Mikhaila Fuller: Classical Education Is Disappearing. It’s Time to Change That

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In this episode, I sit down with Mikhaila Fuller. She is the host of the Mikhaila Peterson Podcast and co-founder and CEO of Peterson Academy, an alternative educational model that she says is affordable, interactive, and free from political bias.

“Part of the reason we put this together was to try to give people an education that’s just true, we hope—so what you’re supposed to be learning in history and in humanities and in science, math, etc.—just basic education,” Fuller says.

We dive into the different professors and courses at Peterson Academy, what they are trying to achieve, and their plans for the future.

“We’re getting top professors from institutions and we’re not telling them how to teach. We’re saying, ‘Teach this course if it was exactly the way you’d want to teach it, without guidelines from somebody else put on you.’ And we have chosen professors carefully that don’t have a political bent. So it’s mostly trying to avoid woke ideology and politics in courses that shouldn’t necessarily be political. That’s how we’re trying to navigate it,” Fuller says.

Views expressed in this video are the opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

*Big thanks to our sponsor for this episode, Patriot Gold Group. Check them out here: https://ept.ms/3sr5LhH

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:
Mikhaila Fuller, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Mikhaila Fuller:
Thank you very much for inviting me on.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s been a lot of talk about parallel structures in education, new educational models, and of course, Peterson Academy is right in the thick of that. But what do you see as the problem, though, in the education system today?

Ms. Fuller:
Oh, man, there are so many problems in the education system today. I mean, in America, one of the main problems is that it’s completely unaffordable. So a degree at Harvard, it’s doubled in the last 20 years.
It costs about $307,000, which is insane. So that’s one of the main problems is it’s just not affordable.

And then the other problem is there’s a veil of wokeness that has infiltrated most of the courses taught in university. So part of the reason I wanted to work towards building an alternative education system was because when I went to university and I went to university in Canada, I went to Concordia, which was an art school in 2012.

And I was taking classics in psychology and I was learning courses through a feminist lens. And this is before wokeness had infiltrated most of the disciplines. I was like, what? I didn’t sign up. I don’t want to pay for Homer through a feminist lens. Like, what does that even mean?

So part of the reason we put this together was to try and give people an education that’s just true, we hope. So what you’re supposed to be learning in history and in humanities and in science, math, et cetera, just basic education without woke ideology and something that is affordable. Because you can basically learn everything you need from a degree from YouTube online for free now.

And the number of corporations and companies that aren’t even looking towards a bachelor degree for their employees is growing. And so I don’t know what’s going to happen with universities in the future, but they’re in dire shape right now.

Mr. Jekielek:
Many of the people in the academy today would say everything is taught through a lens. What do you mean by trying to teach it in a way that’s true? So explain that to me.

Ms. Fuller:
I mean, that’s true. We’re getting top professors from institutions and we’re not telling them how to teach. We’re saying, you know, teach this course if it was exactly the way you’d want to teach it without guidelines from somebody else put on you. And we have chosen professors carefully that don’t have a political bent. So it’s mostly trying to avoid woke ideology and politics in courses that shouldn’t necessarily be political. That’s how we’re trying to navigate it.

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, so it’s interesting. I saw you have at least two courses focused on very well-known philosophers. One is Plato, another one is Nietzsche, and your father teaches Nietzsche. And I’m curious, why did you pick these of all people?

Ms. Fuller:
We were kind of letting professors go with what they think students should be taught based on their 30 years or 40 years of teaching experience. So part of it is that part of how we designed the curriculum was looking at great, great curriculums from, say, Chicago University or liberal arts universities and kind of taking the average of what people were taught, focused on the literature more than on the politics.
So Plato was chosen because James Orr wanted to teach about Plato. I think Plato is one of the fundamental philosophers everybody should know about just to be a sophisticated person. Then dad chose Nietzsche because he’s inspired by Nietzsche.

Mr. Jekielek:
I forget the title but it’s something about teaching with a hammer or how to philosophize with a hammer. That one was the one that caught my eye and actually I started taking that one. This is interesting so I noticed you have an audience, right? That’s taking the course in the video itself. I’m going to get you to explain to me how all this works, but like who are these people that are actually taking the course live?

Ms. Fuller:
Our assumption when we started marketing was, are there people interested in going to see eight hour lectures taught by brilliant people just for the sake of learning? And it turns out there’s a massive audience for that. I mean, education can be fascinating. It’s fascinating learning from brilliant people. And so we basically offer free tickets to people who want to take part in the course filming. And then the professor can interact with the audience. There’s a Q&A portion. But we thought that would be a lot easier than a professor lecturing straight to a camera. It’d be more natural.

Mr. Jekielek:
And there’s actually a number of people, you know, John Vervaeke. You have Warren Farrell teaching, of course. You know, people have been on the show. So I know, you know, how important the work that they do is and how much I’ve learned personally from them. But tell me a bit about how it works. Because basically, when you join the Peterson Academy, you don’t really get to interact with the teacher. And for me personally, that was incredibly important in college.

Ms. Fuller:
We’re building on that. Right now we have 20 courses up, we release three new ones a month. We’re cranking that up to four, hopefully in the next three months. So that’s a new course a week. You can interact with other students watching the course. What’s missing is interacting with the professors, but we’re building that on the backend so professors will be able to interact. Now it will not be in-person interactions, but we are building out live capabilities. So I think when we premiere an episode, because we’ll be releasing new courses on Fridays.

It’ll be a live premiere and you’ll be able to interact with the professor then so it’s different from what you would get in class which is kind of a constant interaction and professors have profiles on the platform so we’re not forcing any of them to interact with students but if they’re interested then they’re more than welcome to.

Mr. Jekielek:
I see and so basically you’re you’ve launched this while you’re still building in capability so what you have today is not what you’re going to have you know a few months down the line.

Ms. Fuller:
That’s what’s exciting about it. We wanted to get it out. We’ve been building it for three years and built up quite a large team and we thought that the product we have now which is three new courses a month social media platform quizzes exams and then the ability to watch courses and comment on them would be good as people are thrilled with that. So I think we wanted to capitalize on the fact that universities are in rough shape. We could have waited a year and come out with notes, essays, direct messaging, which is going to be available in a number of weeks.

We could have waited, but I thought the most important part of the platform was the content and what was ready. So you get the social media, you get the commenting, you get the courses, you get the recommended reading, and you get interaction. I was like, that’s already a product. The fact that we’re building on it just means it’s going to get better.

Mr. Jekielek:
I’m very excited to see that you have this course with Gale Pooley, someone else who’s been on the show, on the economics of human flourishing. The reason I’m saying this is there’s this kind of idea in our society, I guess, but certainly it was, I was in a biology department for a really long time in university. And so you get this idea that, you know, the pie or the economic pie is limited and you have to take from someone else to get it yourself.

But what Gale Pooley through this type of education would tell you is no, actually, that’s what human ingenuity is, right? We can, you can actually increase the pie. That’s the whole thing that we humans do. And, you know, it took me years to figure that out. That’s why I was so excited to see that course available.

Ms. Fuller:
I think I was lucky to have my dad as a dad because I grew up knowing that. I’m sure that was just from him. It wasn’t from anything I learned in school, which was, you know, we have problems in society, but if humans are flourishing and if they’re taken care of, then there are brilliant people out there that can help solve problems. I love that about Gale Pooley’s course. We have in the works a number of Austrian economics courses that are upcoming too, which I think we need people to know about. So those are incoming as well.

Mr. Jekielek:
I think I have some good teachers for you too, that I could recommend.

Ms. Fuller:
Oh, that would be helpful.

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, tell me a little bit about, you know, your background, right?
Obviously, we know who your dad is. You’ve mentioned him a few times now, but just like trace your trajectory to getting here today doing this work.

Ms. Fuller:
I was pretty sick as a kid. Most of my life was about being sick and fortunately having my dad as a dad he didn’t let me use that as an excuse and I know a lot of people who are chronically ill because it’s horrible and no wonder feeling sorry for themselves and kind of succumbing to it. And I get it for sure. When I was in grade two, dad sat me down and said, you have reason for excuses, but you can never use this as an excuse or it’s going to ruin your life. That was when I was diagnosed with juvenile rheumatoid arthritis in grade two and it was in 37 joints. I was pretty crippled when I was a kid.

I remember a lot of my childhood as kind of trying to manage being chronically ill and being crazy. I was on antidepressants for depression, ended up taking Adderall for chronic fatigue and was on immunosuppressants for arthritis. I had my hip and ankle replaced when I was 17 from the arthritis that wasn’t kept in check with the immune suppressants. And I was in rough shape. And I always had, my dad was really good at instilling a life plan. He was very big on plans.

So I had a number of plans that went sideways. Originally I wanted to be a surgeon and I was like, I have arthritis in all my fingers. Like how, how am I going to do surgery? And then I, when I had goals, I wanted to have kids young, but I wanted to get a PhD because my dad always told me, you know, basically the best thing you could do as a person was to go to university and get educated up to the highest degree, which was a PhD. I was like, how am I going to balance that with having kids? If a PhD takes until you’re, you know, 28, how am I going to have kids young? So it mostly started with trying to figure out my health.

So I left Concordia where I was taking classics in psychology because I was really unhappy with the quality of education. Like I had a psychology professor that told me rats weren’t social creatures because they lived in cages in an intro to psych course. And I remember turning to the person next to me saying, do you know, he just, he just said that. And she was like, yes, he just said that, writing it down. I was like, oh my gosh, this is, I’m not traveling 40 minutes to the psychology department to learn that rats are solitary creatures because they live in cages.

And so I dropped out of that school and I went back to school in Toronto for biomedical science to try and figure out why I was sick and ended up stumbling across diet as a potential intervention for chronic illness. So I managed to put myself into remission once I set my mind to it when I was 23 by cutting mostly by cutting out everything I thought a person could be allergic to—eggs, grains, dairy, processed foods, soy, and nuts. What’s the least I can survive on to see if this is causing my problems. And it turned out it was causing my problems.

Once I managed to get off of the medications, which was really unpleasant, and put myself into remission, then things got more interesting. Then at least my life wasn’t just revolving around trying to survive. Then dad blew up online. That happened in 2016. I started running his brand, and by that I mean making sure his podcast was being put out and growing Instagram and Facebook and the social media platforms that that job initially started because my parents were so overwhelmed with going viral and all the controversy that was surrounding them.

It was very stressful. It was not fun. There was nothing fun about it. And so I was trying to take things off of their plate. Like, um, I’ll take on the scheduling. I just started with scheduling. I’ll take on the scheduling. And then it was like, I’ll grow the social media. And then I started negotiating deals and I tried to make sure he wasn’t being
taken advantage of.

Because people kind of came in and like, I was like, who are you? Oh, I’m your dad’s new best friend. I was like, oh, okay. And it kind of blossomed from that. So I got a number of years of very unpleasant experience dealing with legal and business and touring and social media managing my dad then started my own podcast and another company and then started working on Peterson Academy.

Mr. Jekielek:
As you’re talking now I’m thinking back to those lectures that he was doing at University of Toronto which then were put on YouTube and you know this actually when I first became aware of him. It was kind of a Peterson Academy on YouTube.

Ms. Fuller:
He started a long time ago. He was recording himself at Harvard before the age of 30, when nobody was doing that. So he has his lectures from Harvard. And then when YouTube came around, he started uploading those and then uploaded his university classes, which was really helpful when all the controversy hit because people were trying to paint him as a Right-wing fanatic. He said I have thousands of hours of lecture content
online, find something there. And there was nothing. So dad gets credit for that. I built the other social media, but he built YouTube.

Mr. Jekielek:
Give me the picture of where it is today, the Academy as it lives today. And then the sort of the, the final stage, or at least as you’re imagining it right now, as you’re going to develop it,

Ms. Fuller:
We’re implementing more educational tools on the platform. So right now you can watch the courses. You can comment on the courses. There’s a transcript you can follow along on. You can click on it if you want to go to an area in the lecture. So that’s all fun. We’re going to have note taking. So you’ll be able to look at the transcript, take notes off of the transcript, link your notes to a transcript, which I thought would be useful. So that’ll be rolling out. We’ll have an essay feature.

And all these educational tools aren’t meant for everyone necessarily. Like a lot of the people who are interested in enrolling and really just want to watch the content and educate themselves. They don’t want to be forced to do assignments or take notes. They just want to watch videos, which is totally fine. That’s a huge portion of the people who are on there.
But for people who are trying to get a certification or become accredited or get a degree if or when we become accredited, then we’ll have more educational tools for them. So we’ll have essays, note-taking. Like I said, our professors are going to go live. We’ll be launching courses and have premier parties. The other thing that we’re working on is in-depth psychometric testing. Yeah, so that’s fun.

That’s what I’m really excited about. Now that the platform is up, the educational tools are great. They’ll be very useful for people. But psychometric testing so that you can test your IQ and your personality and your ability to work and your conscientiousness. That’s what we’ll be rolling out in the future.

Mr. Jekielek:
You know, something that just struck me, you know, courses that help you delay gratification in our, for our society. I mean, if there was something that was actually effective this way,

Ms. Fuller:
I think it would blow up like nothing else. That would be incredibly effective. I don’t, I mean, that’s something that dad could speak more on in order to increase conscientiousness that it’s tricky. Like we are, I was just talking to my dad about this, about a course actually for people who take a personality test, find out they’re not the most conscientious person, which is really highly linked to success. So it’s a really helpful personality trait to have.

There are things people can do, like keep a schedule. Most people
don’t even have a schedule, keep a to-do list there’s like implementable things you can do to train yourself to act more conscientious but I haven’t read anything about actually changing the personality trait I think if you try though and implement some of these techniques then it works out anyway.

Mr. Jekielek:
You know I’m just thinking about you know Jordan’s thing you know make your bed point number one go make your bed right exactly like this would this would fit very well right into the into the ethos of the academy probably

Ms. Fuller:
That’s so funny. He just went to Miami to film a personality course which is a kind of an overview on personality traits and the different ways of viewing them. I haven’t seen it yet because he just filmed it but like the historical perspective. I was saying, yes, it would be helpful for people who are extremely agreeable to know where the faults lie with that so that they can negotiate better on their behalf, or if they’re not conscientious to figure out how to be more conscientious.

Mr. Jekielek:
I saw in your deck that you’ve got a storytelling course. Why do you have a storytelling course?

Ms. Fuller:
The art of storytelling is done by Gregg Hurwitz, who was one of dad’s graduate students at Harvard, bestselling author, and incredible storyteller. He’s done graphic novels, scripts, thrillers, he’s written hordes of books. And we knew we wanted him on board. What we’re doing is we have a curriculum design in mind that we’re rolling out over the next like 18 months to two years.

It was a lot of courses, like a hundred courses, but we also wanted to capitalize on the people we knew who were brilliant, who could just offer something that they really wanted, that they were excited to teach about. We knew we wanted Gregg Hurwitz to teach something. We’re or like what you want to teach. It’s like the most important thing that I could teach people was the art of storytelling, just how to write a story.

Mr. Jekielek:
I read a scientific paper actually that was trying to assess which methods of psychotherapy actually work like what are the factors right so they looked at existential psychoanalysis they looked classical freudian they look at a whole range. And there was only one thing that actually determined success or not. And that was the identity of the psychotherapist. So in other words, the good psychotherapists would always help people. And the bad ones, didn’t matter what method they used, they didn’t help people. Your logic here sounds pretty sound to me based on that.

Ms. Fuller:
Yes, that was my experience in university. I had two professors that I thought were pretty good. They weren’t mind blowing. And I think I probably had a high bar because of who my dad was. When I went to university, I expected a bunch of my dads. And that is not what happened. But I had two that were pretty good. And they weren’t those courses weren’t the courses I would have chosen to be my favorite courses, but they ended up being my favorite because the professors were good. So a lot of it is the quality of the professors.

Mr. Jekielek:
I could benefit a lot from these courses but when I was in university I got most out of the in-person teaching. I mean that’s just how I remember it. I wondered if there was some way to help those people because you know during the pandemic we discovered pretty quickly that some kids or even young adults and so far they’re just not suited for online learning very well. Is there some way to augment that in your plans for people that are more like me?

Ms. Fuller:
So the only thing that we have in the works right now, and things like luckily, we’ve got a lean team, and everyone’s smart and interested in growing this. So I’m sure there’s problems we can solve. Right now we have chat bots, so these are large language models [LLMs]. They’re AI-trained on basically the transcript and recommended reading of the courses. So if people are watching the course, that little guy will pop up and you can ask that LLM questions and it’s trained specifically on the content. We thought in a virtual way that could replace a TA [teaching assistant].

Now, it’s still not one-to-one communication with professors, but given how well this is going, I think the trajectory is probably leading and we’ll see how many professors are on board. I can think of three that I think would be interesting. We’ll probably hope to have full-time professors working for Peterson Academy. That would be the ideal situation maybe a year from now. And I think I can see that happening because there are a number of professors that are like, yes, I could teach 12, 13 courses. I just keep teaching them. So like at that point, if you’re interested in teaching that many courses, maybe you’re interested in doing that full-time.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s a lot of discussion about the value of these credentials from schools. I mean, but they’re, they’re for all sorts of serious professions, they’re needed, right? So how does the Peterson Academy fit into that?

Ms. Fuller:
It depends. If you’re trying to go into medicine, then this isn’t going to work, right? And some of the hard scientists that require labs, like in a number of years, we’ll probably be doing virtual labs, because you can already do virtual labs. Like in a number of years, we’ll probably be doing virtual labs because you can already do virtual labs. So that might be solvable. But for our first plan, what we’re trying to offer is a general education degree, like a curriculum that everybody would benefit by learning.

So an introduction to chemistry and physics, history, philosophy, psychology, like something that anybody, even if you’re going to go out and become a plumber or work on houses, something that everybody could use as a basis or a foundational education. And then once that curriculum is built out, we’ll separate into a psychology curriculum and a history curriculum and build those out for medicine and things that require labs.

That’s probably a number of years down the line because of the need for virtual labs. So that’s kind of our goal. Our goal was to create something extremely affordable that anybody, regardless of their age or their background could take and learn from to become sophisticated in conversation, which just opens up doors of opportunity to people.

Mr. Jekielek:
There’s a lot of basic core courses that people will take. It worked this way 25, 30 years ago that you had to take basic courses of this nature that you
described there. So presumably those could be for credit. Those could be transferable.

Ms. Fuller:
I mean, we’re like, we’re talking to a number of institutions about transfer credits right now internationally. And so that would either be to transfer credits to the universities we’re talking about. We had internal discussions about it. It’s not worth bending the education platform we’ve designed to fit into what accrediting boards would just naturally accredit. Like if you, if you fit into a number of buckets, you’ll get accredited. It’ll take a number of years, but it’ll just happen.

It’s a certain number of course hours, a certain number of hours spent at home, what they don’t look at, which is crazy. I didn’t know this until we started talking to, uh, accrediting boards if they don’t look at what people learn. There’s no standard for what someone who’s taking an intro to psych degree should know at the end of the degree. They just get someone who has a PhD in psych to teach an intro to psych course. And then it has to have a certain number of hours in class and hours spent at home on coursework.

I thought when we went to accreditors, we could say, here’s our intro to psych course. We cover the same thing, better quality, better professor, but we cover the same information as we do at this university, as they do at this university or this university. So our students end up with the same knowledge, but that’s not what they look at to accredit you. There’s no standardized test.

Mr. Jekielek:
But there’s a curriculum, I mean, you have to submit curriculums. I know we’ve done a little bit of this for our journalism academy and in development too, but there’s no curriculum. You have to present some kind of curriculum, I guess, right?

Ms. Fuller:
Yes, we’d have to present a curriculum. But for knowledge, the knowledge people get after they take the curriculum, there’s no standardized testing for it. You know, what does a person with a psych degree know? And then nobody knows. But they’ve taken 40 courses and they’ve spent this many hours in class.

Mr. Jekielek:
That may have enabled some of the lowering of the standards we’re seeing in education. I would assume, so, yes. Which courses are you most enamored with here?

Ms. Fuller:
Stephen Hicks really killed it on the platform. I couldn’t believe how much he covered. He covered almost all of the philosophers the average somewhat educated person has heard of in a couple of courses, postmodern philosophy and modern philosophy. I think those are incredibly dense, but also easy to understand. He’s easy to listen to.

I used to study classics, so I was really interested in having Sophocles. We’re going to be producing a course about Sophocles and Plato and Greek epochs. I really wanted those on the platform. I think I’m probably most interested in the tangible courses for people though. So I was really, really interested in getting dad to do a personality course because I think the benefits of understanding your personality and understanding people around you and their personality I thought that’s really beneficial to people.

Then I am interested in the niche courses we’re going to produce an etiquette course, because I know that there’s something missing from my education. I didn’t exactly learn table settings or how to sit down or how to greet people. Like that kind of education has disappeared. So I’m kind of interested to bring back the, you know, here’s eight hours of an etiquette course. We have to learn how to dress to be taken seriously, which I don’t think people necessarily learn that too. You’re depending on how you look. You’re taken completely differently in different social situations and you can really use that to your benefit. We have another course upcoming. That’s what to do in emergencies. If you get burnt or if somebody’s choking, like simple things that people should probably know, really usable information.

Mr. Jekielek:
How many people are enrolled now?

Ms. Fuller:
We have 34,000 people.

Mr. Jekielek:
Do you have a special category where if you’re going for credit that you tick a box or something?

Ms. Fuller:
Until we are properly accredited then we don’t people can log into the platform they can watch and when they get to the end of their lectures they can take the quizzes and then the exam so and then that’ll be added to their profile and then we’re going to have our own certificate for course completion that we’ll be giving people regardless of whether or not we get accredited so most people most of the 34 000 people that have signed up have started watching courses.

I don’t know how it’s possible to tell you the truth with the numbers, but I know dad’s course has 250,000 views. I don’t know how that even works with 34,000 people on the platform. But the lectures are very popular. A smaller percentage of the people are using the social media component, but most people who sign up to social media don’t actually interact. So it lines up with other platforms.
When we launched pre-enrollment in August, it was crazy. We were shocked. We couldn’t believe the amount of interest. So far people have been overwhelmingly positive about it. Like one of the things I love about it is if you go to the social media platform, and like I said, a smaller percentage of the users are actually using that, which lines up with how people use social media, but almost everything I’ve seen is upward aiming somehow.

So it’s a philosophical question for Peterson Academy students. Can you tell me a story? And then everyone says something about their day. It’s all really positive. It’s really refreshing compared to I’ve spent less time on, you know, Instagram and social media because of it.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s very interesting because the premise of it is that you’re entering your, you’re sort of entering the system. You’re paying to learn, to be edified, to understand things better. So it makes a lot less sense to go in and sort of attack it, I guess, right at this. Constructive critique probably would be as far as it would go.

Ms. Fuller:
We’ve received constructive critiques for sure.

Mr. Jekielek:
Any final thoughts as we finish?

Ms. Fuller:
The goal of it was to give people the ability to become educated by the most brilliant people we can find for an incredibly affordable price. And I think it’s sad that university is so expensive that people can’t afford it. And if I dare say, they can think better. That’s key. I just don’t think people understand the value of the classics, the value of the great books, and the value of reading.

Mr. Jekielek:
Mikhaila Fuller, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show.

Ms. Fuller:
Thank you very much for the opportunity.