Humanitarian, social worker and former educator, Stephanie, put amazing words that grabbed my intuition in her book Making IT, What Today’s Kids Need for Tomorrow’s World. She is very future and human oriented in her drive to make concrete the right of children to learn and thrive, as well as examples and ideas that can help make this a reality.
I love the Triple Bottom Line concept of cost benefit analysis, had never heard it before, but certainly is exactly what I had in mind. Some things are challenging to quantify, but we need to take it on and simultaneously not hypertrophy our attempts to correlate what actually matters.
Links:
The Listening Society – Hanzi Freinacht
Transcript:
keevin bybee 0:00
Welcome to the one school podcast. This is keevin Bybee. I’m a family physician exploring how we might turn local schools into 24/7 365 Day safe havens for our children by having conversations with experts and those with experience who might inform such a project. Today, I have the pleasure of speaking with the humanitarian social worker, educator, founder and author, Stephanie Malia Kraus, she first got my attention when I listened to her talk on the getting smart podcast last year, about her book Making it what today’s kids need for tomorrow’s world. Her message resonated really highly with me, and the tools that she brought forth, really seemed like they would help one school learners and caregivers in the future. So Stephanie, I would really love if you could tell the listeners a little bit about yourself, and how you think the elements from your book, and your experience might inform a project like a 24/7. School. If we had the funding to get away with it.
stephanie krauss 0:55
Yes. Oh, well, funding ends up always being the question keevin I’m really glad to be here. And I don’t think anybody’s ever called me a humanitarian. So I’m taking it, I’m going to add it to BIOS moving forward and just be like Mom, teacher, social worker, humanitarian, every time. It’s, it’s good to be with you. Because I think it’s important that we gather together folks who really have the whole child in mind and understand the connections between living and learning between health, the brain, the body together, healing and learning and development. And so I’m excited to talk about what went into making it why I wrote it, what it could mean if somebody was designing new, but also to talk about some of the system constraints of what happens when you’re inside of a system that’s not designed with health and healing and wholeness and learning and development in mind and how we got there. And I’ll even give you a sneak peek in terms of what I’m working on. Now, from a writing perspective, because I think it really matches with this vision of creating safe havens for kids and why that’s so important and what a right 24/7 365 would look like. So just to tell you a little bit about me, mom of two, but mom, God mama of four, so my two guy kids slept with us in the summer. And when all four are together, I have a big kid a tween, and I have a big kid now two tweens and a teen, although the two tweens are about to split off, so I think I’ll all soon have a big kid between a teen and a big teen. But I say that to say that you know that the group of kids I think most impacted by the pandemic, where we’re seeing real flags and warnings in terms of mental health and development and learning. I’m no longer on the education frontlines, but I am on the parenting frontlines, and so I’m seeing it at home every day. But my background on the education frontlines was as a teacher, and then I ran a school and an education nonprofit in St. Louis, and for the last 10 years have worked nationally trying to answer a question I couldn’t answer when I was working in the classroom and running a school and that was what actually do young people need to be ready and well, and the sort of moment of conflict for me, that gets to writing the book, but ultimately had me leave the education frontlines and go to social work school was that what we teach in the classroom content knowledge and what we focus on as administrators compliance is not the same thing as what young people need to be ready and well, and so often our days are full of these requirements. on the content side a lot that is nice to know and not needed to know, on the administrator side, a lot of just administrative tasks. And then, because I really think educators and administrators really are in it for the kids, we just shove into whatever is left, whatever we know is good. But it’s really hard to make up the difference of what we know we still can’t get to and how we can’t serve kids. So when I left the frontlines 10 years ago for national work, I suddenly found myself in the conversations that I should have been in when I was a teacher and a school leader. When I was on, you know in the work with the kids and What I know this what these conversations about the science of how kids learn and develop and the future of work.They were all about young people, they were all about education, but there weren’t young people are educators in the conversations. And so I decided to write making it as kind of my front, my love letter back to the frontlines. It was the research that I was able to learn only after I left, that I needed while I was there. And that was the hope. And so I say that as we sort of launch into our conversation to say, much of what I wrote in making it has to do with how do we get young people ready, and view that as a fundamental human right, they have the right to be ready for school, they have the right to be ready for adulthood, they have the right to be ready for work. And how do we also do that when the world is still unfair and unjust? And when the ways schools are designed, are still broken? So I would say to you keep in that there’s a sort of duality of how do we make sure young people are ready and well and have a safe haven when the systems are broken? And when life is really hard? And is that possible? And if so, how? And then to your vision? What would it look like if we had the flexibility and funding to actually design with kids needs in mind? And what would that look like intake,
keevin bybee 6:33
you said so much that I want to chase and but to get to your last question, in the sense that I really like how you framed the word the right as a socially agreed upon minimum that obliges those who can protect and provide for those in need. The, throughout your book, you really highlight the the interiority the interior experience of our learners. And so I think starting from a place where we acknowledge that as primary, recognizing that we can have correlates that we can measure that are but not quite it, and holding lightly those correlates instead of hypertrophy them to the point of rigid metrics that shoot us in the foot, I think you’re kind of touching upon that, right. And so starting from that point, and then recognizing that the continuity between healing and just being well is very much a spectrum with no boundaries. And so bringing in the tools to do prevention at the forefront in terms of you know, how people understand their bodies, you know, we have the tools now to tell a five year old the basic mechanics of their own body and not just their own body, but their own mind, right. And so, by integrating those as primary curricula in a environment that is, both physically and you know, emotionally safe, it’ll be in one sense, the catalyst or the nucleation, that will hopefully kind of start to ripple out and then feed back into the system that is otherwise unfair. So I guess, iterative sense. If we can start a place that has some forward momentum to it, then it will be an example of how things might be done so that more people would be tempted to do it. And, you know, we’ve got to come from the spot where we care about people’s interior experience. And that the any, any privilege that somebody might enjoy is largely due to luck. So that if we want to make sure that our own kids, those of us with privilege, who who have kids and want to make sure that they’re going to live in a comfortable, stable environment, it it only behooves us to sow the seeds of a place where even more kids are going to be humanitarians, and kind and patient and contemplative. And so the schools are the one place I think that not they’re not perfect, but of the institutions that we all distrust, at least that one is mostly trusted. And so hopefully, we can kind of sneak in through there and make some make some changes. But kind of it all kind of has to happen at once in a keystone model. Like when you’re building an arch until you drop that last one in the top, it doesn’t work. And so you have to make sure to put enough in at the same time, but also in a small enough place where you’re not revamping the entire system, because that’s just not going to happen either. So I know I just went on a bit of a ramble. But did that touch on what you were asking?
stephanie krauss 9:41
Yeah, I mean, I think there are a couple of things that you said to grab on to. One is just to do a caution in terms of where we are with schools that are open right now, which is that we’re at a moment in time across the country where attacks on cultural responsiveness, diversity in education, CRT in terms of headlines have now expanded to include social emotional learning, mental health, health, wellness and well being. And these really crucial, there’s a separate conversation we can have about how crucial it is for health and well being of young people who have identities that have them at the margins, young people of color young people or poor, young people who are gay, you know, a number of marginalized identities, how important it is for them to see themselves in school, and what CRT is or isn’t, but that’s for a separate conversation. I think. I’m very concerned about this dangerous slide that what you said is right, kids spend the most time in school, it’s a central place that we can come around. And right now, we already know it doesn’t do enough in relationship to the health and well being of kids. But what little it does is now being attacked and questioned. Seeing seen as a backdoor for CRT seen as the role of the parent and family instead of the role of the partnership between the school and the family. The role of the parent is crucial, I say that as a mom. But I count on my kids teachers to also attend to their well being I count on my kids principle for that. I see us as a team.
Our pediatrician and counselor are included. So that’s one caution in terms of what I heard, I think for anybody who’s considering designing a new school, the opportunity would be to look at how do young people learn and develop? What really is the science of learning and the science of human development, child and adolescent development? And what are the things that are crucial there, which would include, I think, in a really profound way, the importance of social relationships, and positive social interactions, the ability to feel deeply safe and secure. The ability to have your identities and cultures represented and honored. A prioritization of basic needs and health and mental health, a focus on cognitive fitness, the ability to be present and reduce stress, stress, resilience, coping skills, those are the kinds of things that allow young people to survive in these really, really hard times to learn. And that also become these key ingredients for just livability and longevity moving forward. So those are a couple of the pieces I think of in terms of ingredients for the sort of movement from how do kids both survive and thrive in this particular moment. But I am curious for you, because I don’t get to talk to physicians too often. And so thinking about your role as a family physician, so one of the things you wrote about in making it is that making it as about not human flourishing as much as the fundamental human rights of what do we need? What do kids need at baseline? It’s not enough. But every single one of these things is essential. And so I talked about these currencies, human connection is one the relationships isn’t their credentials, they still matter, employers really care about them. So getting some kind of post secondary degree is really important. I talk a lot about the role of cash. But but the the doctor part, your medical training, so the other thing that I talked about are competencies, which are ways of being and doing in the world, and wanting to see schools be able to really focus on this, but I relate them to the body systems. And so I’m curious, your perspective here, because the way I talked about it my my older son has asthma is that we were trained by his doctor, that we needed to look at his skin and his color and his heart rate, and his breathing and perspiration that everything is connected. Was he making sense when he was talking? How fast was he talking? And so we got this really good training on the interdependence of our body systems that your heart is always going to impact your ability to breathe is always going to impact your ability to think and seeing that there are these similar systems last visible of being and doing a functioning in the world that the ability to focus and stay organized is related. To the ability to, to be able to regulate your emotions. And if you’re not able to manage your emotions, and they’re all over the place, it’s much harder to focus right that if something’s going on health wise, it’s going to impact the ability for you to think creatively. And so I’m curious how that sat with you, as you talked, or as you read and thought about that. And then I’m curious for your own thinking of education, what potentially from medicine, and integrative medicine and family medicine? Could both could offer wisdom over on the education side?
keevin bybee 15:43
Well, thank you for that question. And absolutely, we want to be able to get a picture, identify the pertinent details and build a gestalt that tells us how to make our next move. So when we’re diagnosing somebody who might be having a breathing problem, all of the things that you said, and my, the thing that I noticed in medicine is a lot of the things that I am being asked to treat are, in some sense, educational problems. Learning what like the classics that are really kind of eating up, most of the healthcare dollars in the United States are cardiovascular disease, which are largely issues with, you know, the things and quantities of which we put into our bodies and then our relationship to the activities that would reverse the effects of the damage that we’ve done. So diabetes being the big one, knowing what when and how much to eat, is how we control our blood sugar’s and how we prevent diabetic foot ulcers and eventually coronary artery disease and heart attack. So it’s an educational problem to teach somebody the lifestyle tools that can prevent diabetes, it’s not a matter of me, adding more insulin, I mean, in some sense, at after a tipping point, we need these interventions. But it would be significantly cheaper to teach somebody the the appropriate food choices. And it’s not about dumping the the pamphlet on them, but it’s not, I wouldn’t say lead by the hand, except for lack of a better metaphor for live with somebody and through demonstration, and, you know, mutual teaching, show them, hey, this is the way that we put food into our bodies, that’s going to make it last longer in the future, as part of an integrated curriculum of life, right. And so it’s, especially because of my medical training that I realized that the buckets we want to put things into, are really just making it harder to fix the things that are in the buckets in the first place. So does that kind of make sense?
stephanie krauss 18:00
Yeah, it does. It does for sure. And it makes me think about when you when you talk about lifestyle tools. One of the things you might remember, that I wrote about in making it that really changed me personally, it was new research for me was that science and medicine have advanced enough that most of our kids if they have the right resources and opportunities should live to be 100 As a rule, and not the exception, right expectation, not exception. And when we think about whether whether kids need to live that long, or whether they need to have potentially a 60 or 70 year work life to be adulting, first seven or eight or nine decades, it’s wild, it feels like science fiction. But what happens in those first 25 years, the first quarter of a potential 100 year life, the need for those lifestyle tools, as you’re saying, so that there is not a need for interventions later on become so crucial. And then thinking about what is the purpose of school because for most schools, the purposes college and career ready, but that’s 18 years old, and a possible 100 year life that’s not even a quarter of the way through life. And you think about the importance of what happens in those first 25 years. And so one of the things I believe really strongly is how do you shift the focus from college and career readiness to a long and livable life? And what then are the tools and knowledge and skills that young people need to be ready to experience and to have the best shot at experiencing along and liveable life?
keevin bybee 19:57
Well, I mean, that’s one thing I also really love. about your work is the, like the future oriented nature of it as all like you. It’s funny that we have to use the term sci fi in some sort of pejorative when we do future speculation. But in some sense, it’d be insane of us not to if you just look at how things have shaped up over this last century, let alone last decade. And so, you know, like 152, you know, like, Ray Kurzweil hypothesizes that the first person to live to 1000 has been born. So these are basically realistic projections that we’re going to have to consider, or if we don’t, we just shoot ourselves in the foot. So I love that you’re keeping very long minded on this. And the I even hesitate to think of it as a school. But again, because we have to put a bucket on it, thinking about how the, the learning formative years when we have our highest plasticity, the the bleed end between community and school becomes so blurry that you don’t even know where you’re at sometimes, right? Where, for example, if we had vocational vouchers, where every kid gets $400 a month to go to a different professional or vocational career person, like, I’m going to spend six hours this month at the plumber, I’m going to spend 10 hours this month at the mechanic, right. So the kids then pay adults to spend time with him and learn what they’re doing as integrated into their daily life. So that’s just like one example. So that we’re teaching lifelong learning as part of the map when we have maximum plasticity. And so that we’re not being stuck thinking about at 18, I set my career trajectory, it’s like at 18, I’m going to make a decision that’s going to need to get me through two years, and then at 20, I’m going to decide, okay, I want to set my trajectory for the next three, etc. And so, and tying back to how you ask, you know, what would this mean? Or how would the medic model inform this, we are, thankfully, inching towards something like universal health care, you know, plenty of us are dragging our feet along the way. But we do have Medicaid and it’s pretty good. And believe me, I’ve got my gripes but the point being that we have, as a society decided that we’re going to pay for some stuff. And then once you’ve made that leap, you need to examine, okay, why are we choosing to pay for this and not that, and I can tell you that every $1 million hospitalization for a coronary bypass, or like running a dozen kids through the equivalent of a Ph. D program is much cheaper than that coronary bypass. And so I think we have to be future Meier future minded in order to be able to make those cost benefit ratios. And then once we decide we’re going to pay for something, might as well pay for this other thing.
stephanie krauss 22:53
Yeah, absolutely. Some economic development work. It’s called like a triple bottom line, and thinking about okay, so what is that? What is the cost in dollars? And then what is the social, economic and sometimes environmental cost? And so when we think about kids and outcomes, you can think about that, almost from like a change maker model. What is the social impact that a kid can make with the right skills, experiences, resources and opportunities? What is the or cost socially, same economically, environmentally? I think, yeah, these are, these are the things that we have to think about that are hard to hold, because life is so tough right now. Scarcity is so real. And the immediate needs will often Eclipse this longer term planning. Because in so many ways, we’re just hemorrhaging need and this sort of immediacy of what do we do now? Right? So that could go back to medicine liken it to a very crowded er, in a pandemic. I mean, that school right now is this educational? Er, we’re in emergency response mode. And the question is, what is what is the healthy mode? What do we need to be focusing on when we’re not attending to emergency issues, but instead, that the health and well being and longevity issues?
keevin bybee 24:32
Yeah, I guess, in terms of a specific answer to that, I would say, in some sense, we have manufactured scarcity. In one sense, we have the physical resources and technology already existing to put an iPad that can teach somebody to read any language into eight billion hands. I mean, just as a point of illustration, right. And so there are enough of us with the with the privilege to take a breath and future foresight to recognize this fact. And you know, we’re burning trillions of dollars every year on the military industrial complex. And so we just need to take a step back and recognize that the resources are there, to turn this from a resource strapped triage system into a row, well resourced wellness system. So, I mean, I don’t know how to get there. But it it frustrates me that it’s not impossible. It’s quite plausible, in fact, and so I guess the the only answer I’ve got is have enough. If enough people go, Oh, yeah, that is the case, then there’s a critical threshold there.
stephanie krauss 25:52
That’s right. Or we can all just move to Sweden, or Norway or Denmark.
keevin bybee 25:58
That would be beautiful. I think that’s a totally funny coincidence. Have you heard of a book called The listening society behind by Nancy fry, not know, the end the the Nordic anyway, it’s, I’ll send you the link. But I encourage everybody to check that out the listening society, because that’s what you want from society is people who listen. And it’s much deeper than that. But anyway, unfortunately, I think Sweden’s got enough. And they’d be like, now you fix your own problems first. So and I don’t blame him for it. Mm hmm. So we’re at about 27 minutes, I could pick your brain for a long time. And I want to absolutely be respectful, barely had a chance to get into too many of the details of your book. But is there anything else that you’d like to plug or share with our remaining time?
stephanie krauss 26:45
Yeah, well, for anybody who’s listening, I would, I would love to have you pick up a copy of of making it what today’s kids need for tomorrow’s world and really thinking about that idea of the right to be ready. And I can tell you that where I’m focusing my attention and writing next relates to that, but after that, sort of, we’ve accomplished Okay, as as a fundamental human right, what’s needed? Then the question is, How can kids have a good life? What does a good life look like? How do they not burn out before they grow up? And how? How is it possible? Is it possible to thrive in challenge and adversity? And what then is the role of educators and parents and pediatricians and counselors and coaches, right, that the adults who work with kids, what what is our job? What can we do? The good news is that there’s some good stuff that we can do. But my encouragement to folks would be, you know, to check out making it to think about for you, as you’re thinking about designing a school, how do you attend to the human needs, holistically from the beginning, whether the the policy permissions required from that, how do you fund it? You know, we, if you can figure it out, it’s it’s like gold take on the industrial complex. After that we we couldn’t ultimately on the ground, it was it was too expensive and too hard to do what we knew was best for kids. And that’s what sent me on this journey. And then I would say, I’ll come back and share with you what I learned about human in youth thriving. That’s where I’m, I’m really spending a lot of time right now. And unfortunately, in this moment of the pandemic, figuring out human thriving starts with figuring out first, how kids are suffering. And having a good understanding of that. And it’s a tough time right now.
keevin bybee 28:52
It absolutely is. I see it every day, both at work, and in my community. And so, yeah, I wholeheartedly agree, I think the best way to know where to go is to know what we are as humans, both what, what causes us unnecessary suffering, and how do we have the, you know, the highest of the highs that were physiologically and emotionally capable of and any investigation that goes into that direction are tools that help fight the Facebook algorithm, right? Yeah, that’s right. They found the buttons in the wrong way. So how can we find the same buttons in a contemplative way?
stephanie krauss 29:37
Oh, my gosh, absolutely. Yeah. Before we wrap up here, I’ll just say the my one last plug would be a reminder to any parent who’s listening that Facebook and big tech companies did not plan their programs with health in mind and with our kids while being in mind and so they planned it for usership So that’s not the focus of our conversation. But I would say since you went there, my last piece of advice would be all of the things that are kids that are on tech platform wise you have to be the one governing what keeps them healthy and safe because that’s not what they were designed to do.
keevin bybee 30:17
Indeed, no practice deliberate vigilance, and hopefully train them to build up their own technological immune system in the meanwhile.
stephanie krauss 30:26
That’s right. Yeah. keevin Thanks so much for having me on.
keevin bybee 30:29
Oh, it was a great conversation and second, the making it like I think I chewed through it in like 36 hours. I can’t recommend it enough. It’s a very good read, and it stimulates imagination. So
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