Thales College - A New 'School Revolution'? With Special Guest Robert Luddy
Successful entrepreneur and Founder of Thales Academy shows us the possibilities of education outside of the government bureaucratic grip. The future of education is indeed a great one.
Successful entrepreneur and Founder of Thales Academy shows us the possibilities of education outside of the government bureaucratic grip. The future of education is indeed a great one.
Successful entrepreneur and Founder of Thales Academy shows us the possibilities of education outside of the government bureaucratic grip. The future of education is indeed a great one.
Hello, everybody, and thank you for tuning in to the Liberty Report.
With me today as co-host is Daniel McAdams.
And Daniel, good to have you here today.
How are you this morning, Dr. Paul?
I'm doing very well, and we have a very special guest today.
And this is an individual I've gotten to know over the last few years, and very, very interesting person, very successful businessman, very generous in his efforts to promote the cause of liberty, and also very much interested in education.
His name is Bob Luddy.
Bob, welcome to our program today.
Dr. Paul, it's a pleasure to be with you today.
Well, great.
And let's just start off with maybe a general question.
You've been very successful in business, and I saw someplace where you had met Peterson, who was a student of Mises, and you got interested in economics and sort of got converted away from Keynesianism.
And when did that happen years-wise?
When did you sort of start shifting gears?
Were you already a very, very successful businessman, or did Austrian economics actually help you go in that direction?
A little bit of both.
I was already somewhat successful.
The year was 1989.
And I gave a talk on entrepreneurism at Campbell University where Dr. Peterson just happened to be the Lundy chair.
So that developed a lifetime relationship.
And in my adult life, I called Dr. Peterson my personal professor who taught me Austrian economics, for which I will be forever thankful.
And now your first, well, no, you were involved in several academies, but the one that you're most best known for is the Thales Academy.
And of course, I want you to tell us a little bit about that, when that started and where you've gotten to.
But we're also very interested in your proposal for a college.
Now, that's, to me, that sounds like a big step.
I don't know.
It probably is routine for you, but it to me would be a big step.
So tell us how you got your first academy or at least the Thales Academy started.
Thales began, it was founded in 2007 with 30 students here at our corporate office where I'm at now.
So literally over the next four years, we launched four schools from our corporate office.
I don't think that happens very often in U.S. of America.
In year two, in 2008, we had two Thales schools, one in northern Wake County, Wake Forest, and one in southern Wake County, Apex.
Since that time, we now have eight campuses comprising over 3,000 students.
And the theme of our K-12 is high-quality, affordable cost.
In private school education, you can get high quality to some degree, but the cost is normally extremely high.
So it can't be accessed by most middle-class families.
Our idea was to be able to pull in a large number of middle-class families and additionally to provide scholarships to students who couldn't afford to come to the K-12.
Before we go on to the college that you're starting, when you have the academy and you have to think about economics and make it attractive to people who aren't super rich, where do the savings come from?
What makes a difference?
Is there a reduction in bureaucracy?
There probably is savings there.
But what about salaries for teachers?
Can you get the teachers you want at a competitive salary, or do you have to deal with lower salaries?
How do you handle all those issues?
Well, Dr. Paul, here's what we found out.
We don't have lower bureaucracy.
We have no bureaucracy.
That reminds me of Robert Love.
I don't know if you knew him or not.
He had no bureaucracy.
So in a K-5 school, we can put up to 500 students.
We have a leader in the school, the principal, and she has an assistant.
And then we have our teachers.
We are able to pay competitive wages because we average between 22 and 25 students.
And this whole class size thing is a real myth, as you know.
Because when all the students pay attention, the teacher doesn't have to be a drill sergeant.
She can be a teacher.
And so that affords the opportunity to teach more children at one time very effectively.
But we do something else.
We ability group.
So every class has a correct ability group, particularly in the K-5.
So they all learn at the same pace.
And that ability grouping is looked at monthly.
So students, if they're lagging, may fall behind temporarily, will move to a lower group.
Some students will move to a higher group.
Some will stay the same.
Some will get some additional help later in the day.
So we have a whole methodology in K-5 of teaching reading, writing, math, phonics, reading comprehension, and good spelling, very systematized and very cost-effective.
So by the time these students enter sixth grade, they are good spellers.
They know how to focus.
We have high levels of discipline.
Everything about it just works beautifully.
Great.
Daniel.
Well, I'm super excited to talk to you, Mr. Luddy, because I think what you're doing is, I hope, the future of education.
And thank goodness for successful entrepreneurs who become philanthropists who help the next generation.
And it's very clear that's what you're doing.
So extremely exciting.
The father of three homeschooled kids, one who's going into university here in a couple of weeks.
I have particular interest, but I would like to back up a little bit if I can before we go into that because you have written a book earlier this year, which we do recommend for our viewers, Entrepreneurial Life, the Path from Startup to Market Leader.
You started Captive Air really from scratch with nothing in tough times, tough economic times, and you built it from nothing to an extremely successful company.
I think you did something like 300 million in sales last year or something in that neighborhood.
So if you can walk us through a little bit about the entrepreneurial side of your life.
Well, in my startup, and I don't necessarily recommend it, I'm just telling you how I did it.
I started with no money, no knowledge of the industry.
But what that did was it forced me and the people who worked for the company early on.
We had to be very efficient.
We had to be highly resourceful, and we had to win every day.
And that's all part of the entrepreneurial approach.
And as a result, we became more competitive.
Eventually, we entered the kitchen ventilation industry, became the low-cost producer.
We used Kaizen to continuously figure out how to do a more efficient job, a better job, and at lower cost.
And so the entrepreneurial life essentially is a lifetime of discovery.
That's why I call it the life.
And it leads into essentially any industry if you use these similar concepts.
So the things I learned at Captive Air are mostly highly applicable to education.
And I realized that the most important problem we have in our country is education.
We have too many uneducated individuals.
There's six million jobs currently listed in the U.S. that are unfilled.
Phenomenal.
You know, when homeschooling was going in the early 80s, there was a lot of interference by government.
They did not want it to exist.
I still think there's a threat to that.
But how much interference did you have when you started the academy from any government officials?
Did you feel like you were totally left alone and just could go about your way and nobody bothered you?
Or did you have to contend with some people wanting to tell the world that you're a very dangerous person?
Interesting, in North Carolina, has the best private school law in the country.
And the law just simply requires that you notify the Department of Administration that you're going to start a school, you post your grades, and you comply with all applicable laws, state, county, federal, etc.
That's it.
So, no, I didn't have any real resistance.
We do get some resistance from municipalities or other areas that would prefer to have a public school over a private school.
But we've been able to work through that.
So, at least at this point, we've been able to move very quickly, unencumbered.
And, of course, the population loves these schools.
As a matter of fact, most people don't talk to me about Captive Air.
They want to learn about the schools.
That's great.
Well, your big plan, and I think you've purchased the land, if I'm not mistaken, is starting the Thales College, and that's going to be a real revolution, I think.
And that's why we called the title of today's show A School Revolution.
You're planning on this, you're working toward it, you have a fascinating model that enables you to keep the costs ridiculously low.
I'm sending my son to a state school, Texas AM, which is notorious for a very good education at a low price.
You got them beat, Mr. Luddy, and so if you could give us a little bit of about what are your plans and how's it going to work?
Well, you know, initially when I started Thales, we were going to be a K-8 school.
And of course, the parents said, you know, you can't just drop us off after the eighth grade.
So we went to K-12.
And in recent discussions with parents, they're very concerned about college for a number of reasons.
Obviously, cost you know about.
Culture is a huge problem.
Yes.
And beyond that, debt and lack of good academic rigor are a serious long-term problem for many students.
So we began to think about college, and I reverted to my days in college at LaSalle University in Philadelphia, where two-thirds of the students at that time were commuters.
For four years of college education in the 60s combined, I paid $4,000.
If you inflate that to today's money, that's about $32,000.
Guess what?
That's what the asking price is for a college education at Thales.
You know, you have another amazing academy or in the college when you get there, will you be able to follow this plan where you're going to, in the college, where you will get the students to read and study and have a little bit of grasp of the issue?
Then they go and they discuss it at school.
And that sounds, and it sounds like that's revolutionary, unless there are some precedent for that.
But my first thought came from a personal viewpoint: would that work for any study at all?
Would that work the same for science as it would for the social studies?
For some reason, from my viewpoint, it might be more challenging to start off on your own reading something in a science and then compare that to a history or some other subject.
Yeah, to some degree I learned this from Dr. Peterson because he would send me information to read and I would read it and we would discuss it.
Very often it was on the phone.
So if you think about it, professor provides a lecture and you take notes.
Nobody takes perfect notes.
It's a much better process to read the information, to hear videos, to listen to speeches, and then be prepared for the Socratic method, which means it's going to be discussed.
Liberty Fund uses a good technique where they set up about a dozen people into a Socratic setting.
The professor opens it up with some comments, and then he throws questions out, and there's very strict protocols within the Socratic method so that people don't talk too much and that everybody gets an opportunity to participate.
Well, in real time, your professor knows if you read the information, and from your engagement, he has an understanding of how well you understand it.
We're going to do something in addition.
We're going to use the internship method so that each professor will meet with each student for about one hour per week.
And that way they can set goals for them.
They can ascertain where they're at.
They can give them some corrective studies when they're falling behind.
So we're going to use a whole series of modern techniques so that students will deeply understand the material and not just fill out a true-false multiple guess test.
As a footnote, when I was at LaSalle University, all tests were given in blue book.
There were no multiple guest tests whatsoever.
So that's my background.
I remember that too.
I want to just follow up, I guess, for my last question, Mr. Luddy, about you mentioned culture and that, you know, for the third time I'll mention you, but as a parent of a child going off to university, I've seen the horror stories.
My old alma mater, Berkeley, looks like a war zone half the time with people fighting against each other, trying to suppress speech.
It looks like the cultural Marxists are taking over universities.
How are you going to provide a safe haven for sane people to avoid this nonsense?
Well, free speech and discussion are critical to the Socratic method to developing thinkers.
So we will have no tolerance for anybody that wants to suppress speech in any way.
We would run them out of college summarily.
One of the things within business manufacturing schools, you have to have very strict rules.
One person I learned that from was Ken Iverson, who was the founder and chairman of New Corps Steel, that changed the entire steel industry.
Ken was adamant about the rules.
So the first rule will be free speech, respectfully, but free speech.
Sounds great.
You know, I assume that the students that you've had in the academy would all have, the students would have to be reasonably close to the school building.
Accreditation Matters00:03:38
And will that be necessary in the college?
Where are your students come from?
Are they limited to that geography around the building?
Or are they coming from further distances?
Or will they even someday be a lot further away than that?
Well, at least initially, they will come from the proximity of the building.
Because one of the things that we're going to do is make sure that every student is in school 8 to 12 every single day.
And the reason for that is we want them studying, learning.
We want them to understand the disciplines of the workplace.
And we want them to be in a cluster with their professors.
I learned more from Dr. Peterson through this method than I ever learned in college about economics, to be sure.
So, this is a unique approach and will require students to have a high level of engagement.
And we also want students to have an internship as we progress.
And this college education will be completed in three years because we're going to have three semesters per year, not two semesters per year.
So, we're doing many unique things, including the Oxford tutorial, which I've previously mentioned.
Now, will you find people, or has anybody expressed any reservation about accreditation?
Because it's built into our system.
Oh, if you're not accredited, you know, you're not going to be real.
Or are we at a point now when people don't care and realize that you may do better without an accreditation because of less rules and regulations coming down from the federal government?
Dr. Paul, it's interesting you bring that up because in the K-12, parents generally think you have to be accredited or you wouldn't get into college.
So, of course, we asked the question: how did these homeschoolers get in college?
They don't come from an accredited homeschool.
It took time, but we gradually convinced parents that accreditation was not necessary.
And by the way, colleges don't care about K-12 accreditation when they admit students.
Now, when you go to college, it's going to be something similar in that most students coming to our college probably won't get master's degrees unless we offer them in the future.
But even think about this: were they to seek a master's degree, the college is going to look at their academic background, their accomplishments, and they want good students.
So, more than likely, they'll accept them.
If you look at accredited colleges today, they're very snooty, even from other accredited colleges, whether they accept their courses.
So, I view it as a non-problem, and it's very entrepreneurial.
And as parents understand more about it, they really accepted this whole new way of thinking.
You know, the one thing that one would have to think about, if I was back at that time looking at a school, I want to know, well, yeah, accredited, I think you have a good answer for that.
But what about a medical degree?
I think there'd be more pressure.
But then, once again, it shouldn't take too long for the medical schools to realize what kind of students they could be getting, you know, and that the accreditation, besides, you know, they do put a lot of emphasis on entrance tests.
So, it seems like they could get around it, but maybe at the beginning there might be some hesitation.
In a startup, there's all those challenges.
Why Accreditation Matters?00:01:07
I'll tell you something interesting.
I went to an accredited business school, but I didn't realize it until 50 years later when the business school accreditation agency presented me with an award for leadership.
So, throughout my 50-year business career, nobody asked, did you go to an accredited B-school?
I didn't even know personally.
The whole thing is silly, and it's legacy, and I believe it's totally obsolete.
We're going to have to close down, but I do want to thank you very much for being on.
I had some questions about the business cycle and the Federal Reserve and what you expect next year, what the interest rates are going to be.
But that would take a little bit longer because I know you know a lot about economics too, and I'd be fascinated to get a viewpoint from you.
But we don't have time for it, but once again, thank you very much for being with us.
I look forward to a follow-up.
Thank you, Dr. Paul.
Very good.
And I want to thank our viewers today for tuning in.
And if you want to get some more information about where you can find the book by Mr. Luddy, look at our website.