Every time my daughter picks up a new toy to play with, I have an urge to show her the “right way” to do it.

She was sitting on the carpet playing with her new radio, twisting and turning the knobs, putting it in her mouth, turning it around upside down, trying to figure out how to get it to play music. I was about to reach out and tell her, “Here let me show you how to get it to play music.” But then I paused.

Was she really trying to figure out how to get it to play music or was that me projecting the “right outcome” onto her? For her, the joy was not in pressing the right knob to play music. The joy was in the process of figuring out the new toy in her hand, figuring out what the knobs are, and figuring out how the music flow changes when the volume is turned up or down.

In my rush to show her the right way to do something, I was depriving her of this joy. It was a good reminder to me that beauty lies not in the result, but in the process.

And who knows, maybe through her discovery process, she might figure out other ways of using the radio that I wouldn’t have known about. This might be why beginners or outsiders sometimes have an advantage in new industries. They see things from a fresh lens. They don’t know the “right way” to do things. They enjoy learning about the process.

Sometimes this discovery process yields valuable results. Sometimes it doesn’t. But it almost always fills one with joy.

I’m Aastha, and thanks for reading my world of words. I write about education, human creativity, and any other words I bob my head to. I also write a longevity and health newsletter called Live Longer World.

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Humans have figured out how to build Chatgpt, self-driving cars, the iPhone, land on the moon, and a lot more. Yet, somehow our smartness has not been translated to better family lives. 40-50% of marriages in the U.S. end in divorce.

If we’re so smart, why can’t we build happy families? This question has been inspired by Adam Mastroianni’s brilliant blog “Why aren’t smart people happier?”

Since the birth of our daughter, I’ve been spending some time thinking about how to build a happy family. There are no easy playbook answers for me to emulate. Adam’s blog articulates why that’s the case. Problems can be classified into two types: well-defined and poorly-defined. The problem-solving abilities we associate with smartness are typically in the well-defined category.

She’s a doctor. “Smart.” He built a car. “Smart.” He’s ranked #1 in chess. “Smart.”

Contrast this with describing someone who built a large happy family. “She raised 4 happy, well-meaning kids and her husband and her have been married for 50 years and counting. The siblings are close to each other, and now the couple have 4 grandkids with whom they spend a lot of time.”

How do we describe such an act of building a happy, joyful family?

“How loving?” “How cute?” “That’s wonderful?” “Smart” is certainly not how we’d describe it.

But perhaps it deserves to be called smart? It certainly doesn’t seem like an easy feat. When 40-50% of marriages end in divorce1 and ~30% of U.S. adults not wanting kids (double from 20 years ago - 14% in 20032), the failure rate at solving this problem seems high to me. Someone who has figured out a solution ought to be honored as smart at the very least.

Building a happy family falls in the category of poorly-defined problems. It’s so personal to each family that blueprints don’t work. Yes, there might be some generalizable principles, but beyond that there is no tried and tested playbook. Does that mean you can’t learn from anyone and you have to figure it out as you go along? No. These problems are age-old problems, and the best place to look is age-old solutions.

Grandmas who’ve raised happy families likely have the best solutions to offer us. We dismiss grandma wisdom as cutesy stuff that we choose to selectively listen to, and then we wonder why our family lives are a mess. Of course, given that a family is a unit of many people, no one person can determine the outcome. For example, if the husband doesn’t choose to cooperate, the wife will fail at her attempt to build a happy family just by herself. However, like in all groups, the conductor matters. The conductor plays a massive role in enabling the orchestra to perform well.

How does the family conductor build a happy family? I don’t know the answer, but the best direction I have for now is to look towards grandmas and age-old wisdom.

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I was having a conversation with a friend who mentioned “I was reading an article discussing how we should lets kids struggle a bit when they’re playing so they can be ready for the real world.”

Adults want an education system that will prepare kids for the “real world”. Have we stopped to wonder what that means? Is the world that kids inhabit fake then?1

We’ve created this artificial distinction that once you step outside college, then you encounter the real world. This is not only not true, it’s also a bad mindset to raise kids with.

The world kids inhabit is real too

First let’s discuss how the world kids inhabit is equally real. The way kids spend their time is just different from the way adults spend their time. This doesn’t mean their world is not real. This doesn’t mean they’re living in a sheltered bubble. Watch a kid play and struggle to reach a toy, and you will know how real their struggles are. To us adults, it seems so easy, but try to think of it from their perspective. Babies, for example, have to learn to communicate their feelings without knowing how to talk. I’m hungry, how do I tell mom? I’m sleepy, please help me sleep. Or I keep trying to crawl, but fall back down. These are real struggles. Kids are spending a lot of time learning to be slightly more independent day by day. Just because they don’t have jobs that don’t earn money, doesn’t make their lives any less real. In fact, jobs are a very modern phenomenon. In the hunter gatherer days, there were no jobs. You just lived your life and figured out how to feed your family. Hunter gatherers didn’t classify their worlds as real vs. not. I understand that we don’t live ancestral lives, but that doesn’t change the fact that classifying only the adult world as the real world is false.

We are raising low agency kids because of this artificial distinction

Next, let’s discuss why creating this artificial distinction is bad for kids. When you tell kids that everything they’re learning in their childhood years is to prepare them for the real world, you inculcate them with the mindset that whatever they’re doing in their childhood years is not important, since it doesn’t belong to the “real world”. This can have a few different consequences:

1. Kids think they can keep being dependent on their parents till they’re an adult, when in reality they can have very sharp capabilities prior to that. They don’t learn the importance of having high agency - the mindset that you can take charge of your life and get what you want. Look at hunger gatherer kids - they start hunting at the young age of 12 and contributing to the tribe from a much younger age. Perhaps it’s because they haven’t been told that what you’re doing in your childhood days is worthless. And then when a kid steps into the “real world”, they get a shock because all of a sudden they have to change their mindset which is not easy.

2. Kids are made to think that all their play time is worthless. The real world comes with real jobs which can’t be fun cause after all that’s the real world right? In this manner, kids forget their true interests and don’t strive to pursue careers that are in tune with what they truly enjoy. With the education system the way it is, it’s not surprising that ~70% of people2 in the U.S. don’t feel engaged in their jobs.

3. This also breeds them with the mindset that work can’t be fun. If I’m having fun doing something, oh it must not be part of the real world. Childhood was fun, but that wasn’t the real world right? Now I’m a grownup with real responsibilities which means the fun is gone. Yes, being an adult does mean that you have to fend for yourself. But it doesn’t mean that work can’t be play. This artificial distinction of the real world means it barely crosses our minds that work can be play, even though we spend so much of our lives doing it.

We ought to stop considering kids’ worlds as not real. They very much live in the real world. Just because kids spend their time differently from how adults spend their time, does not mean their worlds are not real. Kids too are humans meant to be taken seriously.

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~5 months ago, I gave birth to an angel. As you can tell from my writing, I love the topic of education, and naturally had many thoughts on how to raise her even before she was born. Homeschooling, tutoring, helping her question ideas, interest-based learning, raising her as a genius - all these ideas floated in my head.

Yet, as I watch her grow and take on a personality of her own, it strikes me that all my ideas are flawed if I can’t practice the most important philosophy that education should rest on: The philosophy of allowing each child (and indeed person) to become who they are.

The most important philosophy in education should be to respect human freedom and flourishing, including that of children. If we can truly honor this, I think we can solve the majority of the problems in education. And I don’t mean it hyperbolically.

Children aren’t pieces of clay

Each person is unique with their own set of ideas. They are their own individual. As much as it’s hard for us to see, this applies to children too. Children aren’t pieces of clay who need to be molded by parents and / or the education system.

It sounds trivial and obvious when put this way, yet it’s notoriously hard to practice, since parents, teachers, and adults are constantly thrusting their own ideas and dreams onto children.

The reason parenting can become a controversial topic is because each parent thinks they have authority over their child and gets to decide how to manage their child’s time and energy. Every parent seems to have some opinion on raising their kids, which could be as well-natured as “I want them to be good humans” to tiger mom parenting, “I want them to go to an Ivy league.”

No individual has “authority” over any other individual. This is the basic premise that parenting and the education system does not understand. The ideas of freedom and liberty are somehow thrown out the door when raising children. Parents fail to respect the human they gave birth to.

Respecting your child still requires parental duties

Respecting your child’s individuality does not mean that parents shun all their duties towards children. They still need to provide for the safety and well-being of their child. When one signs up to be a parent, they sign up for certain duties that come with it - mainly the duty of caring for your child at least till they are able to fend for themselves. However, this duty does not give them the power to control1 their kids or to project their ideas onto their kids.

Marriage is a good analogy. When one marries someone, it comes with certain duties - honesty, loyalty, agreement on finances, child rearing, and so on. You can’t simply do only what you want, you need to honor the bond. However, it doesn’t mean that either spouse controls the other. It’s a bond where you respect each person and you respect the bond.

In raising children, we fail to respect the child. We demand that the child respect us simply because we are older than them. But what about us respecting the child?2

But shouldn’t parents share their knowledge?

Some might question and ask: “As a parent or teacher, I have acquired more knowledge over the years, so shouldn’t I be sharing that with my kids?”

You absolutely should. Discussing your ideas with your kids is not the same as forcing your ideas onto them, the latter of which is what adults try to do when they set rules for kids. The distinction is simple to understand when you replace the parent-child relationship with any adult-adult relationship. As adults, we discuss our ideas with others, but we don’t tend to force them on others, no matter how close the relationship. In any case, trying to force your ideas onto someone doesn’t work - adoption only happens when the person listening to the ideas is receptive to them. In fact, trying to force your ideas onto someone merely ruins the relationship.

Another question that might come up: “Doesn’t this parenting style of letting your child be sound a little negligent?” Quite the contrary. The philosophy of respecting my child is not the same as hands-off parenting. It requires a ton of creativity and problem-solving on my part to help her explore her own set of ideas. It’s far easier for me to manage her time in a manner that would be convenient for me - put her in the school system, add on extracurriculars that I think would be useful, discipline her in ways that are suited to my schedule. But all of these actions would be for the convenience of me as the parent, not because my child wants to go to school or do the activities I throw onto her plate. Instead, giving her the freedom to craft her time the way she wants requires creativity and work for both the parent and the child. But how can I not help her explore this gift of personhood?

To Be One with the Universe

This is not a note criticizing any parent or “parenting philosophy.” I think most parents are super-heroes - caring for a child is not easy. Yet, caring for a child is not the same as projecting our own fantasies and desires onto our child.

I understand where this projection comes from. As a new mom, I too was filled with hopes and fantasies for my little one. Nothing better than the reality of watching her blossom into her own self to squash these desires. I’d hate to quench her own personhood by projecting my ideas onto her.

So, this post is mostly a note to myself - that as I watch my daughter grow, let me not project my desires onto her. I just want her to be who she is. To blossom into her own self. And to give her the freedom and space to be one with the universe. For what’s a greater joy than living a life true to who you are?

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Read Part 1 on the Genius of Peter Thiel in attacking the Ivy Leagues and high school dropouts bursting the college gospel.

The Purpose of College (is not learning?)

I know a girl who graduated from Wharton, University of Pennsylvania with a degree in Finance. She was a diligent student with a strong penchant for learning, which landed her a job at a multi-billion-dollar investment firm right after graduation.

On the first day at her job, she asked her manager whether they used CAPM, a calculated risk-adjusted interest rate to discount the cash flows. The concept had been used in all her Finance classes.

“CAPM?! To hell with that, we use none of those academic concepts here!” replied her manager.

And this was the poor academic soul’s first step towards unlearning her Wharton education. Alas, the markets in the real world don’t work like the markets in theory. As they say, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.”

This student is me. Starry-eyed and fresh-off-the-boat from India, the Ivy League education was my foray into the American dream.

For four years, I scrambled to soak in as much as I could from classes at supposedly the best Business school. I even audited classes just to learn, only to realize too late that learning in college often translates to academic theories with little practical consequence. What’s worse is that the academic knowledge was not only useless, but I also had to spend time unlearning it! So much for the best Business school.

However, most students are more aware than I was back then. They recognize that while college might want us to believe it’s a mecca of learning (a trap I fell into!), and one that molds the youth into “critical thinkers”, it’s an exaggeration to say the least. In the age of books and online learning, students recognize that there isn’t much learning happening in college classrooms, especially for non-science disciplines. And teaching critical thinking is paradoxical if the academic mental models themselves are flawed!

Why then do students continue to go to college? There are social and other reasons, but the biggest reason is to get the stamp of “college graduate,” a stamp that gets them credentialed for a job and confers them with some prestige.

Pay and Prestige conferred by the University Degree

There are predominantly two big reasons why students choose to go to college: Pay and Prestige. On average, a University degree gets students a higher-paying job than they would otherwise get. Prestige is the status bestowed on University graduates. However, the degree to which status matters depends on the University one attends. Going to an Ivy League confers a large amount of status and plays a big factor in why students go to these Universities. But the further you get in rankings from the Ivy Leagues, the status drops and plays a smaller factor into the decision making of students. As a result, for someone going to a top University, prestige plays a significantly larger role in the decision making. However, for someone going to a lower-ROI1University, getting higher pay plays a larger role in the decision to go to college.

“Higher education” before University

Before Universities were established, the transition from childhood to the workplace was laden with apprenticeships, and there was no concept of '“higher education.” A 14 or even 12 year old boy would apprentice at a trading shop or factory for example, before being employed full-time. Rockefeller, Amschel Rothschild, Da Vinci, all followed this path.

Apprenticeships are synonymous with working on the job, with your manager acting as a mentor and actively training you for a certain period of time. They are the prototypical example of “learning on the job.”

When colleges started being established, college became a gate between school and work. Instead of directly learning on the job through an apprenticeship, you first went to get educated before you worked. Soon, college became the norm for most smart students, leading to a boost in the pay and prestige conferred by the University degree.

However, for the first time in a decade, college enrolment declined in 2021. With Covid, students started awakening to the fact that they weren’t learning much while at the same time incurring massive student debt.

The Student Debt Crisis and the beginnings of an awakening

Bryan Caplan, author of the book The Case Against Education suggests how 80% of the value of a college degree is signaling to employers that you can conform, you’re conscientious to finish the degree, and you’re smart. He suggests that only 20% of the value is learning useful skills. However, because of the signaling function of the college degree, someone who goes to University earns more on average in white-collar jobs than one with just a high school diploma. A higher pay is desirable but at what cost? Inflated college tuition is negating many of the benefits of higher pay and eating away at the returns to the college degree.

The biggest criticism hurled at University is their skyrocketing tuition, and rightly so. As of 2022, student debt is $1.76 trillion. And as of 2021, 34% of 18-24 year-olds who aren’t currently enrolled in college say they can’t afford it; 29% say it’s a waste of money.2

In 1980, the price to attend a four-year college full-time was $10,231 annually—including tuition, fees, room and board, and adjusted for inflation. By 2019-20, the total price increased to $28,775. That’s a 180% increase.3

It would have been another matter if the higher tuition translated to higher pay as well. However, the average graduate salary for bachelors degree hasn’t budged since 1990. It was $62,000 then and is $62,000 as of 2023, adjusted for inflation.4

Part of the reason for poor returns to the college degree is a phenomenon known as degree inflation. This means that an increasing number of jobs require a college degree, even for jobs that don’t necessarily require college level skills. As a result, students are paying high tuition to obtain a college degree but are often finding themselves in jobs where they are overqualified and undercompensated. It is little wonder that students are saddled with loans, which on average take a little over 20 years to be repaid, and in many cases longer. In 1970, college graduates had on average of $1,070 in loans compared to $31,000 today.5

Paying high prices, taking on debt, not learning much, and not having salaries commensurate with the loans taken, results in a low return on investment (ROI) for many students. They have awoken to this. Enrollment rates have dropped, confidence in universities has plummeted, graduation rates are on the decline, and universities are shutting down. Since 2004, 861 colleges have shut down, with the number of closures increasing since 2014.6

In 2021, college enrollment at 38.1% was the lowest it had been since 2006. While the enrolment increased to 39% in 2022, the percent is still low compared to previous decades.7 Further, according to a Gallup survey, Americans’ confidence in higher education has fallen to 36%, sharply lower than in two prior readings in 2015 (57%) and 2018 (48%).

Students are voting with their feet and recognizing that it’s not worth their money and time to enroll in many of the low ROI universities. Many of these students are now seeking alternatives to colleges that would enable them to earn higher pay without a debt burden.

Let’s take a look at some of these alternatives.8

The Attack by Bootcamps: Can we solve for high-paying jobs without student debt?

We’ve established that for the majority of students not attending prestigious Universities, the main purpose of college is to get a high-paying job, along with additional career certainty. We also know that students don’t want to incur massive student debt in the process of obtaining a degree.

Entrepreneurs recognized this dilemma and pondered: Could we create an alternative credential that teaches students job skills and gives them access to well-paying jobs without going through 4 years of college and incurring massive student debt? As college was becoming unaffordable, jobs for software engineering were becoming high in demand. This was an opportune time for the emergence of coding bootcamps, institutions which provide students with coding skills in a few months to a year and place them at high-paying software engineering jobs. No college degree required.

The promise of coding bootcamps is to compress job-ready skills in 4-12 months instead of 4 years, with a focus on teaching you the skills needed for the job. Over the years, bootcamps have evolved to cover areas outside coding like business, nursing, product management, healthcare workers etc.

Although bootcamps have gained popularity, their student body is still a tiny fraction compared to college graduates. In 2022, 58,756 students graduated from a tech bootcamp in the U.S. compared to ~2 million students with a 4-year bachelor’s degree from college. However, bootcamps have seen a surge in growth post COVID, when the bootcamp market grew ~32% from 2020 to 2021, and 25% the following year.9

Despite the boost, bootcamps face their own share of criticism. Many students still struggle with finding a job after doing a bootcamp. Bootcamps have also been slandered for predatory pricing through income share agreements (taking a portion of someone’s income as tuition).

While bootcamps aren’t without their share of criticism, they have done a fair bit in changing the narrative around college from something that was so deeply ingrained in the minds of people to creating alternatives for whom college isn’t viable.

Apprenticeships rise again and College as middle-man no more

With the establishment of Universities in favor of apprenticeships, companies expected they could outsource training and filtering of job candidates to colleges. However, increasingly employers are waking up to the reality that colleges are not training students well for the job. Employers have to spend resources on training and apprenticing graduates anyway. As a result, companies like Zurich NA insurance and Accenture are expanding their apprenticeship programs, and others are dropping the degree requirement, especially in tight labor markets. Famous examples include Google and Delta Airlines. However, the critique here is that these companies have only dropped the requirement for some of the ‘back-office’ functions, not any of the ‘more significant’ or technical roles.

Worried about student debt, many students too are choosing apprenticeships in favor of college. Typically, apprenticeships have been associated with the construction trades. Now, they’ve expanded beyond that with 40% of apprenticeships outside construction trades and in white-collar industries such as banking, cybersecurity, and even consulting.10

There has also been a surge in total apprenticeships over the last 10 years, seeing a growth of 106%, with more than 600k apprenticeships offered in 2023. A consequence of companies offering apprenticeship programs directly from high school is that they have to design their own talent screening process as opposed to relying on college screening filters such as GPA. It will be interesting to see the new tests and screens companies use to rely on filtering.

If we look outside the U.S., apprenticeships in many European nations are much larger, partially because some of these governments offer a tax credit to employers offering apprenticeships. In 2022, there were 600,000 Americans in registered apprenticeship programs—a miniscule 0.3% of the US working-age population.11 

During the same year, the share of working-age adults in apprenticeship programs was over five times higher in Canada, seven times higher in Germany, and a staggering 12 times higher in Switzerland. For example, Germany has an apprenticeship system called “Ausbildung” where students spend 70% of their time at work, and only 30% in college.

Perhaps, the U.S. will adopt some of the apprenticeship models from Europe.

Trade Schools / Vocational programs

Trade schools take a streamlined approach to education and arm students with specific skills which are typically hands-on in nature.

From spring 2021 to spring 2022, many trade school disciplines saw significant increases in enrollment in two-year skilled trade programs, including a 11.5% increase in mechanic and repair, a 127% increase in personal and culinary courses and a 19.3% increase in construction trades. Last year alone, enrolment in vocational-focused community colleges rose 16%. Meanwhile, enrollment at public two-year colleges dropped 7.8% and dropped 3.4% at public four-year colleges for the same time period.

Further, some trade professions, like 90% of the construction companies, are facing worker shortages which is driving up wages and in turn attracting more people to the trades. According to a recent Fortune article, Gen Z is increasingly choosing trade schools over college to become welders and carpenters because “it’s a straight path to a six-figure job.”12

As more data comes out, it’ll be interesting to see the evolution of trade schools and whether they can sustain their growth.

Humans want prestige: Bootcamps & Apprenticeships vs. Thiel Fellowship

While bootcamps, apprenticeships, and trade schools are viable college alternatives for many students, they don’t have the power to break the college gospel that permeates society. On the contrary, even though the Thiel fellowship is small in size, it has the characteristics of a powerful attack at the University system, capable of eroding the college gospel.13

The primary reason for this is because bootcamps, apprenticeships, and trade schools lack prestige. They can compete with Universities on pay, but not on prestige. No one who is accepted at Harvard is picking a bootcamp over such a college! As a result, the students who attend these alternatives are the ones who would have otherwise attended a lower-ranked University.

Contrast this with the Thiel fellowship which is high in prestige. It not only competes with the Ivy Leagues on prestige, it surpasses them by getting students at Ivy’s and other prestigious Universities to drop out in favor of the Thiel fellowship! As noted in Part 1, ~70% of the Thiel’s fellowship’s first 2 batches were students from Ivy’s or other prestigious Universities.

If the mission of college alternatives is to break the idea of the college gospel, they would have to compete with the top Universities. This is because the gospel of college hails from the Ivy Leagues, which were some of the earliest established Universities in America. And competing with the Ivy Leagues implies competing on prestige. This is why, even though the Thiel fellowship is a smaller attack compared to bootcamps, it is a more powerful attack as it pertains to breaking the college gospel.

However, even though bootcamps and apprenticeships cannot compete on prestige or play a big role in breaking the college gospel, they still provide an alternative to students who only care about earning a higher pay. But if their mission is to see the collapse of Universities altogether, by themselves they alas won’t succeed. Humans care for prestige.

Conclusion

As Universities come under scrutiny, some will try to adapt, and new Universities will spring up to compete with the incumbents. Further, the decline in the value of Universities might have some interesting 2^nd order effects on society. I explore the emergence of new Universities, 2^nd order effects of the decline in University, and open question on the future of Universities in Part 3. Stay tuned!

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Please share this essay with anyone who might be interested in alternatives to college. You can follow me on X @aasthajs for more on the topic of alternative education.

We discuss:

• Schools as daycare

• If college was more useful in the past

• College is mostly signaling

• Killing DEI and gender studies in colleges

• How Hamas hit the prestige of American universities

• How Bryan homeschooled his kids, and more!

Bryan is candid, smart, and funny. Timestamps below. Hope you enjoy the episode!

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Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify.

Find me on X: @aasthajs for future posts and writing.

Read my essay: The Genius of Peter Thiel on attacking the Ivy Leagues and the high school dropouts shattering the college gospel

Follow Bryan Caplan on X. Bryan’s blog Bet on It.

Timestamps:

0:00 Public vs. Private Schools

1:40 Teaching “Learning how to learn” is wishful thinking

8:08 McKinsey does not teach critical thinking

9:36 Schools are daycare

11:30 Was college more useful in the past?

15:00 College is filtering for employers

16:08 Why don’t colleges improve learning?

18:53 Bryan’s argument with Tyler Cowen if he was University President..

26:03 Would Bryan start a new University?

32:11 Hamas hit the prestige of top American Universities

36:13 Would companies adopt Tyler’s talent hiring approaches?

42:03 Crazy idea that could collapse Universities

45:29 Education funding is inefficient

51:20 How Bryan homeschooled his kids

57:59 Does parental influence matter?

59:42 Government is strangling the housing industry

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It’s 1am. Sigil Wen is laying on his bed screaming. Screaming with joy. He just received his O-1 visa, a visa for immigrants with exceptional abilities to work in the U.S. Sigil is exceptional indeed. In high school, he started a company which he bootstrapped to $250k in revenue. Even though he was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, he deferred his college decision to pivot into building another company which was funded by top Silicon Valley investors. However, a few years in, the company’s prospects were not looking great, and Sigil decided to shut it down. He took some time off to contemplate his next move.

Contrary to what most people might predict, Sigil’s next move was not enrolling at Penn. Instead, Sigil boldly decided to skip college and joined the engineering team at Airchat, a Silicon Valley startup founded by Naval Ravikant, the founder of Angelist and one of the most well-regarded angel investors in Silicon Valley.

In deciding to skip college, Sigil might be a rebel in your eyes. However, only ~60 years ago, not going to college was the norm. In the 1970s, only 11% of the U.S. population1 completed a 4-year college, whereas in 2022 the number was 37%2. Prior to the 1990s, college was less ingrained in people’s minds as the standard path to take. The path to success was showing capability at the workplace, instead of showing capability by taking tests.

In 1850, Andrew Carnegie was a poor 14 year when he immigrated from Scotland to Pittsburgh and started working in the factories. Through hard work and some sales acumen, he managed to climb his way from the factory floor to being a telegram operator, to ultimately controlling the largest steel company in the world. John D. Rockefeller too started working at age 16 as an assistant bookkeeper. He needed no college degree to eventually become a business magnate and the richest American in history.

Similar to Carnegie and Rockefeller, Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Henry Ford, Coco Chanel, Ray Croc (founder of McDonald’s) didn’t go to college. More recently, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Joe Rogan, Ralph Lauren, Anna Wintour, and Ellen DeGeneres either dropped out of college or didn’t attend at all.

All these people were extremely successful. And no one made a big fuss about them not attending college the way Mark Zuckerberg made headlines for dropping out of Harvard in the 21st century. Why the fuss? Because the late 20^th and early 21st century has seen the college degree turned into an ideology. Unlike in previous generations, today most people assume that in order to be successful, one must go to college. College is the new religion for any student who wants to embark on a successful career3.

However, will college continue to be the religion for our youth 50 years from now? Will it hold such a strong grip on society? Will our kids and grandkids continue to unquestioningly go to college? I’m not so sure I’d say yes. The tides are already turning. You may not see it yet but the bubble is beginning to burst. Students are taking matters in their own hands. You’ve already met Sigil, and now it’s time to meet some of his friends.

• Samir Vasavada dropped out of high school, and started his company Vise, a platform that automates investment management for financial advisors, which is valued at over $1bn.

• Robert Westbury dropped out of high school to start his own company before taking a job as a software engineer at Primer, a startup building microschools to revolutionize the education landscape in the U.S.

• Andrew Kirby decided to start his online business which made him financially free at 22.

• Arjun Khemani dropped out of high school to work at Airchat and to spend more time writing his newsletter.

• Alex Gyrov decided to apprentice at a tech startup in London at 17 years old instead of going to University.

• Zelda dropped out of high school and worked in Edtech startups, before writing a book on how to help teenagers hack their education.

Sigil and his friends are young revolutionaries who’ve launched a fire against the University system. In this essay, I highlight why their fire is not merely an inconsequential flame but has the potential to be the most powerful attack at the University system.

You may not recognize it but this fire was started by none other than Peter Thiel.

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel strikes top Universities

Peter Thiel casually launched the Thiel Fellowship at a conference in 2010. His claim was that Universities were molding students into conformists and the degree was largely becoming a credentialing mechanism. He would award $100k to a select few students each year to drop out of college and pursue an ambitious entrepreneurial endeavor.

Naturally, such a bold endeavor drew plenty of criticism. 10+ years later, all the critics have been shunned. The Thiel Fellowship has been wildly successful creating companies that are together valued at ~$50bn, excluding Ethereum which is valued at a whopping $450bn.

However, the Thiel Fellowship remains underrated. I want to underscore two important characteristics of the Thiel Fellowship that have played a significant role in attacking college unlike any other college attack in history.

One, Thiel was the first person to directly attack the Ivy League and the 1-2% most prestigious Universities. This is not only bold because it’s the first attack at the Ivy’s, but it’s also bold because it’s the critical attack needed to burst the college gospel.

Two, Thiel didn’t start a fellowship, he started a movement! He inspired other brilliant students to shun college in favor of their ambitious dreams. And now, students are carrying forward this renegade torch.

Let me detail each point.

(1) Thiel was the first person to directly attack the Ivy Leagues

When most people criticize college, they tend to criticize the lower ranked and questionable return on investment (ROI)4 Universities. Thiel was different. Through his fellowship, he launched a direct attack at the Ivory tower (By Ivory tower, I refer to the Ivy Leagues & other highly prestigious Universities ranking in the top 1-2%). Although he didn’t explicitly say so, his fellowship’s results are a clear indication.

For his inaugural class in 2011, I found information on 21 out of the 24 fellows. Here are the stats on which colleges they dropped out from:

So, 14 out of 21 were Ivy League + Stanford dropouts and 2 didn’t enroll in college at all.

What about the stats from 2012, the 2^nd year of running the program? I found information on 18 out of the 20 fellows:

11 out of 17 dropped out of Ivy Leagues + Stanford + Berkeley, the other 3 dropped out of prestigious Universities often considered “Public Ivies”, and 4 didn’t enroll in college in the first place!

The results above show that most of the inaugural Thiel fellows came from the Ivy’s and other prestigious Universities5. This is attested by Michael Gibson who ran the fellowship for Thiel and notes in his book The Paper Belt on Fire, how he and his colleague Danielle Strachman toured top University campuses to recruit the Thiel fellows.

By doing so, Thiel was directly attacking the Ivory tower. And the program was perfectly constructed to hurl such an attack. Thiel’s name, the program’s exclusivity (“20 under 20”) and recruiting students from top Universities allowed the program to match, if not surpass, the Ivy’s in prestige, thereby making it easier for students to pick the fellowship over continuing their Ivy League college degree.

As such, Thiel was the first one who even dared to attack the Ivory tower.

The Genius of Thiel: Why an attack at the Ivy’s has the power to burst the entire college gospel

And the Ivory tower felt the heat from Thiel’s attack. Larry Summers, former Harvard University president, lashed out against Thiel in a bid to protect his baby Harvard:

“I think the single most misdirected bit of philanthropy in this decade is Peter Thiel’s special program to bribe people to drop out of college,”

“I think it’s hard to look back and say it’s a sad thing that Bill Gates dropped out of college — world’s OK, he’s OK. I think it’s a hard thing to say that it’s sad that Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of college. But they are extraordinary exceptions, and if any significant number of intellectually able people, of the kind that would have the opportunity to attend top schools are dropping out, I think it’s tragic.”

What Larry left out is who it’s “tragic for”. Dropping out to start a company or take a job is not tragic for the students. It’s tragic for Harvard. And it’s tragic for the entire University system.

But how can a tiny attack targeted at the top 1% make a dent to Harvard, let alone the college system? What’s the big deal about an attack at the 1%? To truly burst the college gospel, doesn’t one have to create alternatives for the other 99%?

No, because the power in the University system resides in the top 1%. Thiel knew that the Ivy Leagues and other prestigious Universities are largely responsible for inflating the value of the college degree and for making college a religion in today's world. Established in 1636, Harvard University is considered the first American University. Many of the other Ivy’s were founded soon after, years before the widespread establishment of public universities. Their founding role in the University system coupled with their association to an aristocratic education, has enabled them not only to control the power in the University system but to also set the precedent for “University-as-a-status”. Thiel’s genius lay in recognizing this one point – that the University degree prestige rests with the Ivy’s.

Recognizing this was brilliant in 2 major ways:

(i) Breaking the college gospel requires an attack on the 1%:

Not only is the attack on the 1% critical, but an attack on only the 99% (without an attack on the 1%) is not sufficient to break the college gospel. The prestige of the University system comes from the 1% and breaking that prestige requires an attack on the 1%.

(ii) An attack on the 1% will weaken the other 99%:

Further, an attack on the 1% will bring down the 99%. If the prestige of Harvard goes down, the prestige of other Universities and that of the entire University system goes down. If students begin to question the value of Harvard, then certainly more of them will question the value of other Universities.

The weight of Thiel’s attack is tugging at the Ivory tower and pushing them closer to the precipice of losing their status. Given that the other universities are chained to the 1%, a fall in the 1% will take the 99% down with them.

Thiel’s war forced society, culture, and employers to begin to re-examine the religion of college. It ignited questions on the gospel of college. Big employers like Google and Tesla no longer require college degrees for many roles. And importantly, by creating another alternative through the fellowship, it directly brought down the prestige of college, thereby leading the change on the religious beliefs surrounding the University degree.

Larry Summers is right to feel threatened.

Thiel had successfully deployed a crucial war strategy – attack the source of the power to win the war. In the college war, the Ivy’s are the source of the power or the army generals, while the other Universities are soldiers. Thiel knew that if he attacked the soldiers, but the army generals were unscathed, the war would be far from being won. But a successful attack on the army generals would make the soldiers eventually surrender themselves.

However, despite the Thiel fellowship’s savvy stratagem in attacking the 1% and its critical role in challenging the gospel of college, isn’t it still too tiny to melt the gold off of the degree papers? By itself it might be. But the Thiel fellows are not alone. As I said, Thiel has ignited a movement.

This brings me to my 2^nd point on why the fellowship is underrated.

(2) Thiel didn’t just start a fellowship. He started a movement!

Thiel assured the earlier generations of bold students that they weren’t crazy to harbor thoughts on the futility of college. In essence, he gave permission to top students to drop out of prestigious Universities. In doing so, he was the first person to encourage students to leave the Ivory tower, an idea most would and did balk at.

However, few people realize that Thiel’s impact has spread outside of merely the Thiel fellows. Having shown the world how students can create world-changing companies without a college degree, Thiel awakened more smart students to think beyond University as their default option and to chart their own paths. Thiel’s contribution to this awakening remains underrated.

Now, a newer generation doesn’t necessarily need Thiel’s stamp to drop out of college. You’ve already met Sigil and his friends who’ve started companies, sought incredible jobs and apprenticeships, built their own projects and reputation in the absence of a college degree. And I’m sure there are more that I don’t know of.

This newer generation has its own traits, 4 of which I want to highlight:

(i) They’re a step ahead by dropping out of High School:

Earlier generations of dropouts signaled their credibility by enrolling in top Universities before they dropped out. Badges of “Stanford dropout” or “Harvard dropout" are flouted to indicate that they’re smart enough to get into the Ivory tower, but they’re even smarter to not need it eventually.

Sigil’s friends are beyond applying to University in the first place! They don’t care for the badge of “Stanford dropout.” In fact, they proudly wear their own badge of “High School dropout”. They’re turning “High School dropout” into something that’s cool, not something to be ashamed of.

The previous era of bold students were top college dropouts. Now, we’re entering an era of bold high school dropouts.

(ii) They need no one’s permission; they’ve established their own alternative credential:

Previous generations signaled their value though the degree credential, or the Stanford dropout badge, or the “Thiel fellow” badge. This generation needs no one else’s badge. Armed with the Internet era, they display their capabilities through projects of their own. By creating code, newsletters, podcasts, businesses, and startups, they display their worth through proof of work as opposed to a badge someone else bestowed upon them. And in doing so, they’ve established their own alternative credential: “portfolio of projects.”

This has greater implications: not needing someone else to crown a badge on you allows a lot more people to chart their unique paths. The movement won’t be restricted to merely 20 Thiel fellows. Anyone can create their unique portfolio of projects and seek their own meritocratic path based on their interests.

(iii) They’re inspiring others like them:

Memes and sharing stories on social media seems to come more naturally to this generation. Similar to how Thiel inspired them to drop out of high school, they in turn are inspiring more high schoolers to build their own “portfolio of projects” and seize control of their future.

(iv) They are carrying forward Thiel’s attack on the Ivory tower:

Lastly, and most importantly, these high school dropouts are extremely talented and smart. They likely could have been accepted at top Universities. So, by choosing to not apply to University at all, they too are hurling an attack at the top Universities and the Ivory tower. Emboldened by Thiel, they are doing their part in carrying forward his torch. 

Conclusion: Rite of Passage, Universities as Luxury goods & Students hold the power

In the last 50 years, college has established itself as the rite of passage for an academically smart high school student. Is it a worthwhile rite of passage? Back in the days of hunter gatherers, once 12-14 year old boys were trained well, they were sent into the jungle by themselves for a few days to fend off predators and catch prey. If they survived, they successfully transitioned into men. The harsh jungle was the rite of passage for these boys. Today, the rite of passage for our young generation are college classes where most students don’t learn, tests that can be gamed, and parties. Sigh.

However, as we’ve seen, students are taking matters into their own hands, especially as Universities become less valuable and inflate prices at the same time. Increasingly, the business model of top Universities is becoming similar to that of luxury goods – charge exorbitant prices for the prestige. Seen from this vantage point, students are the celebrities who buy these luxury goods. However, what happens when celebrities fall out of favor with a luxury brand?

Imagine if celebrities stop buying Louis Vuitton and Tiffany in favor of a different brand. Do you think Louis Vuitton and Tiffany will hold the same appeal and be able to command high prices? No. Similarly, if top students drop out of Ivy Leagues or choose not to enroll at all, then Ivy leagues will begin to lose their power. Just like there is no Louis Vuitton without celebrities, there is no Harvard without its top students.

The bewildering part about education is that everyone seems to have an opinion on it, but no one seeks to ask students, the real consumers of education, as to what they think about the system! People assume that students are too young to make their own decisions and the adults must decide what education should look like. This is a fallacy. Students are capable of a lot more than adults incorrectly assume, and with the growing estrangement of students by Universities, they are left with no choice but to actively lead the charge in showing their discontent.

It's students who are attacking Universities on all fronts. Without students, Universities don’t exist. They have more power in these fortresses than they recognize. Students, the power resides in you.

“Like any other social structure, school needs to be accepted by its participants. It will not survive very long beyond the time when children can no longer be persuaded to accord it a degree of legitimation.” - Seymour Papert, author of Mindstorms.

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Schools have been immune to change

Companies that fail to innovate don’t survive. Animals that don’t evolve become extinct. Managers that don’t do a good job are let go.

But American schools seem to be omnipotent. They are shielded from competition. They are protected from dying off.

Our failure to allow for means of error-correction within the school system has resulted in an unsuccessful experiment that has overstayed its time. When public schools were initially established by Thomas Jefferson, they were structured as three-year schools meant to teach only basic literacy and math. In the 1840s, Horace Mann, known as the Father of Modern Education, advocated for emulating the Prussian model of education which is very similar to the “factory model” that exists today. 1852 was another turning point - Massachusetts became the first state to adopt compulsory schooling with the other states following soon after. By 1910, public school in America was transformed with 72% of American children going to compulsory schools.1

While providing literacy to all is a noble cause, the 1840 Prussian school experiment has failed to adapt to a dynamic world. Today, schools resemble institutions that are subduing the youthful energy of our kids. In a nutshell, we set up schools, made them compulsory, and then decided to lock our kids in there without bothering to see whether the experiment is working, or making meaningful progress to correcting errors in the experiment.

The government has taken it upon itself to make our children literate and it’s failing miserably. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only 31% of 8^th graders performed at or above proficiency level in reading in 2022. The same number was 33% for 4^th graders, and 37% for 12^th graders2. This means that nearly 70% of our students can’t read at the proficiency level for their grade, a skill that is the most important superpower for learning.

The bleak results are largely because public schools don’t operate in the free market, shielding them from competition and accountability. Charter schools have tried to compete with public schools but it’s notoriously hard to get mandates to set them up. This is because charter schools threaten funding away from low-performing public schools (it should be the case if we allow for free competition), which tends to create an uproar among teachers’ unions. Regardless, most private and charter schools have to comply with the state curriculum, thereby not innovating much on learning pedagogy either. As a result, they’re running the same experiment as public schools.

It’s not that public schools haven’t tried to adapt. Clayton Christensen’s book Disrupting Schools argues that contrary to what most people think, public schools have made many attempts at curbing the criticism hailed at them. However, these attempts have not been enough and have not yielded results. And the attempts at change have been heavily restricted because of lack of free market competition.

Disgruntled parents recognize that the lack of free market activity has caused the entire school system to not function well. The way out is the way out of the school system.

The rise in homeschooling

Currently, around 3.5 million children are homeschooled in America. While this number might seem small compared to the ~49 million students enrolled in public schools, homeschooling far surpasses public schools in enrolment growth. Over the last 6 years, homeschooling has seen a ~51% rise in students, compared to only 7% for private schools, and a decline of 4% for public schools.3

Many people associate homeschooling with parents who want to provide religious instruction to their children. While this is true to some extent, religious instruction no longer remains the dominant reason to homeschool.

In 2012, 60% of parents picked religious instruction as the primary reason to homeschool, compared to 34% in 2023. Today’s parents are dissatisfied with schooling primarily because of “concern about school environment”, “to provide moral instruction”, and “dissatisfaction with academic instruction at schools”4. Some other parents realized how their kids were happier, more engaged and curious when homeschooled during Covid, compared to public schools.

Hence, parents have taken it upon themselves to educate their children. And they’re right in doing so. Studies even indicate how homeschoolers score 15 to 25 percentile points above public school students on standardized academic achievement tests.5

However, homeschooling is not feasible for all parents. They go to work, they want other teachers for their kids, and they want more social group activities. Ingenious parents evolved another way to solve this problem. They created learning pods and microschools. Parents have innovated more in education in the last 5 years than the government has in decades!

Microschools – the startups of education

Microschools are informal schools of a small group of students where the learning is centered on the student’s needs. Typical schools are focused on standard curriculums, but most microschools take a more personalized approach to learning. Some people describe them as the re-emergence of the one-room schoolhouse where students of mixed-ages would follow their individualized curriculum with the teacher serving as the guide. Microschools also tend to be 15 students or under, although you will find some larger ones. Most allow for flexible schedules - parents can choose to send their kids to the microschools for a couple of days a week and only for a few hours as opposed to the standard schedule offered by traditional schools.

Some microschools are science-based, some focus on classic studies, some cater to neurodiverse students, some are faith-based, some are Montessori-inspired, and some are for unschoolers (self-directed learning), among the many diverse variety.

You will notice that there is no standard definition of a microschool and I’m describing many of its features. The truth is that there is no concept of a standard microschool; they don’t come in cookie-cutter coke bottles. And this is exactly what makes them so special! Each microschool innovates in its own way, trying different education pedagogies and teaching methods. However, they’re all coherent in their mission towards student-centered learning and towards creating a better educational environment for children than what exists in traditional schools. Microschools allow for more experimentation in education.

I see microschools as the startups of K12 education.

Microschools offer choice to parents

Microschools started gaining popularity during COVID when parents banded together to start small group learning pods for their kids. Some of the parents would take turns teaching the students and some others would hire a teacher for the pod. Microschools are the more formal name for a learning pod typically implying that the pod is run by a teacher instead of parents, and they charge tuition. If homeschooling can demand a lot of time from parents, and traditional schools aren’t geared towards student-centric learning, microschools are a great solution that incorporate personalized learning solutions, small group socialization, and flexible schedules.

Moreover, microschools give parents more choice in schooling for the first time. Similar to how you walk into a grocery store and can pick your choice of yogurt, parents and students can pick the microschool that best suits them. They no longer have to be restricted to only one type of curriculum offered by the public and private schools in their area.

Factors favoring Microschools

Public school teachers starting their own microschools

It’s not just parents who are disgruntled with the traditional school system. Teachers are too. Troubled by low pay and the compulsion to comply with state mandates that often make little sense, public school teachers are leaving the system to start their own microschools. Between 2020 and 2022 alone, about 300,000 public school teachers and staff left the education system, corresponding to ~3% of the workforce6.

A lot of these teachers have started their own microschools, giving them an opportunity to become business owners. Additionally, smaller classrooms have allowed teachers to develop stronger bonds with each student, a primary reason they were attracted to teaching in the first place.

School Choice Movement

Innovations on the financing side are also aiding microschools. The school choice movement is growing steam. Currently, there are 15 Educational Savings Account (ESA) programs in 13 states7. This means that if you choose to not send your child to public school, you are eligible for ~$8k towards private school education or after-school programs, including microschools. 7 of these programs are universal school vouchers available to any student. And 8 of them provide school vouchers for students with special needs or to those from low-income families.

For many parents, this money is the deciding factor between being able to send their kids to a microschool vs. continuing public school, as further evidenced by the growth in students using ESA money.8

School vouchers are not only beneficial to parents, but they also help state and local budgets. Taxpayers spend an average of $16,446 per student annually in public schools.9 Conversely, school vouchers of ~$8k are less than half the cost of public school student allocation. This frees up resources for state and local governments to allocate to other causes.

Microschools are not immune to error-correction

The greatest aspect of microschools is that they operate in the free market and don’t block the means of error correction. If a parent is not satisfied with their child’s microschool, they will pull their child out. If a microschool does not solve the academic rigor a parent is looking for, a new microschool might pop up to serve the unmet demand. Microschools operate more like private businesses and not schools shielded by the government, which means that if they fail to serve their consumer, they will die and deserve to. Further, one can hope that competition from microschools would make public schools step up their game.

Microschools are more nimble

Most microschools are being established as homeschool co-ops or after-school programs such that they don’t have to jump through regulatory hoops to get school licensing. This makes it faster and easier for them to start up. The current rules around school licensing aren’t structured to work for microschools, so it only makes sense for microschools to chart their own path for now.

There is a growing concern that states will begin to crack down and enforce rules of traditional schools onto microschools. For example, one microschool was forced to shut down because of zoning restrictions, a rule that has been set for traditional schools and doesn’t make much sense to the new situation. Regulation should update its playbook for microschools or stay away to allow the free market to innovate in education. People worry that without regulation and mandates, there is a chance that some of the kids might not learn much. This argument is not very strong for two reasons. One, the data shows that kids aren’t learning much in public schools so the mandates aren’t working too well – note that mandates don’t imply learning. Two, if the kids aren’t learning, the parents can simply pull their kids out of the microschool.

Microschools work well in a free-market system, shifting the accountability from the government to parents. In most states in the U.S., the public school your child goes to depends on the district you reside in, leaving parents with few school options. As a result, public schools don’t leave much room for parents to be accountable for school choice. On the other hand, microschools bestow parents with more decision making power.

The optimistic world of microschools

The Internet era has changed many products we interact with. Physical newspapers are on the decline. Maps are a thing of the past. Taxi cabs are not hailed in traditional ways anymore. Books can now be read online. Food is ordered to your doorstep in minutes. The best teachers are available at the click of a button.

Yet, despite one of the biggest advances of the Internet being that learning online is now abundant and free, schools haven’t adapted to the new world. They don’t allow for error-correction and this is a fatal mistake.

In a dynamic world, if there is no way for us to correct our errors, society won’t move forward. Progress will decline. And human quality of life will suffer.  

We’ve tried the traditional school experiment for decades. It’s not working. It’s time to try something new. And microschools are the pioneers of this.

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Please share this essay with anyone who might be interested in microschools. You can follow me on X @aasthajs for more on the topic of alternative education.

I had a fascinating discussion with Henrik Karlsson on the type of early childhood education received by creative and scientific geniuses like Pascal, Faraday, Alan Turing, Mozart, Virginia Wolf.

Henrik is a researcher and writer. He read dozens of biographies and wrote a fantastic blog on what did the childhoods of exceptional writers and scientists look like, and can we replicate that in society?

I'm super intrigued by the space of early childhood education, so I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Best, Aastha

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We discuss:

• How genius kids were raised

• The role of mentors in the lives of genius kids

• Homeschooling and tutoring

• Taking Children Seriously

• Online learning cultures & apprenticeships

• AI tutors

Watch on YouTube. Listen on Spotify. Follow me on Twitter for future posts and writing.

If you enjoy the podcast, please share it with others!

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Timestamps:

0:00 Henrik on writing

3:10 On raising children to be geniuses like Newton, Einstein, Mozart

8:34 Taking Children Seriously

9:44 Exceptional children are surrounded by the best in the world

14:01 Best mentors in-person vs. books as mentors

17:50 Do entrepreneurs like Elon Musk break the pattern of growing up in exceptional surroundings?

22:07 Henrik's biographies sample

24:36 Homeschooling until age 12

27:36 Mixed-age classrooms

29:41 Counter-examples: Exceptional kids who were not tutored

32:33 Online apprenticeships

36:16 Self-directed projects by Pascal, Maxwell, Mozart

40:05 Polgar on raising chess prodigies

43:38 Are genius kids happy?

45:39 Are there genius late bloomers?

48:11 Self-directed learning cultures in Sweden

57:32 Will AI tutors have an impact?

1:01:35 How does Henrik educate his children?

1:08:01 Homeschooling & Social Interaction

1:09:34 How to scale learning cultures?

1:12:34 Outro and Show Notes

Little kids are adorable. Almost everyone will agree with me on that. But if you look beyond their sweetness, you begin to realize how little kids are powerful teachers.

Adults are constantly trying to teach kids. I wanted to flip the roles and ask: What can we learn from kids? What did I learn hanging out with James, Grace, and Ann for the last four days?

More than anything, I have many questions about how we transform from kids to adults. I have many questions, but not many answers..

Kids are honest

“Grace, do you want to help Grandma do the dishes?”

“No!” Pat came the reply.

Can you imagine any adult responding that way? Kids are very honest about their thoughts and feelings. If they don’t want to do something, they’ll throw a hue and cry about it (afternoon nap time is an example). If they are eager to play a game with you, they’ll drag you into it. Kids are expressive.

As we start to grow older, we learn to mask our feelings with false words - our words and thoughts begin to be disconnected on many occasions. Why is that the case? Some of it is because we don’t want to hurt other people’s feelings. But could we create a world where we can be totally transparent without hurting others? What occasions call for us to speak white lies? Why do we get hurt by adults but not by kids? If an adult had denied help to Grandma, she might be a little upset by that, but Grace could get way with it. Why is that so?

I’m not saying it’s right for Grace to not help Grandma; I’m just saying it’s incredible for kids to be so honest with their thoughts. That’s powerful.

Kids are natural Kings and Queens

Speaking of powerful, kids know they’re in charge. They cry and adults come rushing to them. They demand more food and they get it. And if they don’t get their way the first time, they learn to become master persuaders in getting their parents to do what they want. This is no easy feat - adults can’t pull this off! Kids have a royal demeanor to them - they know they’re the kings and queens despite being tinier than us. This gives them natural self-confidence.

Do we lose this confidence with age? Why do some people retain it and some don’t? How can we learn to be master persuaders like kids? Can we truly be in charge of our own lives instead of ceding control to institutions? What are the downsides of always trying to be in control? Are kids honest because they know they control the strings? Do honesty and royalty go hand-in-hand?

Kids play their own games

Kids choose the games they want to play. Doug and I were trying to make Grace and James build Lego trains. They were interested for 2 minutes and then got bored. So they had no hesitation in walking outside the play room and devising their own game. Uncle Doug’s shoes caught their fancy - they put on shoes four times their size and began walking in them! They did this for a few minutes before the toy dinosaurs caught their eye and kept them briefly engaged. And then back they went to the play room!

There are so many good lessons and questions for adults here.

• Kids know their interests and have no qualms walking away from what’s boring to them. They fill their lives with what grips their interest. As we grow older, we lose touch with what’s fun to us. We begin to think that work must be boring - “that’s just the way it is.” But could adults also fill their days with what’s fun to them? And, I don’t mean short-term pleasures like partying and alcohol. I mean activities that bring joy and peace in the now and long-term. Why don’t more adults find “work” that is play to them? Why aren’t adults honest about what they find fun? My sense is that a lot of adults feign interest in their work. Why? Aren’t we merely being dishonest to ourselves and our lives? Why can’t we have the courage to walk away from what’s not fun (like kids do) and find meaning in what intrigues us?

• Kids find joy in the little things. They play with shoes, they play with forks, they play with cans of sparkling water. With age, these everyday objects begin to be overlooked. We crave fancy vacations and big houses. How do we lose our sense of joy for the little things in life? Why don’t adults marvel at the shape of a soda can?

• Kids are epitomes of human ingenuity. They make their own games using whatever they find - in this case, it was our shoes!

• Kids play their own games. This was the most powerful lesson for me. If kids are bored by the games adults bring to them, they’ll simply find a way to create new games. On the other hand, adults get trapped in playing games laid out by society - status games, wealth games, power games, and so on. Why don’t more adults pick and create the games they want to play? Why do we merely settle for playing games society has created for us? I think if more adults thought deeply about what games they want to play and created their own games, the world would look pretty different.

Kids are not attached to their games

Grandma brought with her a set of Go Fish cards. She started drawing the cards from her hands and asking Grace and James to tell her the colors. They did so for some of them but you could tell they wanted more to do with the cards than merely reciting colors. James grabbed the pile of cards from Grandma’s hand and laid them on the table. A wide mischievous grin spread across his face. Uh-oh.

Whoosh! In one wide swoop of his hands, the cards were on the floor. The grin was wider.

James felt so much joy in destroying the game and burying it to the floor. But he felt more joy in creating his own game from the mess of cards - next thing you know, he was on the floor having a great time picking up the cards. He once again created his own game!

Grace and James felt no hesitation in moving on from one game to the next. They weren’t attached to their games. They felt joy in their games when they were playing them, and felt equal joy in destroying the Lego blocks or moving on to something else. They were living in the present.

This is contrary to how adults live their lives. Why do we get so attached to the games we play? Why can’t adults feel a level of disinterested interest? Why is it so hard for us to shake off the past? Why don’t more of us truly live in the present?

Kids are powerful readers of humans

Before a certain age, kids don’t understand all that we speak. As a result, they have to rely on reading people based on their body language. There are many times I saw Grace and James staring at Doug and me. What were they thinking? What were they observing? Were they trying to read us? Were they trying to determine whether they can trust us? I’m fascinated by knowing what goes on inside their heads.

I think kids have to rely more on body language and less on words because they don’t understand all the words yet. But we begin to lose this art as we grow older. It’s such a lost art - often our body language conveys a lot more than words do. Our body language is telling the truth, but our words mask the truth. Why do we lose this art? How can we learn it again and get better at it? Are kids master persuaders because they can read body language well? Would human interactions look a lot different if all of us became good at reading body signals again?

Kids are good imitators

While kids are original, they also like to imitate adults.

When Grace and James were playing with their toy dinosaurs, one of them dropped a dinosaur to the floor. Their mother exclaimed, “Uh-oh.” A little someone’s ears picked up on that.

Later that evening, Grace was sitting on her dinner chair playing with her spoon. She swung her hand and tossed the spoon in the air. It landed on the floor with a tiny plop. Her eyes met ours and even though we were smiling, she knew she’d done something she wasn’t supposed to do. A brief second later, she exclaimed, “Uh-oh.”

We burst out laughing.

It seems to me like we learn how to imitate from a young age. But kids are very original too. As we age, it appears that our tendency to imitate increases and originality decreases. Is this true? If so, why is that the case? Why do many of us struggle to be original and think for ourselves? Why do we have such a strong tendency to imitate? Are all our desires mimetic, as Rene Girard would have us believe?

As I mentioned, I have more questions than answers. Being the youngest in my family, I haven’t had the chance to play with and observe kids much. Four days is not enough and I could be very off with some of my observations, learnings and questions. In time, I’ll find out.

Story #1: School grades are lying

Calvin was an 11th grader who was exceptional at Basketball. He was an African-American and came from a poor family, but unlike the other families in the neighborhood, his family was free from violence and his parents were not separated.

Arne Duncan was the captain of the Harvard Basketball team back then and he thought that Calvin would easily be able to get into one of the Division 1 schools for Basketball if he got his ACT scores at a decent place. So when Calvin sought help at the after-school program run by Arne’s mother, Arne decided to spend his college summer break assisting Calvin.

Calvin was a happy, optimistic kid who was a B honor roll in school so Arne didn’t think that getting his ACT scores up would be a problem. However, when Arne tested Calvin’s writing and English, he was shocked. Calvin couldn’t spell correctly or form proper sentences. His writing and comprehension were the level of a 3rd grader’s and yet he’d been passed to 11th grade in school and been told he was a B honor student! Arne knew that even a summer’s hard work wouldn’t be able to make up for years of poor teaching such that his ACT scores would line up. Sadly, the talented Basketball player wouldn’t be able to go to a Division 1 college because his school had lied to him. His school had lied about his performance, his standards.

Why did this happen? Teachers are judged based on how well their students perform on tests. As such, they are incentivized to pass the students or make the standards extremely low, thereby lying to the students about their performance. This is shocking.

Story #2: Teachers are cheating

When Arne Duncan was made CEO of Chicago Public Schools, he got a phone call from Steven Levitt (the Freakonomics guy) who said that he had built an algorithm that was able to detect how many teachers were changing the fill-in bubbles on tests “in order to make themselves look better.” (Firstly, I was shocked to hear teachers would do this!)

“Some teachers who knew their students weren’t learning might fudge results in order to make it look as if their kids were in fact learning.”

It turns out about 5% of teachers in the Chicago Public Schools system were changing results!

Story #3: Standards are low

School standards are set extremely low giving students a false indication of how much of the material they’ve mastered. The results of “Meets Standards” and “Below Standards” are once again not telling the truth. (Btw, I don’t think these standardized tests are a relevant indicator of student potential. The tests mostly test for how good you at taking them and not for real knowledge. But that’s a separate conversation).

For example, Arne Duncan found that the kids who were granted the “Meets Standard” status only had a 1 in 5 chance of getting close to a 20 on the ACT. In other words, they were clearly not meeting standards and were behind, but the system was once again lying to them. So, in reality, the standards scale should be shifted down by 1 entire standard or more. The students who were “below standards” should be in the group “academic warning” and the “meets standards” should be “below standards.”

Story #4: Incorporating Vocational and hands-on learning

This is an optimistic story compared to the previous three. Worcester Technical High School’s turnaround story highlights the importance of hands-on learning for people. The school was one of the worst performing in the state, but the principal turned it around by incorporating vocational programs like woodworking, automotive, and culinary programs. She partnered with a local credit union to open a bank branch inside the school. A veterinary clinic was established in the school as well. Students were given the liberty to intern in these programs. This type of hands-on-learning changed the fate of the school from being on the verge of shutting down to increasing graduation rates and the number of students who went to college.

This story sheds light on how we should incorporate more internships and apprenticeship programs for students. The best learning is learning by doing. Students don’t retain information when it’s simply being lectured at them in a boring manner. You learn by doing.

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P.S. Learn more about Feynman Scholars, an after-school intellectual curricular program I’ve launched where students advance towards achieving their highest potential. Students learn the tools of masters, work on projects they are passionate about and learn by doing.

Aastha Jain

Feynman Kids Program

Feynman Kids is a virtual group where ambitious kids direct their own learning, follow their obsessions, learn by doing, build projects that excite them, think for themselves, and come to love learning. We should raise more Feynman Kids. No, I don’t necessarily mean physicists or Nobel prize winners. I mean people who follow their curiosities, fall in lov…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · Aastha Jain

We should raise more Feynman Kids.

No, I don’t necessarily mean physicists or Nobel prize winners. I mean people who follow their curiosities, fall in love with problems they want to solve and pursue them, instead of caring about what other people think.

Why Feynman Kids?

School does not leave enough time for kids to explore their interests and curiosities. True learning happens when people dive into areas they are eager to learn about and then engage in hands-on learning.

My mission with Feynman Kids is simple: Give kids a place to pursue their interests. Because greatness and happiness comes from people pursuing their passions.

Where does Greatness come from?

The below quote from Richard Feynman (Nobel-prize Physicist) sums up how he lived his life:

“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don't think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn't stop you from doing anything at all.”

If you look at all those people who went on to do great things in the world, you will realize they did the following:

• Followed their own obsessions

• Solved problems they fell in love with

• Learned by doing, experimenting, and error-correcting

• Took their ideas seriously, had freedom & time to explore their curiosities

• Did not defer to authority, instead used first principles to think things through

This applies to people in all fields, be it scientists, entrepreneurs, investors, musicians, or writers.

Other than Richard Feynman, some examples of great people who solved problems they fell in love with are Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, Paul Graham, Taylor Swift, Mozart, J.K. Rowling, Elon Musk, Sam Walton, Oprah Winfrey.

Hence, inspired by Richard Feynman, people like him, and my own personal experience, I’m launching Feynman Kids, a program where I work with children to help them figure out their curiosities and problems they want to solve and enable them to launch projects in those areas, such that they can learn by doing and think for themselves. School does not create greatness, self-learning does.

How does Feynman Kids Work:

Unlike other schools and programs, there is no strict schedule where kids are shepherded from one class to the other. Feynman Kids is not about me lecturing but about giving students the independence to work on projects that interest them and are connected to how the real world works. It’s all virtual.

Month-to-month Project Building:

Let’s build a place where curious, smart, doer kids can thrive!

• What Makes Me Unique: Child completes an extensive curiosities questionnaire to reflect on their interests, curiosities, and projects that have excited them

• Build Your Own Project 1:1 call with me to kick-off Feynman Kids where we map out the project the student will work on and steps to get started. Thereafter, monthly 1:1 with me

• Student Teach-Ins: Every week, we come together in groups of 4-5 where each student teaches the group something about their project and receives feedback on the project

• Demo day: Parents and friends are invited to the last teach-in of every month

• Slack group for life: Community of smart, ambitious kids around the world who are following their obsessions and learning by doing

• On-the-job training: The best form of learning is learning by doing. I’ll help kids get freelance work, internships and on-the-job training to supplement their own learning

• Weekly Goals: Students set their weekly goals and daily goals using our template and keep track of their progress

• Virtual Check-In: I’ll check in daily with the student to help with problems, updates on projects & new projects

• Parent Updates: Parents receive extensive updates on their child’s projects and anything else that is noteworthy

If you’re interested in hearing more about the program, please email me (Aastha) at aasthajain1025@gmail.com with the subject “Feynman Kids” and we will find a time for an introductory call.

Below, you will find a writeup on “Why Me?” and how my personal experience has equipped me to launch The Feynman Kids Program, along with more details on the program.

Why Me?

Hi, my name is Aastha. I went to the best school in my city, Kolkata India. I was the only student to win the All-rounder prize all 3 years it was offered. I got admitted into the best business school in India and the best business school in the world (Wharton), so I naturally chose Wharton.

Post Wharton, I was one of maybe 10-15 students to land a job into Investing right out of school. I worked at Apollo Global, one of the largest asset managers in the world. Most graduates go through 2 years of Investment banking before they can get a job in Investing. I then worked for a prestigious Private Equity firm before making the move to a Y-Combinator backed startup.

My path was essentially one of following the credentials of the most prestigious institutions, because that is where the smartest people went right?

Once I started work, I realized I was miserable and had simply been conforming instead of following my unique interests. I realized how my education had failed me. Despite going to the best schools, I knew little about how the world actually worked. All I was taught in school was theory, not how reality works. There is a large difference.

I decided to teach myself. It was the first time I was truly learning for the joy of it; I was truly learning what interested me. I was solving problems that I was uniquely interested in solving. I was unlearning all that I was taught at these supposedly best schools and learning what sparked my curiosity and learning by doing. I was working on projects of my own, I was learning through on the job training and I was learning by reading books and absorbing ideas from some of the best teachers out there.

I learned Investing by actually investing on the job instead of sitting in Finance classes at Wharton. I learned interviewing and podcasting skills by actually interviewing people like Andrew Yang instead of reading about public speaking. I learned how to start a business by actually trying to start one and then launching a product at a startup, instead of merely sitting in business classes. I learned how to write by blogging and writing a short book. I learned more about human history, evolution, how knowledge works, how power works by reading books from some of the best authors instead of sitting in semester long classes.

The biggest learning I’ve had is that the schools of today failed me and they are failing our children.

Aastha Jain

The Schools of Today are Failing Us

What even is a “Good Education”? Many of us step out into the “real world” only to be nauseated with the feeling that most of what we learned in school is not applicable. Many of us would agree that school was “pointless” or at best could have been compressed into a few months…

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4 years ago · 2 likes · 2 comments · Aastha Jain

I have learned more in these past 5 years than I did in 22 years of school.

School was mostly about credentialing to get my first job out of school. In today’s Internet world, even this kind of credentialing is becoming redundant.

Aastha Jain

The Internet has changed the landscape of Education. Let's take advantage of it.

The Internet has changed our lives in massive ways. Google allows us to access information by typing out a few words instead of driving to the library and sorting through archives. Food delivery apps allow us to order food while sitting at home instead of going to a restaurant. Of course, with any new technology there are both upsides and downsides. In …

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4 years ago · 1 like · Aastha Jain

You don’t necessarily need a degree to solve problems in areas that interest you. A degree doesn’t always imply actual learning and now it’s not even important for credentialing. Let me explain by giving my personal example once again.

Problem I Fell in Love With: Longevity Science

In 2020, I was in the midst of launching a high-protein spread consumer company when COVID hit. But my idea got me interested in health optimization. I got obsessed with learning about the science behind how to optimize my health, put the science into practice by experimenting on myself, and immediately saw positive results. I started a newsletter Live Longer World to pass on this information to more people so they too can reap the benefits of science-backed health optimization. I grew my newsletter rapidly in just under 5 months and it reached “Top 25 in Health”.

I kept up my learning and began to learn about the science behind aging and the science that will ultimately lead us to reverse aging. I decided to start a podcast to interview longevity scientists and bring this information to more people. In under 6 months, I grew my podcast to 8,000+ downloads, 1,000+ YouTube subscribers and messages from fans who wrote “Hands down the best longevity podcast.” In contrast, the average time for most YouTube channels to gain 1k subscribers is 15.5 months and on average1, most podcasts only get 28 downloads per episode2. My podcast gets 500+ downloads per episode in the first week itself, making it in the top 5%. You can see some of the positive feedback below.

What happened there? I am not a scientist. I am not a medical doctor. I am not a PhD student. Most other longevity channels are run by PhDs or medical doctors. In fact, I did not even study science after 10th grade and hated biology in school. Two main things happened:

1. My learning was pure curiosity based so I absorbed quickly. It was a problem I wanted to solve for myself and fell in love with it.

2. I learned by doing. I learned by launching projects – in this case my newsletter and podcast.

Of course I still have some ways to go and I’m still keeping up my learning, but the important point here is that learning and doing require no credentialing or degrees. Learning requires desire, interest and building / on the job training / learning by doing.

Learning is solving problems you are uniquely interested in solving. Learning is following the Feynman principle.

My Interest in Education

I recall enjoying playing teacher when I was a 10 year old kid. I ran a summer camp for middle-schoolers when I was in high-school. I tutored and mentored students in college. I tried to start another education startup in India. I ran a public speaking course for students back in India when I was in college. I was a residential advisor for freshmen in college.

Above all, I care for children. I deeply care. And I take them seriously. Children deserve trust and respect and should be treated like adults if we don’t wish to dumb them down.

A few months ago, I asked myself the question: What would a good education look like for my children? I didn’t find any answers in traditional schooling and went on a search to better understand how children learn.

As I explored the question deeper by reading several books and reflecting on my own learning experience, I began to form more concrete ideas around a better education model. I couldn’t find any existing solutions that fit that model, so I decided to launch it myself. And hence, Feynman Kids.

More details on Feynman Kids:

Broadly speaking, the program has 3 components:

1. Learn by doing (projects, freelance work, internships) in areas the child is curious about and questions they want answers to.

2. Intimate 1:1 and group discussions with other children and me on what questions they’ve been exploring, problems they’ve been solving, progress on projects, what we learned that week and any other ideas!

3. Become friends with other maker children who also follow their obsessions and fall in love with solving those problems.

Let’s further dive into the components!

Make Problem Solving Fun and Curiosity-Based

I’ll work with children 1:1 to help them figure out curiosities they want to explore, problems they’re interested in and map out next steps in terms of building out projects in areas they want to dig deeper into. It begins with simply noting your curiosities and questions and then deciding which ones to explore. See below an image of all the questions I currently have. I’ve decided to dive deeper into the first and second questions for now.

Learn by building projects

As I’ve mentioned, the best learning happens by doing. No one learns to ride a bike by reading how to ride a bike. Similarly, the best way to learn to code is to code, the best way to learn to run a business is by running a business and the best way to learn physics is also by doing physics experiments. Of course, all these projects can be combined with theory and learning from the best books and teachers on the Internet. But merely theory without practice is as good as not learning much at all.

Once we’ve mapped out problems and questions kids want to explore, I’ll work with children to map out projects and experiments in those areas such that they can begin work on them and learn by doing! Along the way, I’ll have regular check-ins with them such that they can receive guidance and feedback on their projects.

The Apprenticeship Model: Learn by doing freelance work and internships

When students graduate from college, they are subject to “future shock” which is a way of saying that they realize that most of what they learned in the classroom is not applicable to how the world really works. So, why not allow them to learn more from interacting with the world outside classrooms and working with companies on projects or through internships? For example, startups always have several projects that children could assist with, including coding, writing, marketing etc. I will assist children to reach out to companies and gain more work experience, should they wish. This will not only help them better understand what they like and what they don’t like, but they also get on-the-job training, hands-on experience, and learning through apprenticeship.

This portfolio of projects, along with the projects they work on themselves, will also serve as proof-of-work for any jobs they want to get later on or if they want to pursue their own work. I’ll help them launch their personal websites that showcase their portfolio of projects. More and more, proof-of-work matters more than degree credentialing.

Connect children to Industry mentors

In order to further enhance the apprenticeship model and help children understand their interests, I’ll help connect them to people in industries of their interest. This way they can learn from people what their work looks like instead of merely theorizing about it.

Oxford Style Tutoring and Student Teach-Ins

Oxford has a tutoring system where students work with professors in groups of 2-3 and discuss research done by the student, papers they’ve written and ideas they want to explore. It’s a free-flowing discussion where questions are brought up, students receive criticism and feedback, and ideas are thrown around. These small group intimate discussions create a space for creativity and criticism, which is how ideas and knowledge progress. The weekly student teach-ins gives the students a chance to be teacher and explain their projects to others!

Community of builders, creators, problem-solvers, doers

The Feynman Kids Program will be a community of children who are problem-solvers and builders. The kids will learn from each other, discuss problems they’re working on, and fuel each other with their optimistic energies! The nerds and builders finally have a home.

Book Discussions, Passion Talks and What I Learned This Week

I once had a weekly tradition with a few friends where we’d get together and discuss what we learned that week. Each of us would teach the group something new. It’d be fun to try that out in the Feynman Kids Program too. We could have book club discussions and discussions on our learnings. Kids can also hold sessions where they present to everyone on a topic they are passionate about!

Discussions on the theory of knowledge and how all problems are soluble

I’ve been highly influenced by physicist David Deutsch’s optimistic theory of knowledge. He talks about how knowledge grows through good explanations, how knowledge creation is the only way to make progress, how every human is capable of understanding all there is to be understood, how all problems are soluble with the right knowledge, and how we should be optimistic about the future if we make use of our capacity to be creative, to solve problems, and to create knowledge. I’d love to arm children with this optimistic energy as well!

FAQ

What age groups is the Feynman Kids for?

8-17 years (if your child is outside this band and you still want to enroll them, feel free to email me and we can chat)

All that is truly needed is the ability to read.

What type of student thrives at Feynman Kids?

All children! All children are curious learners and want to direct their learning. That being said, Feynman Kids is best suited for ambitious, curious kids who want to self-direct their learning, are hungry to take on challenging projects and want to meet other builders!

How do you pick the project my child will work on?

The project is personalized based on what the child is interested in! They complete an extensive “What Makes Me Unique” exercise to reflect on their interests and write out their ideas for the project. Based on that, we brainstorm together and come up with a project the child wants to work on. There are no templatized projects - Feynman Kids wants children to explore their unique interests. The projects are also meant to be as close to the real world as possible - they’re not merely dummy projects.

What is an example of a project?

Caroline is a 12 year old who is interested in biology and business. She wants to research strokes and heart conditions and build a website and mobile app to provide accurate information to detect symptoms and treatments for these conditions. Google is typically not a trusted source for good medical information. Caroline came up with the project herself and wants to advance her knowledge in this field, learn Python to build an app, and talk to real users for her product.

Liam is a 10 year old who is interested in Fighter jets and physics. He is going to build a 3D fighter jet using Tinker CAD and then map out each part of the fighter jet and understand the physics behind and mechanics behind it.

How long is Feynman Kids for?

Feynman Kids is a month-to-month commitment. Your children can continue with it for as long as they enjoy it. Every month, or even earlier, we will revisit the projects and see how to continue with it or take on a new projects.

Can my child participate in Feynman Kids if they are enrolled in school?

Yes! Feynman kids works well as an after-school program and most of our students attend full-time school. Feynman Kids also works great for homeschoolers and unschoolers!

How much time commitment is needed?

I expect ~1-2 hours of work on the projects outside of the weekly student teach-in. But don’t be surprised if children want to spend more time on their projects - after all, it’s their interest!

Is the program virtual or in-person?

The program is all virtual.

How will my child find time outside school to work on the project?

This is a project your child wants to work on so they should be eager to find 1-2 hours a day to work on it. That being said, some days are busier than others, so the child can work more on it during weekends. This shouldn’t feel like a chore or studying for exams; this is something they are eager to learn about themselves!

Will the project help my child get into a good college?

Yes, building one’s own project is certainly good to have not just for the college resume but also for job applications. But beyond all of that, the true value of Feynman Kids is to inculcate a sense of confidence and joy for learning such that your child can be a life-long learner and loves to innately build his / her own projects throughout life.

Can you further elaborate on why schools are failing us?

Schools have become a pressure-cooker for conformity. They thwart each person’s unique interests by teaching them standardized curriculums. Sure, there might be some project building in schools, but most of them are dumbed down because they don’t take children seriously. The truth is children are capable of a lot more - we have history to prove it - Andrew Carnegie, Ben Franklin and several other modern examples are not the product of schooling. In fact, most people who went on to do great things in this world (small or big) did so because of their unique knowledge and by unschooling themselves, not by conforming and getting the same jobs as everyone else. [I will be writing, educating and spreading more information on this so people can become informed on the history of schooling and what it has done to our kids - stay tuned! But feel free to ask me more on it if we get a chance to chat.]

Are there any other principles or values of the program I should know about?

Yes! I take children and their ideas seriously. I do not believe in coercing them to do anything. I believe in using explanations and rationality to make progress. I believe in allowing children to explore their interests, as I’ve already mentioned above. I believe that children are capable of much more than we give them credit for and that they crave more responsibility and independence.

Can I pause Feynman Kids during school exams and other busy / vacation weeks?

Yes, you can pause your membership for 5 weeks the entire year and up to 2 weeks in a row in any single given month.

Will I be the one guiding the students or will it be someone else?

All sessions, including the 1:1 sessions will be conducted by me, Aastha Jain.

Please read the “Why Me” section above to see why I’m conducting this. For more on my background:

Website: aasthajain.me | LinkedIn: aasthajain1025

How do I enroll my child?

Email me (Aastha): aasthajain1025@gmail.com with the subject “Feynman Kids Program.”

That’s it for now! If you’re interested, do shoot me an email or signup by clicking on the button above and we can chat more. And if you know anyone else who might be interested, please share this post with them. Hope to speak with you soon, Aastha.

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Aastha Jain

Feynman Kids Program

We should raise more Feynman children. No, I don’t necessarily mean physicists or Nobel prize winners. I mean people who follow their curiosities, fall in love with problems they want to solve and pursue them, instead of caring about what other people think…

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4 years ago · 1 like · Aastha Jain

Feynman Kids Signup

The Internet has changed our lives in massive ways. Google allows us to access information by typing out a few words instead of driving to the library and sorting through archives. Food delivery apps allow us to order food while sitting at home instead of going to a restaurant. Of course, with any new technology there are both upsides and downsides. In any case, the main point of this essay is not the discuss everything about the Internet, but to discuss how the Internet has changed the nature of education. Most people don’t realize it or don’t take full advantage of it.

[Note: When I speak of “schools” in this post, I’m talking about schools and colleges.]

The best teachers are online

The Internet allows you to learn from the best teachers online instead of restricting your learning from teachers in your school or college. A lot of the best teachers have an online presence, be it through blogs they write, or videos they create, or books they’ve written that you can purchase online. You have at your disposal ideas from the best teachers in the world, so why not take advantage of that instead of fighting for the best local teachers? In fact, the Internet allows you to easily find ideas from the best teachers who are no longer alive. For example, all of Richard Feynman’s lectures are now available online for free for any curious kid who is interested in physics.

A note on the look of teachers online: A lot of people haven’t adopted the idea that the best teachers are online because most of the online teachers don’t have the same feel or method of teaching or credentials as traditional teachers you would find in schools1. This, in fact, is likely better because most of the online teachers are practitioners who are passing on their learnings. For example, a lot of investors have given talks that could now be accessed online. Would you rather learn from someone who actually invests money or from someone who merely teaches about investing, aka most professors in college?2 As I wrote about in my previous post, the problem with schools is that they teach a lot of theory which breaks down in practice. So, you’re always better off learning from people who walk the walk instead of merely talking the talk. And don’t dismiss people who don’t look like traditional teachers; instead listen to their ideas and consider if they’re useful.

Note on Online Schools: When I say that the best teachers are online, I’m not referring to the rise in online schools or Edtech startups. A lot of these online schools have a repository of videos on different topics and subjects (i.e. Khan Academy). Some of them can be great, but you don’t have to restrict your child’s learning to the videos curated by these online platforms - they face the same problem as schools - that is, it’s not necessarily true that they’ve attracted the best teachers to make the videos. So, when you think online education, think broader and don’t be afraid to expose your child to authors or other online personalities whose ideas you’ve learned from. The teachers for children don’t have to be different from the teachers for adults. The best teachers often explain simply such that even a child can understand it.

You can learn ideas that excite you, at your own pace

The best part about learning from teachers online is that you don’t need to coerce yourself to sit through 45 minute lectures which you otherwise would have to in school. If you don’t like the way a certain teacher explains something, then you can try another teacher.

Also, you don’t need to read the entire book or the entire essay or watch the entire video. You can pick out the concepts and ideas that are interesting to you or relevant to you. Again, you are not forced to try and absorb every idea, no matter how irrelevant, that is presented by the teacher in the 45 minute class. In reality, children do this anyway. They just zone out and dream or talk to each other when the teacher in the classroom bores them. Now the child can simply switch to another essay or video.

On the flip side, if an idea excites the child, they can re-read that part, take the time to think about it, watch the video again and so on, instead of being forced to rush to the next concept. What all of this means is that, 1) You can learn at your own pace and 2) You can learn the ideas that interest you and skip the rest. (If your counter is that “kids must learn certain topics even if it bores them because it will be useful to them, please see my essay “The Schools of Today are Failing Us” where I argue for no coercion based learning for kids. Emphasis on points 2 and 6 in that essay)

The best form of credentialing is proof of work

Let’s address the elephant in the room. You’re probably wondering: “Okay, but if my child doesn’t get a degree, how is she going to get a job?” (Btw, the idea that most of us need to get jobs is also a little outdated. The Internet allows more people to work for themselves, so the idea that schools are necessary for jobs in itself might be flawed, but that’s for another day.)

In reality, a lot more people will agree with me that schools are not doing a good job of educating our youth and a form of homeschooling and online education will be far superior than most schools. But the place they get hung up is that schools serve as a form of credentialing to get your first job out of college. In fact, in my opinion, this is by far the biggest reason schools exist, along with the fact that they serve as cheap daycare for parents. Anyhow, in the age of the Internet, this credentialing provided by schools breaks down as well. With easy access to infrastructure, it is now much easier than ever to show interest in a particular job by showing proof of actual work done. Let’s take a few examples:

1. If you want to get a job as a coder at a technology startup, you can show a portfolio of projects you’ve coded. For anyone familiar with the tech world, this is obvious because a lot of companies will ask for proof of projects coded. In fact, Google does not even care whether you got a degree or not. They simply care about the work you’ve done. This concept can be applied to most other fields as well.

2. If you want to get a job as an Investor, you can show proof of work by running your own portfolio even if it’s a few hundred dollars. Or you could even run a mock personal portfolio and talk about some of your investments in your interviews.

3. If you want to get a job in journalism, you show a portfolio of your writing.

The idea is that you let your work do the talking and not the degree. Most companies would prefer this over degree credentialing too because by showing proof of work you’re already showing how you’re interested in a particular field instead of just talking about.

The other question that might come up here is: “Even if companies prefer proof of work more, how will I reach companies in the first place? At colleges, many companies come to my campus for recruiting. This makes it significantly easier to find a job.”

Sure, it might be easier to find your first job at college because of “on-campus recruiting.” But, with so much information out there, including people’s digital identities, it’s easier than ever to reach companies. You could cold-email people, you could message them on LinkedIn, you could see if you have mutual contacts. Yes, it might be more work than letting companies come to you but 4 years of college might not be worth avoiding a little bit of extra effort. In fact, in colleges you are grouped in with everyone else and hence competing with other students for the same jobs. But if you carve your own path by emailing people with proof-of-work, you automatically stand out from the competition!

Another way to show proof of work is by doing internships at different companies and learning through on the job training (the best kind of learning!). Instead of spending 22 years and more focused on theoretical education, imagine if you could spend even 5 of those years working different types of jobs? You’d not only learn quicker, but it would also be a way for you to gauge what you’re interested in instead of theorizing about it. You could try to get companies to hire you for very little or no pay. In many cases, you’d be gaining skills and an apprenticeship that is more valuable than no pay.

Exceptions: Of course, this model of no school does not apply to all fields, and breaks down for highly technical fields like becoming a doctor or scientist. In those cases, it’s likely useful to get your medical degree or PhD, but even so it’s almost always better to include as much on the job training as possible.

Making friends online

“How will kids socialize and make friends if they don’t go to school?” This is another common question. For one, there are plenty of homeschoolers who manage to make friends through activities outside school, through friends they meet in the park, or with other kids in their neighborhood. But, the Internet has also changed how people can make friends!

When you are sitting in a classroom, you don’t get to choose your friends. You are randomly allotted into classes with other people. Your high school friends could have been very different if the random allocation worked out another way. In some cases, the randomness works great - people find their best friends this way! But in many other cases, kids move on to college and don’t really remain friends with their high school friends. This is likely because the high school friends didn’t really share the same interests or worldviews, but they were merely friends because of physical proximity. These friendships don’t materialize into long-term bonds

Imagine instead: You could become friends with people online who shared your interests. You could find your best friends at an earlier age, the compounding could start sooner and you could be friends for life!

The Internet enables you to to find other people with similar interests as you which could foster long-term friendships. For example, if your child is into writing, he could join writing-based interest groups and make friends there. Further, the Internet allows you to be friends with people from different ages, cause why shouldn’t that be the case?

Bonus:

There are 2 other bonuses to being homeschooled or learning online:

1. When you realize that you didn’t learn much in school or college, or worse, you were taught theory that doesn’t work in practice, you don’t have to go through the effort of having to unlearn.

2. You don’t have to incur tons of student loans and be in heavy debt. Online learning is free or very cheap, all that is needed is the enthusiasm to learn.

Open questions:

These are open questions I have for myself or questions others ask me when thinking about homeschooling for kids. If anyone reading this has solutions or answers, please let me know! Thank you!

1. If a child wants to pursue a group sport professionally, how does that work if they don’t go to school or college? For example, in the U.S., from what I know, football and basketball is heavily tied to your college. Can one participate if they are not in the school system?

2. Can homeschooling work if both parents are working jobs that require them to be in the office?

   1. I think it’s possible likely after the age of maybe 8. Prior to that, my hunch is to say it would be difficult. But I’m sure there are creative solutions here I haven’t thought of!

Ending Thoughts:

In my first post, I wrote about how the schools of today are failing us. I noted there that many people have been talking about this problem for a while now, but we still don’t have very many good solutions. I think the reason is that, prior to the Internet, outside of traditional homeschooling, there weren’t many options that were available to counter the problems with schools. The Internet has changed that. In fact, the Internet has entirely changed the landscape of learning, both for children and adults. Of course, it has its own downsides, (I’ll likely write a future post on my thoughts around how to mitigate the downsides of Internet learning) but the upsides are tremendously powerful.

The one thing needed for learning in the age of the Internet is: the desire to learn. And as I’ve already mentioned in the first point of my essay on how schools are failing us, I talk about how schools kill our desire to learn. So, it’s time we came up with better, more effective solutions!

Okay, so I’ve written about the problems with schools and how the Internet allows for better solutions. But what are these solutions?

As I said, I am experimenting with a new model of education based on problem-solving, learning by doing, and understanding the theory of knowledge. It will likely start with a small batch of children over the summer. It’s called the Feynman Kids Program.

Aastha Jain

Feynman Kids Program

We should raise more Feynman children. No, I don’t necessarily mean physicists or Nobel prize winners. I mean people who follow their curiosities, fall in love with problems they want to solve and pursue them, instead of caring about what other people think…

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4 years ago · 1 like · Aastha Jain

If you are interested, please see further details in this post or signup below, and I’d love to send you details and talk to you.

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[If you have any critiques of this post or any ideas / solutions on what a good education can look like for children, please feel free to reach out to me, thank you!]

Many of us step out into the “real world” only to be nauseated with the feeling that most of what we learned in school is not applicable. Many of us would agree that school was “pointless” or at best could have been compressed into a few months.

Author Neil Postman calls this “future shock.” To quote him, “future shock occurs when you are confronted by the fact that the world you were educated to believe in doesn’t exist.”

Yet, we continue to send our children to the same institutions that failed us. Why is that? Shouldn’t we wish for something better for our children? Do we send them to those schools in the hope that the schools would now be better? Is it wise to gamble on our child’s education (and indeed the future of humanity) based on this hope? Or do we send them to the same schools because we know of no better solutions? Well then, we must create better solutions.

I got interested in “education” out of selfish reasons – I asked myself the question, how would I provide a good education to my children? I went to the “best” school in my city (Kolkata) and the “best” undergraduate business school (Wharton) in the world (according to popular ranking at least) and I don’t think I learned much. In fact, I think it was detrimental to a large extent (elaborated below) and if given the choice, I would not go back1.

So, I knew that traditional schooling was likely not the place I’d find an answer. This search led me down a deeper search: What is a good education, anyway? How do children and even adults learn? What sources did I truly learn from? How did schools fail me?

As it turns out, I’m now obsessed with the problem of fostering the love of learning in children. I was surprised to learn that this is not a new problem – philosophers and educators have been talking about how the current education system is failing us for a few decades now. Alas, we still don’t have very many good solutions. (I hope to change that)

I have a few different ideas for better solutions which I’ll elaborate on in future posts, but in this post I want to discuss the problem of how schools are failing us.

Before I begin that discussion, I want to say that from understanding the process of knowledge creation and from applying my own experiences, I believe there are 3 important aspects to learning:

1. The desire to learn

2. Freedom to pursue one’s curiosities

3. Learning by doing

With this backdrop, let’s look at how schools fail us in the very aspects of learning that are critical.

Schools don’t take children seriously

You can call this the overarching problem that ties in all the other issues with schools. Schools simply don’t take children seriously. The Taking Children Seriously movement was founded by Sarah-Fritz Claridge and David Deutsch, but educators and authors like John Holt have been fighting for the same cause since 50+ years.

As John Holt says in the Preface of the book How Children Learn:

“All I’m saying in this book can be summed up in two words – Trust Children.”

Administrators, teachers, and even parents think they know what’s best for the child and the child should listen to them. As a result of this, we force our teachings onto the child even when the child has no interest or desire to learn them. We argue that this is exactly why children need to be coerced into learning, because otherwise they’d never learn anything on their own and would remain “uneducated” members of society. But do you recall the last time you truly learned something when you were coerced into doing so? There is no learning that happens through coercion. Learning happens when there is an innate desire to learn.

Quoting Neil Postman again in the book Teaching as a Subversive Activity:

“There is no way to help a learner to be disciplined, active, and thoroughly engaged unless he perceives a problem to be a problem or whatever is to-be-learned as worth learning, and unless he plays an active role in determining the process of solution. That is the plain, unvarnished truth, and if it sounds like warmed-over “progressive education,” it is not any less true for it…unless an inquiry is perceived as relevant by the learner, no significant learning will take place. No one will learn anything he doesn’t want to know.”

We should take the interests of our children seriously and foster learning in areas they are curious about.

Schools kill our desire to learn

The one thing needed for learning is the desire to learn. To quote Naval Ravikant: “The means to learning are abundant. It’s the desire to learn that’s scarce.”

By coercing us to learn subjects, schools leave in us a distaste for learning. We come to associate learning with boring material that might apparently be good for us some day. We come to associate learning with something we just have to do to get through school. I think this is the #1 reason so many people do not continue to learn after school. If they can get by without learning new things, they would rather do that instead of bringing back distasteful memories of school. But learning can be fun and there is only one way it can be fun: if the person is learning something they are truly interested in. Schools don’t allow for this since everyone is forced to learn the same (or similar) curriculum.

The general pushback to an argument like this is something along the lines of: “Well, if we don’t force children to learn anything, they will be illiterate and rowdy and watch TV all day. Surely, there must be some learning that has to be forced upon them. It’s good for their future.”

It is simply not true that children will not want to learn if no learning is forced down their throats. Children are natural learners – they want to learn. You can see this by the simple fact that they are always asking questions and are innately curious about the world around them. Instead of forcing them to learn from rigid curriculums and material they are not interested in learning, we should foster their curiosities in areas they want to learn about. This way, children will be super-learners for life. They will never fear learning and will be able to learn anything they wish to learn at any age. And all because they were given the freedom to experience the joy of learning and develop a love for it.

Schools force us to conform

Every individual is unique and has unique interests. Schools treat children like factory workers where each student has to go through the motions of attending classes, take “core fundamentals, sit quietly in lectures, learn according to the pace dictated by the teacher and so on. These words from the song Mad World by Gary Jules perfectly sum up this point:

Children waiting for the day they feel good
Happy birthday, happy birthday
And I feel the way that every child should
Sit and listen, sit and listen

Went to school and I was very nervous
No one knew me, no one knew me
Hello, teacher! Tell me, what's my lesson?
Look right through me, look right through me

What happened to allowing children to learn at their own pace? What happened to allowing children to learn what truly interests them? What happened to allowing children to be unique individuals?

Schools don’t leave us time to follow our curiosities

What unites Richard Feynman, Leonardo Da Vinci, Charles Darwin and some other successful people? They followed their own curiosities and interests, no matter how quirky they may have been at the time. Darwin’s theory of evolution was indeed heresy because back then it was considered that God created all creatures. But he had a deep interest in it and continued to work on it despite resistance, simply because he was obsessively followed his own curiosity. Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, has written about this phenomenon in his post, The Bucket Theory of Genius.

Attending school is more than a full-time job when you include sitting through all those classes, doing homework, writing papers, studying for assignments, trying to be popular, and so on. After all of this, how does anyone expect to have any energy and time left to pursue their curiosities? It is little wonder that many children might resort to television and video games to numb the pain of having to sit through dreary lectures in school.

All this wasted time and energy could be spent focusing on problems that interest the child instead.

Schools don’t focus on learning by doing

Most teaching in schools is lecture based. This can be fine in some cases, but when all of learning is focused on listening to teachers drag on, it should be no surprise that children pass on chits and invent games to make the classroom more entertaining.

Humans learn best by doing. We don’t learn to ride a bike by reading about how to ride one. Similarly, business is best learned by running a business, not by reading business books. And science and math are probably also best learned by solving scientific and mathematical problems or running experiments.

Schools teach us irrelevant material

What is the point of memorizing the dates of battles or the capitals of countries? We live in the age of the Internet where all this information is just a search away. Why do we coerce children into learning such irrelevant material? So, they can be good at Trivia?

To take it a step further, most of us haven’t had the need to use calculus in our lives either! And yet it is a core class in almost all schools. Why? We should think about this. Why is something that is not useful to most people considered a core class? Indeed, calculus is useful for the person trying to become a mathematician. But why is it useful for someone who is inclined to pursue music or cooking or even entrepreneurship?

The reasoning given by most educators is something along the lines of: “Oh you know, it might be useful in the future” or “How can you go about life without knowing basic calculus?”

As to the first argument, why can’t people learn calculus when they need it then? Why must it be forced upon them when they have no need for it or desire to learn it? If someone loves to learn and has the desire to learn, they will be able to learn it at any age. As to the second argument (which is not an argument btw but it’s commonly used by educators), most everyone who doesn’t need calculus outside of passing some class, forgets it and gets by life very well!

In my conversation with a 21-year old who didn’t go to school, he said: “I may not know processes like “photosynthesis” but that’s because I’ve never had any use for them and if I do need to learn something that might be useful to me, it’s so easy because I love to learn and have no fear of learning.”

I’m not arguing that learning should be a function of how useful the material is to the child. There are several people who learn about things they are curious about even if they have no functional use for it and there is pure joy in doing that. I’m arguing that learning should not be forced upon children – it kills the desire to learn altogether as I’ve already elaborated on in the second point.

The 21-year old I spoke to did not have his desire to learn killed by schools.

Schools focus on pointless metrics like grades

Who even came up with the concept of grades? What do grades even test for? They test for the ability to take tests! They test for memorization. They test for how good of a test-taker you are.  

They don’t test for understanding.

There is another point I want to make here: the difference between knowing and understanding. Simply knowing the word “photosynthesis” does not mean understanding the process. You might think it’s a trivial point, but most adults fall in this trap where we know the word “evaporation” for example, but when a child asks us what it means, we won’t be able to explain it. Do we really have understanding in that case?

Richard Feynman talks about the difference between knowing and understanding in his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman. His father and him used to go on nature walks together. Instead of simply telling Feynman the names of birds or the name of the body parts of birds (i.e. wings, beaks), he’d explain the function of wings.

Most other fathers would simply tell their sons the names of birds, giving children the false understanding that they knew the function of the bird by knowing its name!

Schools force us to defer to authority

“Because I said so” and “You should listen to me” are phrases a lot of us are familiar with. Our parents and teachers used them on us and some of us may have used them on our children too. What makes adults think they’re authority figures every child must obey? Simply because they’re older and seemingly understand more about how the world works?

If we do want children to listen to us, we should give them rational arguments similar to how you’d persuade or explain anything to an adult. If an adult argues with you over something, you wouldn’t retort by saying, “You should listen to me!” What gives us the liberty to use that statement on children? It’s not age that matters, it’s your explanation and ideas that matter. Children have perfectly valid explanations too and it’s worth having rational discussions with them instead of making them defer to us.

Schools compartmentalize learning into different subjects when the world is interrelated

“Learn to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.” – Leonardo Da Vinci

It’s fitting to see this quote from Da Vinci because he was one of the most multi-disciplinary people to have existed. If he went to the schools of today, he’d probably be diagnosed with ADHD. He was flipping from one curiosity to the next, exploring what intrigued him and through his explorations he realized how interconnected the world is.

The world does not work in silos or as dictated by the subjects taught in schools. Each subject is interconnected to the other, but when students only learn the subjects in silos, they don’t see this relatedness.

As Neil Postman would say, “most significant learning processes do not occur in linear, compartmentalized sequences.”

For example, why the government makes certain decisions over others is not just a matter of political science, but also a matter of economics, human nature, history, and so on. Similarly, investing doesn’t only belong to the realm of investing books; you need to have a broad understanding of human nature, economics, history, and even science in many cases.

But this is not something that is taught at schools. In schools, children barely ever understand the complexities of the real world. Instead, they learn in silos, switching to a different subject every 45 minutes. This is often why theory breaks down and in practicality things barely ever work according to theory. Albert Einstein’s famous quote still holds: “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.” 

Schools make us less human

Humans are creative individuals. We have the capacity to learn, the capacity to be creative, and the capacity to create knowledge. We don’t understand much about where creativity comes from. What we do understand is that creativity requires freedom and time. We’ve already seen how schools don’t leave time for children to pursue their curiosities and other creative endeavors. As I’ve mentioned, school is more than a full-time job with classes and homework outside school. Without freedom and time, it’s hard for children to solve creative problems. As such, by stifling our creativity, schools are making us less human.  

Schools instill fear in us

At schools, we are often forced to comply and listen to our teachers. We get punished for making noise, or not doing our homework. Schools try to discipline us and get children to do boring assignments, by instilling fear in us. We fear that if we fail our grades, we will be kicked out of school, which determines our future success as we’ve been taught. This is no way to teach. Fear shuts off the brain’s capacity to be creative, to think, and to learn what interests you. Instead, schools should use rational arguments and explain why it might be important for the student to participate in class, if at all. Using fear is an unfair weapon against the child who can’t use the same tactic against adults. Fear teaches the child to not trust themselves - this can be detrimental for years to come.

What is the purpose of schools vs. What is the job they are really doing?

I started by saying that the schools of today are failing us. When I say they are failing us, they are failing us in what? This depends on what we want for our children. If we want them to be creative, independent, joyful human beings, I think schools are failing us in shaping our children to be that for reasons I’ve mentioned above. Schools are not encouraging our children to enjoy solving problems.

Schools could certainly be doing the job in getting our children to be compliant (without reason), or helping them get into a good college, and eventually find a high-paying job. But is that all we want for our children? High-paying jobs? I certainly wish for a lot more than that.

Schools are doing the job of credentialing - that student X has earned a degree in a certain subject and hence qualified for some related job or college degree. It matters little how much understanding of the subject matter one truly has. Schools are doing the job of teaching our children to be obedient employees.

The following paragraph from Neil Postman’s book Teaching as a Subversive Activity is chilling:

“In fact, the similarities between mass-production industries and most existing school environments are striking: five-day week, seven-hour day, one hour for lunch, careful division of labor for both teachers and students, a high premium on conformity and a corresponding suspicion of originality (or any deviant behavior), and, most significantly, the administration’s concern for product rather than process.”

Schools are not doing the job of encouraging our children to enjoy solving problems. Schools are not doing the job of encouraging children to think for themselves. Schools are not doing the encouraging children to question, to learn what interests them, to be creative, and to be optimistic.

Isn’t this the job that schools should be doing?

Closing Thoughts

I want to clarify that I’m not saying that every child should drop out of school and that every aspect of school is bad. Certainly, there are some students who enjoy school. But we should question more on how school and coercion by parents & teachers shape our children. We should spend more time thinking whether school is indeed helpful for our children. Perhaps we home educate them. Perhaps we find other methods of alternative education like the Sadbury Schools. Perhaps we create better solutions.

On this point, I am experimenting with a new model of education based on problem-solving, learning by doing, and understanding the theory of knowledge. It will likely start with a small batch of children over the summer. It’s called the Feynman Kids Program.

Aastha Jain

Feynman Kids Program

We should raise more Feynman children. No, I don’t necessarily mean physicists or Nobel prize winners. I mean people who follow their curiosities, fall in love with problems they want to solve and pursue them, instead of caring about what other people think…

Read more

4 years ago · 1 like · Aastha Jain

If you are interested, please see further details in this post or signup below, and I’d love to send you details and talk to you.

Feynman Kids Signup

We simply shouldn’t take school as a given that every child has to go to. We should take our children seriously. Children are bundles of energy, joy, enthusiasm, and curiosity. Let’s foster this instead of subduing it. More than anything else, the future of humanity hinges on how we treat our children.

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P.S. If you have any feedback on the post or simply want to say hi, you can leave a comment, drop me an email [aasthajain1025@gmail.com] or message me on Twitter @aasthajs