Edtech Insiders joined the first Common Sense Summit on America's Kids and Families hosted by Common Sense Media at Pier 27 in San Francisco on January 28–30.
The conference brought together advocates, researchers, youth leaders, policymakers, and other experts to take stock of America's kids and families and explore solutions to the most pressing issues across four core topic areas: kids and technology, youth mental health, early childhood education, and K–12 education.
In this special episode, Alex and Ben interviews Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton served as the First Lady of the United States to the 42nd President, Bill Clinton. She went on to become a U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Senator from New York. In the 2008 election, Clinton was a leading candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
Edtech Insiders joined the first Common Sense Summit on America's Kids and Families hosted by Common Sense Media at Pier 27 in San Francisco on January 28–30.
The conference brought together advocates, researchers, youth leaders, policymakers, and other experts to take stock of America's kids and families and explore solutions to the most pressing issues across four core topic areas: kids and technology, youth mental health, early childhood education, and K–12 education.
In this special episode, Alex and Ben interviews Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton served as the First Lady of the United States to the 42nd President, Bill Clinton. She went on to become a U.S. Secretary of State and U.S. Senator from New York. In the 2008 election, Clinton was a leading candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination.
Alex Sarlin: Welcome to Season 8 of EdTech Insiders, where we speak to educators, founders, investors, thought leaders, and the industry experts who are shaping the global education technology industry. Every week, we bring you the Week in EdTech, important updates from the EdTech field, including news about core technologies and issues we know will influence the sector, like artificial intelligence, extended reality, Education, politics and more.
We also conduct in-depth interviews with a wide variety of EdTech thought leaders and bring you insights and conversations from EdTech conferences all around the world. Remember to subscribe, follow and tell your EdTech friends about the podcast, and to check out the EdTech Insiders Substack newsletter.
Thanks for being part of the EdTech Insiders community. Enjoy the show.
Ben Kornell: Hello, EdTech Insiders' listeners, we have a special episode for you today. We have a very special guest. You may know her as the First Lady of the United States Senator from New York, the United States Secretary of State, or the Democratic National Presidential Candidate, the one, the only, Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Thank you so much for joining us here today on Edtech Insiders.
Hillary Clinton: Thank you so much, Ben and Alex. I'm delighted to join you.
Ben Kornell: So first, we're here at the Common Sense Summit to talk about the state of kids and families in America. What do you think the state is and what's giving you the most hope and what's giving you the most concern?
Hillary Clinton: I think that it's a mixed message about the state of children and families. There is a lot of concern, rightfully about how well our kids are doing, and whether or not we as a society are supporting families so they can do the best possible job raising children to be happy, productive people, and I think the common sense poll of youth and families that was conducted for the summit really sums it up.
We don't have enough of a commitment from our. Government at the national, state, or local level to invest in kids, we don't have enough child care. We don't have paid family leave so that, families can get off to a good start with their children and go to work with the peace of mind that quality child care provides.
And we also see young people themselves, tweens and teens, as well as young adults expressing, real concern about themselves, their families, and the larger society. So I think there's a set of issues that Common sense is addressing that. We talked about at the summit that we should take very seriously.
And, that runs everything from helping kids who are hungry to help the parents of kids by making sure they have better jobs with rising incomes to have a. Portable housing available so that no family goes without to deal with the mental health, drug and alcohol addiction issues that, sadly affect too many both young and old Americans.
So I think that we have a good agenda to address, but we need to get about doing it.
Alex Sarlin: One of the societal solutions you've been advocating for your whole career is early childhood education. And, as a senator, you call for a national initiative to establish high quality pre K programs.
Research has shown that for every dollar invested in early childhood, we get 13 to 16 back. Yet, here we are, 2024, and only 11 states offer universal pre K. In your extensive experience in this area, what would your message be about the value of early childhood education and how to accelerate momentum for it in the U.S.?
Hillary Clinton: It's such an important question and you're right, I've been working on this a very long time and it is one step forward, a half a step, even two steps back sometimes. Early childhood education has been proven over and over again to provide great benefits to children. Now I'm talking about quality early childhood education, I'm not talking about putting a kid in a car seat and sticking the kid in front of a TV all day.
I'm talking about, the kind of quality interactions that really help develop the brain and give kids a true head start on learning when they get into formal schooling. So we know that done right, it really gives benefits to kids. And as I talked about at the summit at the Clinton foundation, we run a program called too small to fail, which focuses on the earliest kinds of interventions, talking, singing, reading to your children that can actually.
Produce positive brain development all the way to the kind of universal pre K that we've seen a few, but not enough places. The benefits from children are 1st and foremost and should be, but there's also benefits to families because it's not only that, families. Should feel secure when they go to work that their Children are being not just taken care of, but stimulated and educated and really given a great start.
But also families can learn from. Quality early childhood, how to be better parents, how to interact with your children, how to, avoid getting frustrated and overwhelmed like parents everywhere do, all of us do. So I think we've made the case over and over again, but we don't have a philosophy in our political system of seeing these kinds of expenditures as the investments, which they are.
We know that getting kids off to a good start, getting them well prepared for school, helping them, learn how to both behave and learn, reaps benefits in education and also, avoids some of the costly challenges that might happen, later on if kids, get in trouble or fall behind or don't feel, that they're Being taken care of well and act out.
There's just a lot that you could implant early in a child from a good quality early childhood experience.
Alex Sarlin: One other aspect of education you talked about at the summit, it was really fascinating was gender in education. You've been an advocate for women and women's rights for many decades, and we've seen some really big successes.
Now we're at this strange historical moment where boys and men are less likely to graduate high school than girls and women. They're less likely to graduate college. They earn fewer master's degrees, fewer medical degrees, fewer, legal J. D. s. It's a really strange moment. Tell us about your take on this strange moment, in gender and education and what we need to do to address it.
Hillary Clinton: I'm really glad you asked about that, Alex, because I think this is an area that deserves so much more attention. And I was really glad that Nick Kristof, who was interviewing me at the summit, raised it. And as I responded, it's something I've been really thinking hard about. I can't pretend to know all the answers, but I do know that there are Enough worrying indicators about what's happening with boys and men when it comes to education, when it comes to participation in the formal economy, when it comes to forming relationships, taking responsibility for, those relationships and, particularly when it comes to, kids and.
I don't know why this is happening. I think it has a lot to do with the pull of technology and both the attraction of technology, but also some of the challenges that technology poses about what's appropriate behavior for boys and men, I mentioned at the summit an article I had written called The Weaponization of Loneliness, and I wrote it a couple of months ago because it came out of a very important study that the Surgeon General of the United States had done about loneliness being a physical and mental health problem.
And I wrote in there about how Steve Bannon, the advisor to Trump, understood early on that young men who were playing games, were very susceptible to conspiracy theories, to resentments, to fears. There's nothing wrong with games, but if you are totally living in a gamer world, it can cut you off from a lot of the rest of the world.
And voices that you might ignore if you're walking down the street suddenly seem, powerful. And Bannon understood that you could take that kind of gamer mentality. And turn it toward political support for a certain kind of toxic masculinity if you will take that phrase. That's just one thing, but I don't think it explains everything, and it doesn't explain why this is a global phenomenon, which is what I've been looking at.
And I guess the final thing I would say is there's some recent, very recent, polling data about young men, Gen Z men, being quite resentful of women's success, of the success of minorities of any kind, being susceptible to, misogynistic, racist, homophobic kinds of arguments because they, Have been fed a lot of information and propaganda about why other people are getting ahead when they're not, whatever that means, however they define that.
So yeah, I think we need to do a lot more work because we don't want to, ignore what is apparently quite a developing phenomenon.
Ben Kornell: We should acknowledge that the Common Sense Summit is taking place against the backdrop of Senate hearings on platforms and their accountability. And in some ways, it's really about the wave of social media and the impact negatively that it's had on kids and teens.
But then there's new waves coming. We had Sam Altman at the conference and talking a little bit about AI and the future of AI and learning. How do we make sure that this wave Of AI doesn't repeat the same challenges that the wave of social media created. And what are the regulatory guardrails? It does seem like at least for one day in Congress, there's some bipartisanship around this.
What do you see around AI?
Hillary Clinton: I think, Ben, that's a really critical question that we're not going to be able to answer satisfactorily right away because we don't know yet. A lot of the promises that people developing AI are making are like the promises we heard about social media. And I think if history is a guide, we have to assume that they're going to be hard to fulfill.
Remember, AI is being trained on vast amounts of written material, which carries with it a lot of the embedded biases, prejudices, that we have seen rampant on social media. And right now I am not optimistic because I just don't see the guardrails. I don't see the guardrails coming from the tech companies.
I don't see the guardrails coming from governments at any level. You referenced the hearing that was held. I think there's a lot of legitimate concern from Democrats, Republicans, everybody, that we're conducting this vast experimentation on human beings, particularly young ones. And we don't know what we are doing to brain development, to impulse control, to compassion and empathy as key ingredients of civilized behavior.
We just don't know. And I am very worried that We're going to make the problem even worse, and we're not even going to understand where it's coming from, because with an age of deep fakes, of, clever applications of artificial intelligence that manipulate you without you even knowing you're being manipulated, it seems like social media on steroids to me, in terms of the potential.
Negative impact. Now, will it help you write a paper faster? Will it help you do other tasks? Yeah, but what are you giving up for that? What's the trade off? That's what nobody's really focusing on.
Alex Sarlin: It's a very early time and we are trying to keep an eye on it because it is, as you say, we don't know. As a society, as a civilization, we don't know what, where AI is going.
It's a really interesting moment. You have traveled extensively. You mentioned, the gender crisis happening around the world as Secretary of State. You traveled almost a million miles. You've been to absolutely everywhere. So we wanted to ask you, what are some of the lessons that you've taken over your career from other countries, especially around education or technology that you feel like you'd like to see us learn from in the U.S.?
Hillary Clinton: I think other countries, particularly our peers in Europe, really have a much better understanding of the need to invest in early childhood, child development, support for parents and families. Now, they are not perfect. I want to quickly say that and their populations are falling just like our population is falling.
We're below replacement level. Most of the European countries are as well. So we still haven't done enough to really. Support the decision to have children and then the actual raising of children anywhere in the advanced, economic world. But there does seem to be a much greater commitment to trying to ease the burdens of parenting and this is just totally anecdotal.
But, recently I've been in. Denmark and Spain, I've traveled around taking long walks through, cities like Copenhagen, Seville and others. And I see people with one another, I see older people with young people, particularly with children. And I don't see people glued to their screens. I don't see that.
I don't see the kind of constant addiction attention to screens. You go to a park in New York, you see a parent or a caretaker absentmindedly pushing a kid on a swing, looking at a screen. That's not what I've seen in some of these other countries. And again, it's totally anecdotal. I don't want to make mountains out of molehills, but I think trying to be.
In the moment, be present, and then be supported in the most important work any of us do, which is, caring for each other, serving each other, raising children. At the end of the day, that's really what matters most. We need both a change in commitment and a change in investment, so that individuals do what they have to do, and Collectively through government.
The rest of us do as well. And I would just end by saying, on the too small to fail front, it seems so obvious and simple that reading, talking and singing to your babies, toddlers, preschoolers. Would be a nice thing to do, but brain research shows it actually builds brain capacity. So what we've tried to do is to convince people of that.
So putting the phone down when you're walking through a supermarket or you're at a playground and talking to your, little person and reading to your little person, even singing to that little person is doing work. Yeah, it's very nice to do. You build a relationship, but it also builds a brain.
So we just have to get more of that understanding out there.
Ben Kornell: That is a great note to end on at the summit, we talked about big structural issues, but I think the audience was on fire and the audience was optimistic during your talk because of all of these micro things we can do to make the world better for our kids and their future.
Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State, Senator, leader and champion for kids. EdTech Insiders. Thanks so much for joining us.
Hillary Clinton: Oh, thank both of you for doing this. It really means a lot.
Alex Sarlin: Thanks for listening to this episode of Edtech Insiders. If you like the podcast, remember to rate it and share it with others in the EdTech community.
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Hillary Clinton: Substack.