This episode is also on youtube. You can view that video at this link: https://youtu.be/B8B7pdyLWvk

Since 1980, have Americans been getting more educated, less educated, or just holding steady? How would you even answer that question? Literacy and math test scores? Trends in our rising or falling IQ scores? The number of years average Americans are spending in school. Changes in our number of high school and college graduates? Actually, in this episode, we’re going to look at all of that at more.

Educational progress in the USA–or lack thereof–matters a lot to the theme of this mini-series of episodes, in which we’re looking at all the nations that, like the USA, became the most educated civilization in the world at some point in the last 1,000 years. We need to look at the science. Did Americans really stop getting smarter?

It seems like we're in unprecedented times. And yet, if we stand back and look at the bigger picture, our historical moment is not nearly as unique as we think it is. The USA and much of the western world is stuck in a recurring pattern. And this pattern has everything to do with our shared blindness to the power of sharing education ever more widely within the society.

This episode introduces a mini-series of episodes on the recurring nature of this pattern. In it we'll cover some of the other countries we share this pattern with. We're going to look deeply into the educational histories of China, Italy, the Netherlands, the UK, and then we'll return to the USA again.

In 2010, Kathleen Jones and I, Giles Leeper, cofounded a charter school in Atlanta called The Kindezi School. By having just six students per class and splitting them into smaller groups, this school attempted to make tutoring a bedrock of its path to success, while only using the funding levels available to public schools. Kathleen became a teacher and I became its principal. So we had two different experiences of the school we started.

Did we accomplish something meaningfully different? Did we do something that could be considered a paradigm shift or “unleashing our superpower”? How much did Kathleen’s experience of tutoring at The Kindezi School align with what we’ve learned about the science and psychology of tutoring? Is it possible for you or any individual to do something truly transcendent by starting a charter school? These are some of the questions we reflect on in this episode.