← Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
Liftoff with Keith: Conversations with Super Founders and Growth Experts sharing useful insights
Raising Future-Ready Kids: Why Personalized Education Is the Ultimate Startup
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Foreign.
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Is the one and only Compass Strategic Advisors.com an experienced partner to help you navigate everything from cap tables to stock option and compensation plans and all types of backroom and marketing services. There is no better friend to the startup CEO than Compass. Check them out at Compass Strategic Advisors. Hey, another episode of Liftoff with Keith. And today we're going to welcome Julie Duquet, the CEO of Homeschools to go. And I know that sounds like we're going down a different path and indeed we are. Some mind expansion is required here. What we're going to do is focus on the next generation of founders, entrepreneurs, leaders and thinkers. And we want to talk about how we're developing this new generation, this next generation that's going to be in an AI world and looking at non traditional or neo traditional ways of learning. So Julie's going to come onto the program and talk about a couple of things with us that range from everything from, you know, homeschooling to special programs to what's happening in the job market. Huli comes to us from a really diverse background, her, her Columbia origins. And Huli, if you don't mind, I'm going to ask you to talk for a second about your phenomenal education program, Homeschools to Go and what that's all about. And then we'll get into some of these fun topics. Juli, welcome to Liftoff.
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Thank you so much for having me today. I'm excited to be talking to an audience of innovators and entrepreneurs, founders leadership roles. It's exciting to be in this space with you today. Thank you for having me. So you said you wanted me to talk about Homeschool to go.
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B
Yeah.
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Okay. Yeah. So I founded this company because I was a teacher for about 10 years. I taught for Cambridge, Montessori schools. So this would be like a more prestigious version of traditional education. And you would think that this is the type of place you want to send your child if you want them to be prepared. And we wanted to be, you want them to have an advantage in the world. And while my experience in this world or in this educational setting was very enriching in the sense that I was able to see, see new methodologies that go beyond traditional academic learning like project based education, like life applicable skills. I also was constantly frustrated by the knowing in that setting of one teacher to 20 plus students that it was going to be nearly impossible to give to each one of their children, of these children what they really needed to develop their potential and to, yeah, really come and awaken the genius inside of them in that specific setting. Yeah, so. Yeah. So it was around that time that I realized, you know, when I have my own children, I will probably homeschool because this will give me a better advantage with the tools that I have. And then when I had my first child, was in the middle of the pandemic. So that's when homeschooling kind of took off. It's been growing for the last 40 years, but that was the year that I would think it grew so radically. And now the growth has just kept going. And you see more and more entrepreneurs, parents in general, rethinking whether they want their children to be educated by the system that was designed during the Industrial Revolution to fulfill the need for factory jobs. So this is how this all started.
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B
Yeah. Juli. I don't think there's ever been more interest and discussion around homeschooling than there is today. And, and I think it starts at the younger grades, but there's also a lot of debate at the higher levels of academia. Is college worth it? Is university worth it? Not just from an expense standpoint, but if you look at the curriculum, it's very standard, hasn't evolved much yet. The world's evolved a lot and it's a whole new place. So is my, is my initial read correct and what's, what's driving that?
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I do think that there's some things about the system that don't seem to be the most conducive for encouraging innovation in general or encouraging advance in the way that our society is unfolding. I think there's a lot of economic decentralization happening, a lot of new entrepreneurs and innovators and problem solvers coming on in the field and rearranging the way that the economic system has been ran far. And so, yes, as far as that, I think if you homeschool, then you can probably get your child to college level by the time they graduate high school. And so that gives you an advantage, not just time wise, but also money wise. I think there's still some technical careers that perhaps will require that level of education, like health careers, for example. Like you do need to have quite a bit of technical knowledge. But imagine if you could get into med school right from high school because you have the pre, you know, the pre med levels that you need to get in there. And that is because there's a lot of education that is happening in the schools, like at the K to 12 level that is not necessary, that gets forgotten quickly. And skills that are important, like the study in Harvard where They try to, to see or to, to pinpoint what is the thing that makes a child a genius. And they studied these children for, I think it was somewhere around seven to eight years. And they determined one of the most significant measures for developing the genius was curiosity, was creativity, imagination. So these are all three skills that are being actively severed by the system. When you go to a school, you are sitting behind a desk giving instructions and giving reward based on how well you can fulfill those instructions. So there's absolutely no training in thinking outside of the box. There's absolutely no reward for being curious. Like if you have a question, if you have too many questions, the teacher will say questions until the end, stick to the agenda.
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Yeah, it's all bringing back, it's all bringing back some scary memories for me.
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Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's a lot.
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B
But I guess, I guess the response to that would be, look, a lot of parents aren't equipped to handle educating their child at home. First, they might be working. Secondly, they may not be, you know, able to, to actually share that coursework. So for people that are thinking about homeschooling, what's the right environment or foundation that will enable or facilitate that?
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Yes. So the first thing that I want to say to this point is that it's like everything in life. Like, you're not going to, if you, if you choose to leave a secure job to start a business, of course that's not going to pay off right away. You're going to have to take some losses at the beginning, investments, and then eventually that will create a payoff. It's like everything in life, what you invest up front, that is hard at first, it gives you a payoff in the end. So it's the same with homeschooling in the sense that if you are a person who can, you consider yourself your founder, so you consider yourself an innovator, a problem solver, an adaptable person. Do you really think you want to leave the training? And the most important, it's eight hours a day for five days a week for their entire, like up until they're 18 years old, from the time they're five. So that's like the mo. Like their brain is mostly developed by the end of that stretch. And so do you want to leave those formative years to somebody that, you know, has a government job and is following instructions and doesn't perhaps have the knowledge and the, and the expertise that you will have from, you know, tackling real life problems in the real world, handling finances At a level that the school will never teach. I think that the first thing we need to understand is that when we keep our children at home, we're not keeping them at home so that they can do the school that they're doing in the house. Like it's not like now from Monday to Friday, from 8 to 3pm Every day, you're going to be sitting down with them. That's the system you're wanting to take them out of. And so another thing that I learned from working at very prestigious institutions and learning that the most effective methodologies like project based education or experiential learning is that you don't need that many hours to make the learning actually stick. So the time that you're doing actual work that you're perhaps sitting at a table is not going to be equivalent to what children typically sit in traditional schools for. So really the time management of that is for you to be able to create a rhythm where you can maybe three times per week dedicate two to three hours with your child completing these projects together. And you also don't need to be the person that knows all the answers. You need to be the person that's willing to find the answers to the questions that you have in the project based methodology, which is how we structure our curriculums.
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B
Yeah, it sounds like there's a little bit of focus on both the brain development side and the social development side at an early age. And I think it's important that you call out this is something for, you know, when you first start your, your childhood learning school journey.
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Yes, yes. Like a lot of people say, oh, like how are your children going to be socialized if you keep them at home? Or like there's actually studies that have come out that completely debunk that myth. Because social skills are not what you learn when you're sitting behind a desk, not allowed to talk, only when the bell rings and you can go to break, and only with all people your same age where none of them is trained or equipped to guide you. Right. Like you learn social skills from seeing adults around you interact, manage conflict resolution, focus from how you interact with younger kids, with kids your age, with people that are older than you. And you think about it in daily life like we're not stuck in a room with all people our age all the time. And that's. That never happens. And unless it's school, like even in university, you have people of different ages that you interact with. So I don't understand where we, I don't know, we're Brainwashed into believing that the way that you learn social skills is through going to school. There's also the, the, the knowing that having like less friends or like a less amount of interactions with other people. So less quantity but more quality. There's actually more social development in that. And so when you look at, it's like you can go to a website for this and you can put it in your footnotes if you want. It's called, called the nheri. So the National Homeschool Education Research Institute and they analyzed all the peer reviewed studies on social skills and academic skills. All the skills, but I'm going to talk about social right now, socializing. 83% of peer reviewed studies agreed that children that were not institutionalized, meaning children that were homeschooled perform better in social skills measures like leadership, like peer interaction, like, like volunteering, like you know, all of these, all of these that are actually important in the real world.
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B
Julie, let me do just a quick pivot because you and I have talked briefly about the idea of being prepared for today's market, today's job market. Right. And it's a, it is, might be the most disruptive period that I have witnessed in my years. Right. So we're going into thinking about a high school student going into college and those questions about what I'm going to study and then thinking about college students entering the job market and going, wait, now I know a little bit about what's happening in the job world because I consult with a lot of early stage startups and what are they looking for? People with a set of skills that might be completely foreign to students coming out of college because they're not prepared in. Sure they know what AI is, sure they know what prompting is and they've done some study in that. But how much have they really worked in an environment to understand how to apply AI to perform certain tasks and functions? Do you have any thoughts about that?
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Yeah, definitely. It's, it's skills like, like critical thinking, like problem solving, like adaptability that we want to strengthen in our children as they're coming up. Of course some technical learning like you know, creating prompts and working with AI. Of course. Because the truth is AI is not going to be going away and it's going to change the jobs. Like a lot of people are scared, like AI is going to take our jobs. Yes, it will take jobs. According to the stats that I was reading, it's going to be 92 million jobs in the next four years. But it's also going to create new ones. So what that means is that we need a lot of adaptability and we need a lot of new learning. And I think the learning needs to be not subject based, but project based. So in the world where you, like, when you're in school, you're in a world where you like, okay, I'm going to sit now go to math class and I'm going to answer math worksheets and now I'm going to sit down and write essays. Because it's English Language arts. So, so it's in the real world, we don't tackle problems that way. You have, you have a project that requires you to have all of these multidisciplinary knowledge in those subjects. So perhaps part of it is financial, part of, part of it is literacy, you know, different, scientific, like it can be stem. So, so I think it's important to train our children in that mindset so that they can learn anything. So in this, in this particular structure, the way that we do this is you have an investigation or research phase, then you have an execution phase, then you have a presentation phase, and then a reflection and self evaluation phase. So this allows you to take a project to tackle any, any challenge from beginning to end in the corporate world or in the world that's upcoming, like startups or whatever. Because you're having to first of all teach yourself something, which is something that we all need to do constantly today. Then you have to learn how to use those skills to create a, to create a, to, to output a result. And then you have to communicate that result to a team or to a supervisor. And then you need to be able to look back at the work that you did and draw conclusions on how this can be iterated in a way that's better based the experience that was gained from the, from the process. Right. So I think those are the skills that you want to be strengthening at this point. And it's, it's a lot easier to do it when you have a child at home that you're, you're working with versus one teacher that's doing this with multiple children. Like in this setting, there's always children that are going to fall behind to the back row and that are not going to want to do the work because they're just working for grades, right? Where it's like in, you keep your child at home, they're seeing you do your daily work and, and, and solve problems and answer calls and talk to people and handle teams and that's going to show them there's a, there's A purpose to this, to this learning that I'm doing. There's one day that I'm going to be like my parent and I'm going to have to. I can see how the skills that I'm learning now are translating into the real world and that creates encouragement that no grade can ever create.
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B
So, Julie, this is great. I love this conversation too. Is, are most homeschool setups one on one, like parent or what's happening at the home with, with a student? Or are there a couple different teachers? Are there a couple different students? What's the ideal setup in that? And who, if there's any sort of profile of who works best in these scenarios, like there are kids that have special needs all the way to, you know, whether they're a budding genius or there's an ADHD attention issue or some sort of social issue or maybe just a disruptive home situation. You probably see all these different scenarios. We don't have to cover them all. But what are you seeing in general?
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Yes, I think that there's, there's a div. There's a diverse group of options. So there's. For the, for the kids that are neurodivergent, I believe. And honestly, for all kids, the one on one is extremely favorable. However, that's not always the reality of what's possible. So you do see families that perhaps send their kids to a micro school or a homeschool co op like three times a week and then they work with the parents the other days. So that's also something that's kind of like a happy medium where the parents have perhaps like, for me, I'm running a business. I have 17 people on my team. I don't homeschool my child every day. I do two days a week where we do his activities and his curriculums and then three days a week where he goes with the other parent and works with the other parent on like, you know, sports stuff, music stuff, and, and, and helps the, the other parent with the stuff that they do in their business. So, so there are ways of making it work. I, I also have people in our community because, because I lead this organization. We have close to a hundred students right now. And so I see in a lot of different structures and they do send their kids to a micro school for, you know, two days a week or three days a week and then work with them the other days. And then there's parents that have four kids at home, at home, and they have to figure out how to, how to make that work. So There are ways that part of what we do in solving this problem for, for my audience, what I've worked on is identifying what are those points that create that barrier between a parent being able to be the leader in the education and the upbringing of their children. And then we've kind of built this system that supports them. So the way that we do it is we give the parent first. We in the intake assessment, we analyze what is the time availability of the parent, what is the time that the parent needs the child to work independently and the time that the parent can actually work with the child. And then we also analyze what are the dominant learning styles. For example, kids with ADHD have kinesthetic or auditory dominant learning styles or perhaps the opposite, they have visual predominant learning style. And then we also look at the multiple intelligences. So what are the intelligences that are the most predominant? And then based on that, we are able to give them a curriculum that it's going to encourage them to use their skills and their talents and develop those skills and talents. So their genius is growing more and more. They feel more and more confident in what it is that they do. So we take all of this out of the parents plate. Like you don't have to build a curriculum. Here's a curriculum that's going to help your child thrive. Adjust it to the hours that you have available. And then we also do bi weekly meetings where the all the students from that group or from similar learning sub like learning interests come together and show each other their projects. So that also motivates them because they're talking to kids around the world that are doing similar things. And then we also have a teacher assigned to each family so they have somebody to talk to like, okay, I have a question. My child is not really doing well with the, with the project that you sent them, particularly this activity. They just don't like it. They're just procrastinating. So then the teacher will think or my child is dyslexic and this, this book that you send just doesn't work for them. So we're able to continue to adjust and personalize the experience to the needs of those specific students as time goes by and we gather more insight from what it is, the benefits they're learning and the development of their genius.
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And we know there's a lot of displacement going on. Is this all happening irl, like in person? Are we doing a lot of this remote learning too with zooms and web cams and all that stuff?
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Yeah, the virtual calls, we do the group Calls we do virtually. But the learning that they have is like, it depends on what the. What the skills that the student wants to develop are. Right. Like there will, like, if they're in high school and they're doing financial literacy, something that they don't teach in schools, we have the ability to give our students a math credit and instead of having them learn trigonometry, we have them learn financial literacy. So understand compound.
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B
I would have loved that. That would have been a blessing. I really struggled with trig. Hey, let me ask you this. Let's turn to you now. Not. Not personal, but I mean on the business side. Right. Where is homeschools to go, Doc? Business, where is that set up? Where are you at in your journey as an entrepreneur and doing this business?
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Yeah, so we have, we have corporation. I am based out of New Brunswick in Canada, but we have another LLC that is based out of Florida because most of the people that we serve are in the United States. That's where the homeschooling is taking more strength. So that's where we are serving most of families that are in our program. So. Yeah, but we have students from all over. We have students from. We're the only program in English and in Spanish, fully bilingual in the whole world. So we attract a lot of families from Latin America, from the United States. That's mainly where public is situated.
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B
That's great. And you're going to have to teach us how to work with Canada again because I think we're having some troubles lately. I don't know.
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Yeah. So there's an organization here in my province, it's called Opportunities New Brunswick. And they like, they were nominating me for some of the awards and I was like, answering some of the questions. It's like, how have you overcome the hurdles that have come up from the relationship? And you know, what are the. And for me, the answer to that question was like, it's actually helped me. Like, it hasn't affected me negatively in any way. Yeah.
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B
Because we love Canada here. And I think ignoring everything is probably a good, good strategy. Hey, so listen, where. How many people are you. Where can we learn more about the programs?
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Yes, So I am. So my team is 17 people right now. I have seven extra people on the team because we're developing an AI to allow us to take all this in, all this, all these insights and this data to be able to personalize the experiences. Like every student has like a teacher designated to them to create their own portfolios and projects and develop them more and more. So that's why it's like a temporary 17 people team. But once we're done with it, probably go down to 12. Where can you find us? @homeschooltogo.org and if you go there, if you feel that perhaps you are considering homeschool but you feel it's a huge barrier, I don't know how I can adapt my life to that. I actually have a button on there. As soon as you go to homeschool to go.org you'll see the button right in the middle of everything for a free masterclass. And what I do there is I give parents who have these questions, like I've talked to thousands of parents at this point that are interested in homeschooling. And so I know what are the main questions that they have, the socialization, the certification, how do you plan the day? How do you handle a neurodivergent child? All those main questions I answer in that class. So that's available for free for anyone who is interested in taking those first steps.
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B
Luli, I like how you've taken this on not just as a startup company or a job, but a mission to really change, you know, education and make learning more accessible. Kind of moving past some of these outdated systems, just trying to navigate everything. I think you're going to continue to find more interest, more demand for this. I think about a whole bunch of scenarios where this would be favorable to what's currently available. Look, I think there's some positives to what's happening in public schools. I sent my kids to public schools and they had phenomenal educations and I'm a child of both private and public education and I have benefited greatly. But we're in a different era right now. We're in a different time and I think choice is, is great. I wish you the best. I think you have to obviously keep an eye on the environment because the type of jobs that are available yesterday are going to be different than those that are available tomorrow. And I think we need our academic institutions to reflect that, do a little bit better job of that.
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Yeah, you see it already in the US it's happening where the schools are. There's so many low performing schools. I think it's about 65% of school public schools in America right now are considered low performing. And so what some states are doing is they're taking the funding out of the schools and giving them to the parents if they want to homeschool at home. So if you're situated in Florida or Arizona, you can actually qualify to receive up to $10,000 per year per student to invest in the education of your child. So I think that the world is changing to give, to give parents more options on how to raise and prepare their children for the future, because the future is changing before our eyes and it's becoming harder to predict. But I think that the things that, you know, that you will need for sure are adaptability, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity. These are things that you need to for sure strengthen. And no matter what happens, right? Like, we're never going to go back to a world where, where jobs are going to tell you what to do, because now those, those repeated, repeatable jobs are going to be taken over by AI so Lee.
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B
Exciting stuff. Well, look, thanks for sharing all this with. It's really eye opening. You know, you go down a certain path and you have your blinders on, right? We're taking our kids to school, we're doing it, but we always want the best, and that's where you're focused and we're all focused on. Thanks for sharing the insights with us. Really, really a different conversation, but one that I think very worthwhile.