Why Do We Send Kids to School?

Dear friends,

As conversations about the future of education heat up, I find myself simultaneously dazzled by the possibilities and disturbed by what we're missing.

Last week, Reid Hoffman interviewed MacKenzie Price, co-founder of Alpha Schools — the latest ed-tech darling hailed as "a revolutionary model, disrupting education through AI." The premise? Students "crush academics" in just 2 hours each morning via AI-powered platforms, then spend afternoons on passion projects.

As an entrepreneur, I'm inspired by people taking bold leaps with disruptive models. But something nagged at me.

Later, I watched Alpha's promotional video with my 10-year-old.

"Why does everything have to be 'efficient'?" Rio asked. "It seems like the whole school is focused on winning, not including everyone or helping each other."

Even he sensed the vibe.

The world needs a new operating system, and so do our schools. But while we’re racing to deploy A.I. in classrooms, we risk hitting the target but missing the point. The question we should all be asking is this: With all the world’s knowledge suddenly at our fingertips, what’s the purpose of school?!

I'm not a luddite. In fact, I’m wildly optimistic about what AI can do to get everyone on earth up to fluency in literacy and numeracy. If we're smart (and more importantly, wise), AI can be the most democratizing force in academic learning we've ever seen.

But the Alpha model seduces us with a dangerous assumption: that education's primary problem is inefficiency. The real issue isn’t the pace — it’s the direction. We’re racing faster and faster without pausing to ask: where will this lead?

In interviews with Alpha students, they describe watching their "smart score" climb and earning "Alpha currency" for prizes and cash. Speed learners join the “Rocket Ship club” and get "special privileges like catered lunches and Disneyland trips”. It's an eerie mirror to the wider world — a small subset prepping for takeoff with little regard for those who didn't reach escape velocity.

The "Alpha" name isn't incidental — it's the tell. The model doubles down on the same zero-sum assumptions that created our current predicaments: faster is better, success is scarce and winners take all.

We don't need more alphas. We need more humans who understand that we’re all on the same team: team human.

The question isn't WHERE to send our kids to school, it's WHY do we send them at all? *

I've been getting this question a lot recently. My answer? In an age of artificial intelligence, I don't send my kids to school for content or curriculum—I send them to develop the human intelligences that can't be automated: relational intelligence that connects across difference, intuitive intelligence that trusts the gut, improvisational intelligence that builds while flying.

In short, it’s not about WHAT they learn, but HOW they learn to think and WHO they learn to become. It’s also not about the traditional 3 R's—reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic (awkward as they are!)—but what I’m calling the 3 A's:

ATTENTION: Practice directing our most precious and endangered resource—resisting the algorithms designed to fracture it.

AWARENESS: Understanding our place in the web of human experience—sensing our interconnectedness and responsibility to the collective.

AGENCY: Knowing our power to choose our response and our role in healing what's broken.

Instead of training kids to compete, what if we taught them to co-create?

Instead of demanding compliance, what if we developed their conscience?

Instead of teaching them to follow the leader, what if we taught them to fly?

By the time most kids finish high school, they've spent 12+ years being conditioned to conform and perform rather than question and co-create. At The Flight School, we’re giving the rising generation space to navigate by aliveness—to discover what breaks their hearts and lights them up; to practice trusting their inner knowing; to craft lives rooted in service, not superiority.

Our north star?

Nurturing humans who are animated by possibility, skilled with uncertainty, and equipped to lead the transition from fear to flourishing.

The consciousness that got us into the messes we’re in won’t get us out of them. What will? Prioritizing our shared success like our survival depends on it — because it does.

A thriving future won't be built by those boarding rocket ships, but by those building bridges, navigating nuance, and envisioning futures that work for everyone.

So, what if instead of sending our kids to school to become better robots, we sent them to become better humans?

This is the education revolution we actually need — not faster, but deeper. Not more efficient, but more empathetic. Not alpha, but awakened.

With deepening conviction,
Abby

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This piece is part of a new series, Are we asking the wrong questions? About how changing the questions, changes everything.

• Anticipating gathering with extraordinary wisdom keepers at the AwaKin retreat around this beauty: What if we approached the challenges of our ‘tipping point times’ not from fear, but from the intelligence of the heart?

• Wondering whether philanthropy is an apology for capitalism after listening to Liberating Wealth in Prophetic Times with

  Bayo Akomolafe and others brave enough to ask: What does it mean to liberate wealth from extractive systems?

• Watching Eureka Day — a Tony Award-winning satire by Jonathan Spector about a progressive Berkeley school that hits uncannily close to home. A hilarious and brutally honest reckoning with good intensions gone awry.

• Marveling at violin virtuoso, Joshua Bell’s case for classical music in his TED Talk: 300 years of classical music in 18 minutes. A poginant remember that feeling is a form of intelligence, too.

*Gratitude to my friend Courtney Martin Martin who first flipped this script for me in her gorgeous series on ethical parenting and the purpose of school.