Why We Got Started

The pandemic pulled back the curtain on school. One minute everything was normal, the next we were all watching reality unfold on our screens. And what we saw didn't make sense.

Our five-year-old daughter had to do school online. Mercifully short for her, maybe an hour a day. But we watched her transform from a child who could spend hours building elaborate worlds with blocks into someone who couldn't sit still for twenty minutes of direct instruction. Her eyes would glaze over as her teacher heroically tried to engage twenty-five tiny faces in little boxes.

This wasn't just a pandemic problem. This was the system revealing itself.

Parents everywhere suddenly witnessed what school actually looked like. Questions people like John Holt had raised three-quarters of a century ago suddenly felt urgent and personal. Our schooling system wasn't designed with children in mind. It was designed for creating factory-ready workers, and these structures had taken on a life of their own. Standardized tests. Standardized goals. The world has changed at a dizzying pace, and so has our understanding of how children learn.

But the system remained frozen.

School Is Obsolete

Let's be blunt: School as we know it is obsolete. Not broken. Obsolete. There's a difference. Something broken can be fixed. Something obsolete needs to be replaced.

Alternative educators have been making this point for at least a hundred years: Our educational system wasn't designed for the world we live in or the future our children will inhabit. It wasn't even designed based on how we know children actually learn. It was designed for the Industrial Revolution, to create compliant workers for factories. What has been a woefully outdated model for nearly a century is now dangerously obsolete.

Look at the evidence:

India's abysmal performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is just one data point. When India participated in 2009, students ranked 72nd out of 74 countries in mathematics, reading, and science. The results were so embarrassing that India withdrew from the test for the next decade. This isn't just about "poor teaching" or "lack of resources." Countries with fewer resources have done better. It's about a system fundamentally misaligned with how humans learn.

This isn't about tweaking the curriculum or training teachers better or adding more technology, despite heroic educators—many of them skilled professionals with genuine care for children—doing their absolute best within a flawed system. The model itself is the problem.

Factory Model in an Innovation Economy

"We set out to educate children, and we end up teaching them to pass exams."

This simple observation captures everything. The means have become the end. The tools have become the purpose. The map has been mistaken for the territory.

The industrial roots of our educational model aren't metaphor. They're historical fact. Watch how it works:

Age-based cohorts move through the system like products on an assembly line

Subjects are segmented into standardized curriculum units

Bells mark rigid time periods, training future workers to follow factory whistles

Compliance, punctuality, and following directions take precedence

Standardized testing serves as quality control

Power flows from top to bottom in hierarchical structures

This made a certain kind of sense in its time. Mass education was a democratic advance over elite-only schooling. Standardization helped ensure basic quality across diverse settings. It worked when information and expertise were scarce. When access to knowledge required proximity to the knowledgeable.

But ours is a world where the best educators on any subject are on YouTube. Information is readily available on Google, and now AI can even tailor it all into neat little curricula. The scarcity problem that schools originally solved has vanished. Yet the solution remains.

Our children will enter a world dominated by automation, artificial intelligence, climate change, and social transformation. They need creativity, critical thinking, collaboration, and adaptability. Precisely the qualities our education system systematically undermines.

The World Economic Forum now identifies creativity as the third most important skill for future employment, yet our schools still prioritize memorization and standardized performance. Employers consistently report that graduates lack problem-solving abilities and creative thinking—exactly what we should expect from a system designed to suppress these traits.

And then we realized something fundamental: education was never just about acquiring information. It's about so much more. One of us was working on a book about mind, learning, creativity, and consciousness that made this increasingly clear. The disconnect between what science tells us about learning and the daily reality of education became impossible to ignore.

Literacy classes like this have resulted in 8 year olds learning to read fluently (and for pleasure). No desks, no exams.

The One-Size-Fits-All Fallacy

The US Air Force discovered something profound in the late 1940s. Planes were dropping from the skies at alarming rates. Everyone blamed pilot error. The real culprit? Decades-old cockpit designs based on outdated measurements.

The Air Force commissioned a massive study, measuring over 4,000 pilots across 140 dimensions. They planned to design a standardized cockpit that fit everyone well. When they crunched the numbers and looked for pilots who matched the averages, they found something shocking.

Not a single pilot out of 4,063 fit the average on all measures.

There was no average pilot.

Designing for the average means designing for no one.

When we design education for the "average child," we design it for no child.

Yet our approach assumes this mythical average learner exists. We create grade-level standards, uniform curricula, standardized assessments, age-based expectations. Every deviation from the norm becomes a problem to fix rather than a natural variation to respect.

Human development follows amazingly diverse pathways:

Some children read fluently at four, others at seven or eight

Some grasp mathematical concepts intuitively, others need concrete experience

Some think best while moving, others while sitting quietly

Some process information quickly, others need reflection time

Some express themselves in words, others through movement, art, or music

Some thrive socially, others need solitude

These aren't deficits. They're natural variations in human development, as natural as differences in height or hair color. Yet our standardized approach treats deviation as pathology.

The costs are enormous. Children developing slowly in certain areas experience unnecessary failure and anxiety. They develop negative self-concepts as learners. Those developing quickly face boredom and wasted potential. Those with different cognitive profiles find their strengths ignored, their differences labeled as problems.

The Hidden Curriculum of Obedience

If school was merely a pointless exercise in memorizing obsolete information, we could at least hope that they provided decent daycare while kids learned despite or after school. But the traditional model does something far worse.

One of our Comini parents knew it was time to pull their child out when they overheard her playing "teacher" with her dolls. "You will drill this into your head because I say so!" she barked, waving a makeshift pointer.

This is the hidden curriculum in action. Beyond what schools claim to teach lies what they actually teach through their structures and routines.

Imagine being a child again. Six hours a day, five days a week, thirteen years in an environment where:

You must ask permission to speak, eat, or use the bathroom

Bells control your time

Your worth becomes a grade

Mistakes mean failure

Your interests wait for "free time"

Authority figures decide everything

Following rules matters more than understanding

The hidden curriculum teaches that your worth equals your performance. That compliance beats curiosity. That what interests you matters less than what's prescribed.

Most insidiously, it teaches that learning exists for external validation, not personal meaning.

When children ask "Why do we need to know this?" they hear: "Because it's on the test."

Learning becomes a transaction, not a transformation. Study, memorize, test, forget. Knowledge becomes hurdles to clear rather than meaning to discover.

These hidden lessons shape how children see themselves as learners and as people. They create mindsets about ability, effort, failure, and growth that last lifetimes.

The Alternative

So we asked ourselves: What if we could create something different? What if we could build a learning environment aligned with how children actually develop and thrive? What if education could nurture rather than gradually extinguish the natural curiosity and joy that children bring to learning?

The answer wasn't going to be found in incremental improvements to the existing system. We didn't need better textbooks or more engaging teaching methods or updated curriculum. We needed to fundamentally rethink what learning environments could be.

This realization didn't come all at once. It grew as we connected with other families, explored research in neuroscience and developmental psychology, and observed our own two kids. It crystallized as we compared notes with parents around the world trying alternative approaches.

We began to see that a different approach was not only possible but necessary. One that:

Honors children's natural development rather than forcing them into standardized timelines

Recognizes play as the primary vehicle for deep learning, not a distraction from it

Treats children as active meaning-makers rather than passive recipients

Integrates subjects in meaningful contexts rather than artificial divisions

Values intrinsic motivation over external rewards and punishments

Sees education as preparation for life itself, not just future schooling or employment

Go to any school website and you are likely to see some version of this: We aim to empower children to maintain their natural curiosity and love of learning. Who see themselves as capable, creative problem-solvers. Who develop the flexibility and resilience needed for a rapidly changing world. Who experience learning as joyful and meaningful rather than tedious and stressful. We all have the right intentions. But the real question is: how do you actually go about it?

Why We Got Started School Is Obsolete Factory Model in an Innovation Economy The One-Size-Fits-All Fallacy The Hidden Curriculum of Obedience The Alternative