Montessori High School Teacher | Stephen Fairbanks | The Vance Crowe Podcast | Episode 46

About this episode

Vance interviews Stephen Fairbanks, a former ad-agency copywriter turned Montessori/Academy of Thought and Industry high school teacher in St. Louis, in an episode recorded before COVID dominated the show's focus. They open on Fairbanks's earlier life as a competitive sand-volleyball player and restaurant server who drifted through his twenties and thirties before meeting his wife, dropping out of college on "a whim," and eventually finishing an English/French degree in Georgia. The conversation's core is an extended walkthrough of Montessori adolescent education: alternating humanities/science blocks, mandatory movement breaks, a "prepared environment," student-led maker-space time, daily student-run cleaning "jobs," and a discipline philosophy built on observation and Socratic reflection rather than punishment or raised voices — contrasted repeatedly with Vance's own "sit down, sit down" experience in traditional school and his industrial "raw goods" metaphor for mass education. Fairbanks traces his own path from waiting tables and adjunct teaching into advertising (at Paraki, the agency that later worked with Vance at Monsanto and St. Louis Bank), a shift triggered financially (his first paid Labor Day off at 42) but reversed emotionally after his mother — a career-change success story herself, computer programmer turned math teacher — died of cancer in 2018 telling him her only regret was not becoming a teacher sooner. They also discuss language and translation (Quebec's linguistic identity, "translation is treason"), Eric Hoffer's The True Believer on mass movements, and close with an extended riff on VR headsets — Fairbanks's visceral reaction to a paper-airplane demo, and a genuinely open-ended exchange about whether VR-simulated violence or intimacy rewires the brain the same way real experience would.

Key moments

• **[00:34:06–00:37:20]** Contrast between mass-production public schooling ("raw goods... mold them into something we can use") and Montessori's individualized, movement-integrated daily structure.
• **[00:39:11–00:39:56]** Explanation of why the school requires foundational Latin in middle school despite Montessori's normally light emphasis on rote spelling drills.
• **[01:12:14–01:13:46]** Reading The True Believer together and discussing why people with unfulfilled dreams surrender individuality to join mass movements.
• **[01:20:54–01:22:21]** Fairbanks's mother's death and her dying regret — not becoming a teacher sooner — as the emotional catalyst for his own career switch.
• **[01:26:05–01:34:41]** Discussion of Paraki's culture-first agency model and why culture, not expertise, is the actual bottleneck to scaling either a creative agency or a school.
• **[01:49:16–01:53:06]** Extended, genuinely uncertain exchange about VR's effect on the brain — simulated violence, simulated intimacy, and whether experience without risk still "counts."

Notable quotes

“She died... told me that she was going to die with one regret. Just one. And that was that she didn't become a teacher sooner.”

“Let's say I did let somebody learn what it was like to kill somebody. Does that mean that their brain is now wired exactly the same way a murderer's brain is?”

“The agency was the first time in my life at the age of 42 that I got paid to take Labor Day off.”