Chris Balme is an education leader, writer, and school founder, passionate about helping young people discover more of their human potential.

Chris currently serves as Founding Principal at Hakuba International School. He is also the Founder & Director of Argonaut, an online advisory program for middle schoolers around the world.

Prior to this, Chris co-founded and served as Head of School at Millennium School, a lab school in San Francisco, where he helped pioneer new learning methods based in developmental science.

Chris has received the Ashoka Fellowship as a leading changemaker in education, and regularly speaks, trains, and writes for parents and teachers around the world. His first book, Finding the Magic in Middle School, was published in 2022 and quickly became a bestseller. His next book, Challenge Accepted, is written for middle schoolers themselves, and will be released in August 2025.

For more of Chris’s writing and ideas, see his newsletter Growing Wiser.