The greatest untapped resource on the planet isn’t nuclear energy or deep-sea minerals, genetic engineering or outer space exploration; it’s human potential. And what human has more potential than a child?
You’d think we’d pour our best effort into educating them, exhausting all possible options. But we don’t. Most parents know more about the difference between the oat milk from Trader Joe’s and the oat milk from Whole Foods than they know about their own kids’ education. (Not an insult, just a fact.) And it’s why I’m writing to you today.
To be clear, I don’t enjoy harping on the fact that conventional education is broken. There are too many rage-baiters and doomsdayers out there: “public school sucks!” or “save your kid from public school while you still can!” I am not one of them. That’s coming at the problem from the wrong angle. Parents shouldn’t have to ask, “What’s wrong with my kids’ school?” They should be asking, excitedly, “How good can my kids’ school really get? How high is high?”
But to answer that, we have to first understand where we are. And to be honest, it’s not pretty.
My goal is to give you the unvarnished truth of our education system as a whole, so you can start building your own opinion and making the best possible decision for your family.
Let’s start from the beginning.
400 BCE: The golden age of personalized education
For over 1,000 years, education was a deeply personalized experience. It was the golden age of tutors: Socrates tutored Plato, who tutored Aristotle, who tutored Alexander the Great.
You get the picture.
The problem was, only the wealthy could afford high-quality tutors. Personalized learning may have been the pinnacle of education, but it was far from accessible. Naturally, alternative solutions were born.
1837: The birth of standardized schooling
The Massachusetts Board of Education was founded, and Horace Mann became its first secretary. Mann championed the common school movement, meaning he wanted to provide accessible education for everyone. Certainly, this is a vision we can all stand behind. But his method? Not so much.
Mann was deeply inspired by the Prussian education system, which emphasized obedience, discipline, and standardized instruction. (This system was initially founded as a way to unify the Prussian state after the Napoleonic wars. In other words, to govern populations that the Prussian army invaded.)
The goal: mold loyal, compliant citizens.
German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte described the role of standardization:
“Education should aim at destroying free will so that after pupils are thus schooled they will be incapable throughout the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise than as their schoolmasters would have wished … When the technique has been perfected, every government that has been in charge of education for more than one generation will be able to control its subjects securely without the need of armies or policemen.”
Not off to a super stellar start.
1840s: Noble intentions, sour results
To be fair, Horace Mann is not the Captain Hook of this story. His inclination toward standardization came from noble intentions. He believed that standardized classrooms would bridge opportunity gaps and give every kid — regardless of race, gender, or class — a fighting chance to succeed.
But noble intentions quickly soured in the face of behemoth bureaucracy.
1860s – 1900: The Industrial Revolution and factory-style schooling
As the Industrial Age surged forward, factory-style schooling became the norm. More than anyone, industrialists eagerly latched onto the idea of standardization. Why? Because a standardized classroom could produce workers who were 1) punctual, 2) obedient, and 3) didn’t ask questions about the way things were done.
In other words, “the perfect employee.”
Take Andrew Carnegie, for example. After conquering American steel, Carnegie needed a pipeline of workers — mine operators, safety engineers, railroad conductors, furnace workers — to keep his empire running. He poured money into education, funding libraries and endowing institutions, in hopes to build the workforce he needed.
Factory-style schooling for factory-style jobs meant serving the most common denominator, everything geared towards the “average” student:
Bright students became bored and disengaged.
Struggling students fell further and further behind.
Every student was treated like a product on an assembly line: same curriculum, same pace, same progression.
1902: Rockefeller and his “nation of workers”
Then, John D. Rockefeller founded the General Education Board in hopes to improve public education. However, Rockefeller’s advisor — Frederick T. Gates — painted a very different picture of their intentions.
In his vision for education, Gates wrote:
“In our dreams…people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands. The present educational conventions fade from our minds, and unhampered by tradition we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive folk.”
And if that isn’t enough to make your eyes twitch, try this one:
“We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning or men of science. We have not to raise up from among them authors, educators, poets or men of letters. We shall not search for embryo great artists, painters, musicians, nor lawyers, doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have ample supply.”
Standardization was once a noble vision — “accessible education for all” — but the actual implementation of it was never about unleashing the potential of future generations.
1900s – Present: Conformity over brilliance
And here we stand, rooted in these Industrial Age ideals. Efficiency. Utility. Talking out of turn gets you detention, but silence is rewarded with a sticker. Everyone learns the same thing at the same pace at the same time. Conformity. Compliance.
While these are important facets of education — following instruction, respecting authority, knowing when to toss ideas into the ring and when to keep them close — there is a deeper well to education that traditional school simply does not tap into. And it’s universal. Whether you’re in sub-Saharan Africa or rural Ohio or glitzy Beverly Hills, all kids are educated the same way.
The issue is not that we’ve educated kids the same way for 100 years. The issue is that learning scientists have known for over 40 years that the traditional, teacher-in-front-of-the-classroom model is the worst way to educate kids.
At least kids are learning…right?
You’d think the United States ranks in the top two, top five, top ten countries in the world for academics. (After all, don’t we throw billions of dollars into the classroom?) But that’s not the case.
Despite outspending every other country, the U.S. ranks 28th in mathematics. Over 33% of students cannot read at the level expected for their age. (That’s tens of millions of kids failing to demonstrate basic skills.)
Statistically, American education has hit a record low.
The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) is essentially the nation’s report card. It tests the performance of fourth and eighth graders throughout the country. And in 2024, the scores were the lowest they’ve been in thirty years — since the NAEP was founded in 1992.
Here’s another grim statistic: A 2022 meta-analysis published in Educational Psychology revealed that students retain only 50% of material taught in traditional classrooms after just 24 hours.
However, once you understand the history of the traditional classroom, it makes sense. Of course factory-style schooling isn’t helping our kids succeed. It was never designed to.
To be clear, I am not anti-public school, anti-teacher, or anti-tradition. I have simply seen different models — like personalized learning and mastery learning — succeed too well to settle for less. Maybe it’s time you do the same. Maybe it’s time to stop accepting school for what it is and start imagining how good it can get. Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to start asking, “How high is high?”
Scaling the Socratic ideal with AI
One-to-one tutoring has always been the gold standard, but it’s been 1) expensive, and 2) impossible to scale. Enter modern technology.
Artificial intelligence has finally made personalized education scalable. AI tutors can:
Provide personalized curriculum tailored to each student’s needs.
Deliver immediate data and insights to parents and teachers.
Operate 24/7, accommodating any schedule.
Give real-time, one-on-one feedback for each student.
The results are already staggering. A 2023 study in Nature Human Behaviour showed that students using AI-based tutors learned 40% faster and scored 25% higher on standardized tests than those in traditional classrooms. What’s more, the cost of implementing AI tutors is a fraction of hiring human tutors, making this approach accessible to families at all income levels.
AI tutors are accomplishing what Horace Mann set out to do decades ago: bridging the opportunity gap, accessible education for all.
It’s strange, isn’t it? We live in an age of breathtaking individualization. Our oat milk is customizable, our playlists algorithmically tailored, even our socks can be stitched with our dogs’ faces. Yet education remains one-size-fits-all. Needless to say, it’s time to bring that same spirit of individualization back into education.
With AI, we can return to the personalized model that once produced some of the greatest minds in history, at a scale Aristotle could only dream of.
The potential of the next generation — the greatest untapped resource on the planet — is sleeping beneath the soil. Let’s water it.
