astounding array of behaviors and concluded that human nature was almost entirely plastic. Feminists, in the battle for equality, argued that traditional male/female stereotypes were culturally-determined rather than based in nature.

More recently advances in genetics along with evolutionary psychology have renewed interest in the genetic aspects of human nature, that which is inherited rather than culturally determined. Human beings have certain genetic predispositions, including appetites for sex and for status, that seem to be hard-wired into our DNA. One of our genetic predispositions, however, is to be influenced by our peers. The desire for acceptance, recognition, and respect from our peers and from our society is very powerful.

It is largely futile to try as individuals, or even as families, to form isolated bulwarks against the overwhelming force of pop culture. Many evangelical Christians realize this, which is why they are so insistent on mobilizing en masse on political issues and why they are eager to home school or send their children to Christian schools. (It is also the reason why they have created Christian rock, Christian radio, Christian bookstores, Christian television stations, and so on). They realize the importance of mounting a coherent, coordinated cultural campaign against pop culture.) Advocates of new culture -- advocates of a more just, kind, and humane world that better reveals our human potential — all need to realize that their goals are also best realized by means of freeing education from government control.

Although a certain percentage of the high school population is working hard in order to get into competitive colleges (perhaps 20 to 30 percent), the vast majority of high school students are devoting only a small fraction of their intellectual and moral energies toward learning. For most middle and high school students, school is a social activity, a kind of game in which the goal is to obtain adequate grades while doing as little real learning as possible. The number of hours wasted, the number of dollars wasted, and the sum of human energy wasted, is colossal. No other sector of the economy has as great a potential for improvements in efficiency.

As someone who has brought numerous adult professionals into the classroom, I can say that most professional adults, who themselves worked reasonably hard in school and were reasonably polite (they were almost invariably among the 30 percent who actually worked in school), are shocked when they first teach contemporary students. The level of apathy and indifference to learning—the disrespect for authority— is astounding. Beavis and Butt-Head is a joke very much based in reality. Anyone who doubts this should substitute teach in a local government high school for a week. Be sure to get a course schedule that includes a few non honors courses; the view from the high end may be misleading.

In 1999, Phi Delta Kappa, one of the most respected educational organizations in the United States, published an article “Give Us This Day Our Daily Dread: Manufacturing Crises in Education.” The article makes the case that enemies of public education deliberately manufacture crises in order to undermine support for public education. The author recommends that, in response to many of the alleged failings of public education, we should apply the “So what?” test. One of his examples of a manufactured alarmist finding is the statistic that fewer than 10 percent of students are attentive in their high school science classes. He claims that this is a “So what?” finding that should be ignored. His rationale:

“No ‘index of attentiveness’ is provided, tempting readers who have not been in recent close contact with large groups of adolescents to infer that 10 percent is a low value.”

Thus in an article in defense of public education published by a leading organization of professional educators we are told to respond “So what?” to the fact that only 10 percent of students are attentive in their high school science classes (25 years ago; it is almost certainly worse today). The author does not dispute this fact, but instead implies that such a statistic is to be expected among those who have been “in recent close contact with large groups of adolescents.”

Adolescence in America is largely a disaster - and it was so before the rise of smartphones. The recent acceleration of the crisis of adolescence has led most people to forget that it has been a long time coming. Bill McKibben, the environmentalist writer and advocate of natural living, was as harsh as any fundamentalist parent by the 1990s: “If one had set out to create a culture purposefully damaging to children, you couldn’t do much better than America at the end of the twentieth century.” Patricia Hersch, in a 1999 book titled A Tribe Apart: A Journey into the Heart of American Adolescence, states: “All parents feel an ominous sense—like distant rumbles of thunder moving closer and closer—that even their child could be caught in the deluge of adolescent dysfunction sweeping the nation.”According to a 1998 USA Today article titled, “A Culture Purposefully Damaging,” although 75 percent of U.S. parents say they had taken steps to shield their children from outside influences deemed undesirable, 73 percent conceded that limiting children’s exposure to popular culture was “nearly impossible.” Again, this was before smartphones.

Mary Pipher’s 1990s book Reviving Ophelia made the case that contemporary teen culture amounts to an assault on teen girls: “America today is a girl-destroying place,” she states. Students across the United States acknowledge that the viciousness of high school cliques and hierarchies could lead to another Columbine-style massacre anywhere.

The obvious power of teen culture to shape human lives has only recently been re-recognized. We were much wiser in the nineteenth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson summed up the perspective well: “I pay the schoolmaster, but it is the schoolboys that educate my son.” Judith Rich Harris, in The Nurture Assumption, has shown that the majority of evidence of psychological research suggests that peers have a greater influence over young people than do parents: “In the long run it isn’t the home environment that makes the difference. It is the environment shared by children. It is the culture created by these children.”

The pervasive power of peer influence is most problematic with respect to negative behaviors: “Research has shown that the best predictor of whether a teenager will smoke is whether her friends smoke. This is a better predictor than whether her parents smoke. Teenagers who smoke are also more likely to engage in other kinds of “problem behavior”: to drink, to use illegal drugs, to become sexually active at an early age, to cut classes or drop out of school, to break laws. They belong to peer groups in which such behaviors are considered normal.”

As a consequence, “Telling teenagers about the health risks of smoking . . . is useless.” The only way to affect teen behavior is to change the nature of peer culture. The massive public health and education dollars being spent didactically are almost entirely wasted. An educational approach that intervenes in peer culture, instead of futilely talking at kids, is the only approach that is worth being described as “an investment.”

John Taylor Gatto, twice named New York State Teacher of the Year, describes conventional K–12 education as 13 years’ training in passivity and dependence, meaninglessness and incoherence. The method is the only real lesson learned by the students. Existing K–12 education largely consists of experiential indoctrination in the lesson that learning is boring, humiliating, and meaningless and that therefore the only rewards in life come from intense stimulations. Appetites for community, spirituality, art, and nature are systematically stunted in our young people in the first years of their lives. As adult consumers, they then go on to create the society in which we live.

As traditional cultures erode in the face of the media mass cultures, and as addictive behaviors, substances, and electronics degrade the lives of increasing millions, those of us who care about human well-being have an opportunity to create new cultures that are more humane while also being suitably adapted to twenty-first century global society. Innovative, enculturating K–12 education is the only means of raising new generations with the coherence and structure of a culture in the face of the avalanche of commercial stimulation that has become inescapable and as addictive as any drug. As the United States debates, and gradually implements school choice, we face a unique opportunity to transform our world for the better.

The influence of traditional cultures around the world is decreasing. Traditional cultures in Africa, Asia, and South America are vanishing. Ethnic subcultures in urban areas of the United States are gradually disappearing. A few mass media-supported monocultures are taking over the world: a Muslim mass culture, a Hispanic mass culture, a Chinese mass culture, a Hindu mass culture, and an Anglo mass culture. The traditional idiosyncrasies, practices, prejudices, and virtues of those cultures in which mankind evolved are rapidly vanishing. Insofar as traditional cultures are being replaced by new idiosyncratic cultures, for the most part the new cultures are being formed by electronic media rather than by human beings.

Around the world, life with human beings in a common culture is being replaced by daily experiences of flashy, stimulating electronic sounds and images. Electronic stimulation is becoming increasingly potent and seductive. Technology will continue to develop ever more compelling television and video, computer and video games, musical stimulation, and virtual reality. As a teen I read a science fiction novel in which most people no longer wanted to live life; they preferred to experience their virtual realities, complete with electrodes to stimulate the brain so as to simulate physical experiences and mental states. Life consisted of the virtual experience of having sex with the most attractive partners, reliving the most transcendent religious experiences of saints and martyrs, or triumphantly fighting as a gladiator engaged in orgies of violence, all achieved while lying down in a lounger and not moving a muscle.

Each year advances in entertainment technology bring us closer to this world. AI and the metaverse will put this on steroids. Readers who are not immersed in this world have no comprehension of the amount of time and money young men spend on electronic games. The gaming world is now a bigger industry, by revenue, than the motion picture industry, and this enormous industry caters to a narrower demographic than does the motion picture industry—mostly young males. These massive revenue streams will result in ever-larger investments in evermore sophisticated virtual experiences that will soon approximate the science fiction vision described in the previous paragraph. Role playing games and virtual reality technologies are rapidly becoming more intensely stimulating and more intensely real. One of the best-selling computer games, Grand Theft Auto, included an option whereby teenage boys can hire a prostitute, avail themselves of her services, and then murder her. Blowing up heads and splattering human beings are common gaming options. We should be concerned about the ever-increasing realism of such gaming experiences and the consequent tastes and appetites formed among numerous boys.

But it is possible to create new forms of K–12 education based on ever-deepening human bonds and experiences so that real, lived life will be a more compelling direct experience for young people than it is at present. As Mihaly Cziksentmihalyi points out in Flow, engaging in creative, challenging activity is an optimal experience. But in order to prepare them to take advantage of life’s peak experiences, we need to develop young people from a young age to have the capacity to engage in such activities. Then we must provide them with constant opportunities to practice such activities — only then will they find real life more engaging than the evermore intensely-stimulating virtual realities coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

The Power of Culture

Anthropologists have long been aware of the power of cultural differences: many African tribesmen could follow nearly invisible traces in the dust to track animals; some Native Americans who could withstand great pain and suffering during rites of passage; and Polynesian fishermen were skilled in determining their location while at sea, far from land, by feeling ocean currents with their hands.

Other characteristics weren't so positive, but are perhaps more powerful examples, like those Japanese samurai who voluntarily committed seppuku to avoid the shame of not fulfilling their duty and Buddhist monks who burned themselves to death in Vietnam in the 1960s to protest the war. These are but a sampling of the extraordinary range of human capacities that are possible due to culture. During the first generations of anthropological discovery, people from one culture were often incredulous when they first encountered the practices of human beings from another culture. Surely human beings are not capable of such things!

Fareed Zakaria quotes Joel Kotkin’s conclusion after studying cultural patterns in his book Tribes:

If you want to succeed economically in the modern world, the key is simple—be Jewish, be Indian, but above all, be Chinese.

Although it is not politically correct to acknowledge facts so directly, cultural background obviously plays a crucial role with respect to the success of different populations in our current educational system. Asian and Jewish students are admitted disproportionately to elite colleges and score more highly on a range of tests than do students from other ethnic groups.

African-American and Native American students score lower on such tests. This is not evidence of genetic inferiority, but rather of a cultural background that does not happen to provide students with the cultural prerequisites to succeed in our existing school system and contemporary society. Why not create schools that provide all students with the cultural prerequisites for success?

There are precedents for deliberately changing the culture of student populations. Medieval students were a raucous bunch, even when they were 10 or 12; violence, drinking, begging, and whoring were common among students from all social classes. It took centuries of civilizing effort on behalf of the church authorities who ran the schools to change these behaviors.

A sample of earlier student life from Philippe Aries’ Centuries of Childhood:

At Aix the rector . . . [summoned] there a great many boys of the fourth and fifth (classes) [whose tender years afforded them no protection against this contagion of violence], and there he pointed out to them the evil in dueling and forbade them to indulge in dueling under pain of severe penalties. . . . This spirit of violence went with considerable license with regard to wine and women. . . . Montaigne tells us, “A hundred scholars have caught the pox before getting to their Aristotle lesson.”And the boys read Aristotle young!

Aries concludes:

It needed the pressure of the pedagogues to separate the schoolboy from the bohemian adult, both of whom were heirs of a time when elegance of speech and dress was limited not even to the cleric, but to the courtly adult. A new moral concept was to distinguish the child, or at least the schoolboy, and set him apart: the concept of the well-bred child. It scarcely existed in the sixteenth century; it was formed in the seventeenth century. We know that it was the product of the reforming opinions of an elite of thinkers and moralists who occupied high positions in Church or State. The well-bred child would be preserved from the roughness and immorality which would become the special characteristics of the lower classes. . . . The old medieval unruliness was abandoned first of all by children, last of all by the lower classes: today it remains the mark of the hooligan, of the last heir of the old vagabonds, beggars, and outlaws.

Aries traces a long history of thoughtful commentary by this elite of thinkers and moralists (mostly Jesuit educators and priests) that led to specific changes in school policies and practices. Century by century, student behaviors which were once the norm among schoolboys (teen and younger), such as fighting, drinking, and whoring, became increasingly less common.

Of course such behaviors still occur, but not at the scale or with the level of acceptance that was once the case. Medieval books on manners explicitly instruct people not to urinate in the corners of the castle or to blow their noses on the tablecloths. Such instructions are generally unnecessary today. Culture has changed significantly in the intervening years.

Just as the Jesuits deliberately marginalized hooliganism, and just as the Mormons have deliberately created a more successful and healthy religious subculture, so, too, could other groups create more successful subcultures. Over time, they would learn much from each other, and a multitude of hybrids would be developed. The human race would learn a terrific amount about how to create well-being deliberately.

Skeptics may find the analogy between traditional or religious cultures, such as Jewish or Mormon cultures, and classroom cultures implausible. Given the current state of affairs, the analogy is implausible. My point, however, is that habits, attitudes, appetites, and norms are important to education; that because of this a free market that allowed for the deliberate development of habits, attitudes, appetites, and norms would flourish due to parents’ ongoing interest in improving their children’s well-being; and that in a free market, an innovation dynamic would develop that would eventually have highly beneficial results — ultimately the results would be far more positive than what we can currently imagine, just as the results of today’s technology would astound our ancestors.

In 1930, almost all of the technology we use today would have seemed implausible. Since then, many billions of dollars and many thousands of bright, creative, focused, practical individuals have created technological wonders — and this result is strictly due to the fact that most of the activity took place in a free market. We can’t know what might have been the case if similar billions of dollars and thousands of free individuals had been allowed to create new ways of life in a similarly free market. Silicon Valley was created from math, sand, and freedom. The Soviet Union had the best mathematicians, plenty of sand, but no freedom. And by the mid-1980s a decent U.S. university had more computing power than did the entire Soviet Union.

This may be regarded as a parable with profound implications for our educational system. Human beings in modern society are not what we could be. None of us has lived up to our potential. Our current set of research institutions for improving human well-being, including those institutions staffed by academic psychologists, sociologists, and education professors, has overlooked a critical strategy for improving well-being. In addition, those public health officials who are trying to reduce obesity, heart disease, cancers, suicides, child and spousal abuse, family dysfunction, addiction, and so on, have overlooked a critical strategy for improving well-being. And finally, those activists and idealists who seek to reduce racism, poverty, materialism, greed, and environmental insensitivity have overlooked a critical strategy for improving well-being.The entrepreneurial creation of coherent modern tribal structures (or virtue cultures), initially in the context of what is now known as K–12 education, provides a better means of solving all of the foregoing problems than has been or will be provided by the exertions of academic researchers and public policy experts.

A Market in Cultural Innovation in order to Help the Poor

The poor are particularly harmed by the lack of a market in education in a world characterized by cultural erosion. The upper classes can afford to either protect their children from cultural erosion by means of their choice of private school or public school in upscale neighborhoods, or they can more readily remedy the problems after the fact by means of therapies, detox centers, vacations, lessons, plastic surgery, retreats, spas, and a thousand other options available to those who can pay. The poor, however, are often simply the victims of cultural erosion, and a poor parent has little recourse when her child’s well-being has been undermined.

Our existing educational system is designed to support education as training and/or curriculum coverage. It is not designed to support education as enculturation. Insofar as professional success in the twenty- first century depends on the development of critical thinking skills and intellectuality, the traits of innovation and entrepreneurial initiative, and mastery of upper-middle-class social norms, enculturation is the crucial species of education for social mobility. Young people from households or cultures in which these cultural traits are not already developed will be systematically excluded from the professional classes as long as we continue our existing public school system. (AI will only accelerate this exclusion). As an institution, public school has evolved to serve most effectively the most “normal” children of upper-middle-class families; it is most damaging in its effects to any student who is outside the norm or any student who lacks the cultural prerequisites implicitly presupposed by the system.

The greatest benefits of educational innovation, will be a system for distributing cultural wealth and well-being as effectively as the market has distributed technological wealth. Televisions and radios, refrigerators and washing machines, cell phones and pagers, have all become cheap and ubiquitous, even among the poor. Why haven’t we created a society in which thrift, industriousness, intellectual curiosity, academic focus, self-discipline, respect, and courtesy are equally cheap and ubiquitous? K–12 education ought to be the leading vector for transmitting good habits from one generation to the next and for adapting new norms and habits to the times. Instead of creating amazing institutions for the transmission of the best cultural habits, our schools have suffered from cultural wars that have deracinated any set of common norms from public schools, resulting in K–12 education that teaches young people not to abide by any set of norms whatsoever— except those spontaneously developed by pop culture and peers.

Insofar as the goal of education is the transmission of culture, direct contact with humans who know how to live is crucial. Although innovations in educational technology may help teach the academic component of education, innovations in the human element of education are the only means by which we will be able to make a fundamental difference in the lives of the poor. I say this as someone with solid roots in the working class, someone who has seen some members of my family flourish due to positive habits and attitudes and other members of my family experience misery due to negative habits and attitudes. Based on the dozens of members of my own extended family whose lives I’ve observed, as well as the hundreds of children of various social classes I’ve educated, it is clear that day-to-day intellectual and emotional habits are the real key to social mobility. And, as an educator who specializes in the development of new intellectual and emotional habits by means of the creation of new classroom cultures, I know that all young people can have access to the habits needed for success.

The poor are among those who would benefit most from such a process of mutation, selection, and subsequent transmission of new classroom and peer cultures. The system of K–12 education that has been established in this country was a reasonably effective system for educating upper-middle-class students 100 years ago. If a student had been raised with the cultural norms of the upper-middle class, then training in biology, chemistry, grammar, history, and so forth might have been an efficient use of time in order to prepare him for entrance into college at the time. Since then, generations of students have wasted time that might have more productively been spent on other activities. Instead of learning biology or grammar in a context in which initiative and intellectual independence was destroyed, they could have been learning initiative and intellectual independence first and foremost, or frugality and industriousness, or emotional awareness and teamwork, or some other combination of more valuable personal traits.

Anyone who saves and invests $2 per day in an index fund from the age of 15 to the age of 70 will, at long-term average rates of equity return (9 percent), become a multimillionaire. Is it utopian to imagine that, if there were schools that provided deep habituation in frugality and industriousness, in our economy today every impoverished student could create a multimillion dollar fortune? Unlike welfare or other stop-gap measures, such a transference of the technology of success to the poor could eliminate poverty permanently. Moreover, only a generation ago such norms of frugality and industriousness were common. They still are among many people from the developing world.

Because human beings are so varied, with different cultural backgrounds and different personal characteristics, in order to optimize future success for the underprivileged we need vastly more variety in education. Given enough freedom we will eventually develop forms of education that are remarkably different from what we see at present. Some need training in manners, some in “how to win friends and influence people,” and some in frugality and investment. Some require education as emotional therapy, and some need to find themselves. In a market, these and other forms of education will be integrated seamlessly into formidably effective, holistic human development programs that will allow for far more social mobility than exists at present. The more K–12 education is forcibly restricted to the existing curriculum, administered by the existing government institutions and certified personnel, the more the poor, in particular, will continue to suffer.

Success in our society is not simply a matter of academic achievement. It is well-known that the income distribution fits a log-normal distribution (highly-skewed, with few rich and many poor). This income distribution is almost certainly due largely to the fact that numerous independent variables — such as academic skills, presentation (speaking) skills, strategic intelligence, appropriate class manners, emotional intelligence, and so on — are necessary to succeed in the workplace.

A complex constellation of characteristics are required for success, most of which are not cultivated by existing schools. Although there are some students who fail because they do not learn academics, there are other students who do learn academics and yet who still do not succeed in life. Our present approach does not begin to provide every child with what he or she really needs to succeed in life. Insofar as it claims to do so, the system is telling a lie.

The Idea of Cultural Innovation

Cultural innovation is constantly taking place. Every new song, book, video, movie, game, communication device, software package, home design, bathtub, spatula, toothbrush, tattoo, zoo, museum, sex toy, car, vacation, map, corporation, spiritual practice, parenting practice, marital therapy, food, diet, exercise, piece of sporting equipment, and so forth has some impact on culture. The notion that we should not seek to innovate culturally is absurd. It is happening all around us at an ever-increasing pace (remember Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock?). The only relevant question is,“Do we allow cultural innovation to take place in every realm of life except education, or do we also allow a world in which educators may consciously, deliberately learn how to provide better ways of life?”

The most potent cultural innovators are probably in the field of entertainment, broadly construed. There is nothing wrong with entertainment per se. But entertainment necessarily is geared toward satisfying short-term needs, values, and desires. Why should we accept a society in which cultural innovation is almost exclusively determined by means of short-term impulses?

Suppose, hypothetically, that there are human capacities or appetites that take 10 or more years to develop; that those aspects of human nature are best developed during the formative years of childhood and adolescence; and that it is necessary to have communities of talented, committed people working in concert over many years in order to best develop those aspects of human nature. If, hypothetically, any such aspects of human capacity existed, we would be largely ignorant of them because the institutions just described do not exist.

With respect to some desirable traditional cultural traits, those who have tried to preserve them find that it has become very difficult to pass them on to their children in contemporary circumstances. In the West, there are plausible claims that attributes such as character and integrity, courage and honor are not what they used to be -- a tough, grizzled old Colorado rancher, a seeming model of probity and integrity, humbly acknowledges that his generation doesn’t even know what integrity is by comparison with that of his father and grandfather. No comment needed regarding the subsequent deterioration in more recent generations.

In Japan, which experienced a very rapid transition to modernity in the late nineteenth century, older Japanese observed the rapid decline in the Samurai Bushido ethos in a matter of decades. Alaska natives saw an even more rapid introduction to modernity in the mid-twentieth century, in which thousand-year-old survival skills ranging from hunting knowledge to extraordinary physical toughness and prowess vanished almost overnight. Cultural traits that may have evolved over many centuries disappear in a generation or even within a few years.

A skeptic may suggest: Fine and good, but we don’t really need seal-hunting skills, arctic survival skills, samurai self-discipline and shame, or perhaps even old-style honor and integrity. Regardless of what one thinks of the particular examples of skills, my point is that if there were any human characteristics whatsoever that required long tutelage by trained masters in a supportive culture they would be invisible to us at present. There may be amazing capabilities that might allow human beings to adapt to the twenty-first century but which do not exist, and cannot exist, because our society has prevented the development of those institutions that would bring forth such human capabilities.

Traditional cultures, having evolved through centuries of interaction with a relatively stable environment, are models of such integrated, coherent cultures. Education in such cultures was a natural, unconscious experience in which young people gradually learned the practices of their culture. With the exception of the rapidly disappearing vestigial remains of such cultures, human beings today are raised in a more or less incoherent cultural universe. In the absence of a coherent culture, humans are more likely to find themselves prey to impulsive and compulsive behaviors, variously directed toward material goods, status, sex, food, vanity, emotional attachments, gambling, electronic stimulation (television, video games, and so on), or drugs. We are very complex organisms; in order to live as healthy adults, we need to be raised well.

A century and more ago people talked about “formative education” or “the education of character” which was understood to be the deliberate effort to provide young people with the internal stability required to live well. The model that I have described is as true of traditional formative education as it is of transformative education. Indeed, formative education is the model for all my educational interests. I am very impressed by the formative education characteristic of military schools and traditional Catholic schools. Although my goals as an educator are very different from the goals of these schools, the cultural traditions in which these schools operate are rightly attentive to such currently neglected aspects of education as heroes, ideals, music, manners, and attitudes.

Most of contemporary academic education is remarkably neglectful of the importance of such details. The extraordinary human phenomena resulting from the development of Spartan discipline or Buddhist awareness would never have occurred as a consequence of a contemporary American education. I have gradually come to realize that although traditional education and traditional culture were deeply flawed, the holistic cultural approaches used in traditional cultures should not have been left behind by modernity. The same kinds of approaches that have been used in traditional cultures for centuries can be adapted and innovated for greater human well-being going forward into the future.

Gradually, the distinctive new cultures will develop reputations as a market develops in which parents have more information as to which school model is best for each of their children. Just as Car and Driver and PC User magazines provide detailed, opinionated analysis of their respective products, so too, will education magazines arise that will provide detailed analyses of distinctive educational cultures. New standards of quality will arise. Instead of test score performance (in the case of public schools) or elitist reputation (in the case of private schools) sufficing for measures of quality, gradually there will develop cadres of perceptive education critics, similar to critics found in the worlds of automobiles, computers, food, art, travel, and so on: These critics will discern those schools that develop an especially wonderful sort of emotional intelligence, or those schools that develop a distinctive mental originality, or those schools in which lifelong healthy habits are reliably developed. Imagine a school whose reputation includes males who characteristically treat females with remarkable grace and consideration, or a thousand other distinctive virtues.

Alasdair MacIntyre, in After Virtue, describes the prerequisites for what I call a “virtue culture.” He intends for these prerequisites to be abstract and general, to apply to any culture that wishes to develop any particular set of human virtues, be they integrity, politeness, courage, compassion, environmental concern, gender equality, or what have you. His prerequisites are:

1. A communal understanding of each individual’s life as a meaningful whole, a life in its entirety as a contribution to the community: people must see the value and meaning of their life as a lifelong contribution (or lack thereof) to society. If people interpret life simply as one impulsive entertainment after another, or one political commitment after another, or any set of disconnected events, it is impossible to develop a serious virtue culture.

2. A moral tradition. People, especially young people, must be raised in a morally coherent social universe.Who are the great heroes of the past? What are the great events that led to our present time? What ideals do we aspire to in the future? What actions (or even thoughts) are considered unforgivable transgressions? What leads to exclusion from the community?

3. A set of practices that allow the people to develop, practice, and perfect their virtues. If manners are important, then there will be social settings in which the best manners are modeled. If honor is important, then there will be social settings in which honor is recognized, acknowledged and exhibited.Whatever the virtue, young people will be immersed in a culture in which the human actions that allow them to achieve excellence in that culture will be constantly exhibited. For manners, young people would be provided training in the small points of etiquette as well as the larger social principles behind the etiquette. Schools that developed frugality would provide constant opportunities for students to discover amazing values for very little money. If political participation is the required virtue, young people would be trained in political oratory, analysis, and dialogue. In each case, the training may be implicit rather than explicit; but it must be pervasive in the cultural immersion that constitutes their education. These conditions are almost impossible to provide today. They certainly don’t exist at most public schools.

MacIntyre is of the belief that all cultures prior to modern Western culture were based on such a schema. Humans were raised understanding that they had a role and standing in society and that their entire life was a reflection of how well they fulfilled that role. Indeed, in many cultures, this reputational effect was multigenerational: if one violated a cultural norm, it damaged one’s children, their children, and so forth.

Each culture had a vision of excellence in that society. This vision of excellence was transmitted by means of myth and heroic tales, and it was transmitted by a multitude of comments, jokes, attitudes, manners, behavioral corrections, and so forth. The very texture of day-to-day life provided a consistent, coherent template that taught young people how they were to behave. From time to time, a member of the society was sanctioned or expelled in a manner that made it perfectly clear what types of behavior were not condoned by the community. And young people were brought up in a set of cultural practices that allowed them to practice the requisite virtues of that society so they would naturally become respectable adult participants in such a society.

Of course, Western civilization has been seeking liberation from these sorts of intolerant virtue cultures for some 500 years. In their resistance to traditional authorities, the rebels of the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Enlightenment unwittingly provided the foundation for the more radical liberations of the twentieth century. In the 1920s and the 1960s it appeared as if radical individual freedom was the final goal. Now the very notion of a constraint on one’s behavior seems so quaint as to be a historic relic, a detail from a far away anthropological study.

What none of the liberators seems to have realized is the truth of Goethe’s insight that “Whatever liberates our spirit without a corresponding increase in self-control is pernicious.” I continue to be committed to the liberation of the spirit; and I have gradually come to realize that as I liberate spirits, I have an absolute obligation to simultaneously provide training in self-control. Else I am responsible for disasters.

Traditional cultures did not seek to liberate the spirit: by and large, they sought to constrain the spirit within very well-defined cultural boundaries. As a consequence, they were often highly bigoted, shaming, and sometimes cruel. For decades famous films were based on this theme:

Zorba the Greek contrasts Zorba’s own liberated spirit with the cruel stoning of a young widow, My Big Fat Greek Wedding and Bend It Like Beckham are sweet comedies based on the same theme. Few people who are truly knowledgeable about traditional cultures would want to return to their brutal stasis, conformity, constraints, and judgmental attitudes.

And yet many people long for community, tradition, ritual, structure, and meaning in their lives. We (including most emphatically Socratic intellectuals such as myself) have ripped traditional societies and norms to shreds. We had to do it. There were gross injustices and bigotries. We must now rebuild more humane, tolerant, decent replacements for those earlier systems.

Again, I don’t claim to have a particular solution. While I can offer profoundly better approaches to training intellectuality and independent thought, I have not solved the problems of sexuality and the meaning of life - I don’t believe there is one correct, universal solution. I know other educators who are better than I am at creating respect and reverence, who are better at creating awareness and self-discipline, who are better at creating physical vitality and rugged toughness, and who are better at creating aesthetic delight and musical joy. We need to be able to blend these and other approaches to discover what works. Each of us needs to be able to choose our own combinations and educational partners.

The more deeply I’ve thought about how to create a comprehensive educational solution to this problem the more I’ve been daunted by the scale of the problem. But no one individual should or could solve it. If thousands of individual educators were allowed to work with others to create institutions that exemplified their own solutions, our society would gradually begin to figure out these problems. Many thousands of wonderful human beings would, bit-by-bit, here and there, begin to discover, create, evolve, and then disseminate better ways of life.

A transformative education that cultivates the attitudes and appetites, the habits and customs, the fashions and fantasies, the virtues and ideals of future generations offers a virtually untapped resource for increasing human well-being. In addition, many of the chronic problems facing modernity, including such diverse phenomena as environmental degradation, cancer, immune system disorders, poverty, racism, addictive behaviors, crime, and spousal and child abuse may ultimately require for their solution deep cultural changes that can only be achieved by means of transformative educational techniques not yet imagined.

A Vision for the Future

We need to allow entrepreneurs the freedom to create a radical reconstruction of our educational system and, consequently, of our society. Most readers will find it implausible; prior to my career as an educational entrepreneur I would not have believed my own conclusions. The good news is that it is possible to create fundamentally new peer cultures in our schools, cultures that are more supportive of learning, achievement, politeness, respect, and wellness. The challenge is that it will not be possible to create and disseminate high quality versions of these new peer cultures on a large scale until we have dramatically more educational freedom than we do at present.

For me, the most urgent political issue in the United States today is to gradually transform our existing K–12 educational institutions by means of universal school choice through minimally-regulated educational scholarship accounts (ESAs). Schools would be governed by minimal constraints concerning curriculum, staffing, or pedagogical structure. There are three reasons why I regard this issue as the most urgent of all:

1. Because of the relentless pressures of global competition, those in our society who are not currently receiving a great education will find life in the twenty-first century job market harsh and unforgiving.

2. Because of the collapse of common norms of culture, including those norms that prevent addiction, constrain sexuality, support industriousness and thrift, and provide a foundation for long-term meaning and purpose, many in our population already find life harsh and unforgiving.

3. Because people at all levels of our society crave greater meaning, purpose, and community in their lives. They find themselves immersed in a society that lacks structures for providing new models of meaning, purpose, and community and in which gambling, pornography, addictive substances, sensational entertainments, consumer culture, and other types of short-term satisfactions are cheap and ubiquitous.

By administering K–12 education through government – that clunky, lumbering, impersonal uberagent -- we have created a society in which it is easier for entrepreneurs to innovate and market short-term stimulations such as gambling and pornography than it is for entrepreneurs to innovate and market sources of long-term well-being such as wisdom and compassion. We need to legalize markets in happiness and well-being by means of legislation authorizing K–12 educational freedom.

Adapted with permission from Michael Strong, John Mackey, et. al., Be the Solution: How Entrepreneurs and Conscious Capitalists Can Solve All the World’s Problems, Wiley & Sons, 2008.