Traditional school won't be a thing in 20 years

Formal schooling is something people have accepted as realities of life in the modern era. It had its place in the improvement of the general education level of the masses, but we have come to the point where its flaws have become more apparent.

Learning must be practical. Education should solve real problems. This is why getting started with no knowledge and learning on the fly works so well. Education without real application is not only superficial, but also gets forgotten.

We are extremely fortunate that Information is abundant. There is no excuse called “I didn’t know” anymore because that knowledge was one Google search away. Quick knowledge comes from Google. Deep knowledge comes from books and mentors.

A school that I resonate with, and that has recently become popular, is Alpha School. It solves the traditional education issue by using LLMs to compress a full traditional day’s academics into two hours.

I like this method because it frees students to spend afternoons in development of life skills and passions. This format addresses the inefficiency of the traditional “teacher-in-front-of-classroom” model that has dominated education for 200 years. In fact, research has shown that children can learn 2-10 times faster than current methods allow, but this isn’t achievable in conventional classrooms.

The key insight is that LLMs allow schools to scale the 1:1 tutoring method, where each student learns on their own pace, which is often far faster than schools allow currently.

It removes the competition aspect from where it doesn’t need to exist. Competition is great—in sports, in business—but not in self-improvement or learning. It prevents you from asking the dumb questions, and not asking the dumb questions is how the fundamentals get lost.

1:1 tutoring mimics the greats. Socrates tutored Plato, who tutored Aristotle, who tutored Alexander the Great. I would argue it improves this process, because LLMs contain and condense all the knowledge that has ever existed—and make it as accessible as is needed.

When everyone starts to pretend that they know everything, you get misunderstandings, broken designs, and bureaucracy.

In my personal experience, the knowledge I remember now comes from things I taught myself. I stopped taking notes in a classroom after middle school, because I realized I was going to teach it to myself again anyway.

I saw people furiously taking down notes to match their instructor’s taking speed, and forget to take the time to actually listen and fill in the gaps in their brain. The gaps are what matter. What is being omitted? Accidentally or on purpose?

Self-education frees up your time. Forty hours of school a week doesn’t leave any space to develop real life-long pursuits. Every year, it takes away children’s childhoods, the time when they develop and find a skill to double down on.

By the time you graduate, you’ve done a lot of chemistry, math, and English, and then you realize, “Wait, I haven’t really figured out what I’m really interested in.” Then your parents force you to go to college and pick a major out of a whim. Basically, a semi-educated guess as to what you’re going to do for the rest of your life.

Then in college, you get a bit of freedom and you realize—I’m not actually interested in this. And through some sort of extracurricular or through meeting someone you figure out, by some stroke of luck, what you’d rather do. Then it’s too late, and it costs you tuition money.

It worked in the 1900s because most people didn’t have that many options, and you had to suck it up in order to make ends meet. Fortunately, now we live in a world of abundance, and not having the freedom of exploration is going to put you behind other people that do.