I spent a week in Hong Kong teaching kids about AI and entrepreneurship. What I saw shook me — because it showed just how broken our current education system really is.
Many of these kids had never written a line of code. They didn't know what AI was. Within five days, they built real, functioning web apps using Vercel's v0. They learned how to prompt AI to generate commercial scripts. They coded login flows, integrated Google Auth, launched live demos. One team, led by a 10-year-old, built a sign language transcription tool — something that would have been impressive as a college project just a few years ago.
But what struck me most wasn't what they built. It was how they felt. Several kids told us this was the first time they'd actually had fun learning. The first time they felt free to be creative. The first time they weren't bored or boxed in. You could feel the energy in the room. They weren't memorizing definitions. They were building something that mattered, learning fast, and loving it.
Meanwhile, in their regular schools, these same kids are banned from using AI at all. They're stuck in outdated classrooms being taught irrelevant material by people who often don't understand the technologies shaping their future. And we're supposed to believe this is the "proper" way to learn?
The system is broken
Raised in an Asian society rooted in Confucian values, I had once accepted education as sacred. But having gone through the system myself — playing the game, jumping through the hoops — I've come to believe modern education is one of the worst systems we continue to uphold.
It's a rare area where everyone quietly agrees: the system is broken.
Modern education doesn't align with the real world. What do you actually use or remember from school? Practically nothing. Even if you argue that school teaches discipline or grit, there are better, more direct ways to instill those. Meanwhile, foundational life skills — critical thinking, communication, emotional resilience, financial literacy — aren't taught at all.
Why aren't we doing anything about it?
Designed to train factory workers
The fundamental architecture of modern education isn't aligned with the needs, potential, or future of our kids. It's built for a world of factories — a world that no longer exists. From its inception, the system was designed to mold compliant workers for predictable industrial jobs, not bold thinkers for an unpredictable future. We've kept the entire structure intact.
Everything about school reinforces this factory logic: the ringing bells signaling shifts. The fixed class periods. The regimented schedules. The requirement to raise your hand just to use the bathroom. Students wear uniforms. They move in rows. They complete identical worksheets and sit for standardized tests. This isn't education. It's conditioning.
And the worst part: it works. It conditions kids to internalize the rules of smallness. Don't stand out. Don't question. Don't be too passionate, too curious, too loud, too different. Just follow the script and keep your head down.
The real world doesn't reward rule-followers. It rewards risk-takers, creative thinkers, relentless builders. In the companies I run, I don't ask people to fix their weaknesses — I ask them to double down on their strengths. School teaches the exact opposite.
Even collaboration is discouraged. Copying is punished. But in the real world, copying, iterating, and remixing are how innovation happens. Open-source code, viral trends, franchise models — none of these exist without collaboration. School teaches that success is individual, silent, and isolated.
One-size-fits-none
By standardizing curriculum, we teach to the middle. The faster kids are bored. The slower kids are lost. Everyone loses.
The core design of national curricula isn't about inspiring kids or unlocking potential. It's about optimizing for averages — finding a lowest common denominator that governments can test, monitor, and report on. To do that, they need everything to be measurable, standardized, easy to control. The government isn't designing education to maximize each student's potential; it's designing it for the greatest good for the statistical middle. The problem? Local optima are not the same as global maxima. What works best for "most" kids often holds back the few capable of much more.
What's easiest to grade? A multiple-choice test. What's easiest to manage at scale? Uniform pacing. So that's what schools do. It's not about what's best for your child — it's about what's administratively convenient.
The result: there's no room for individuality, let alone brilliance. The system isn't just ill-suited for exceptional students — it's actively designed to erase them. It smooths out the top and props up the bottom until everyone's shackled to the middle. Even great teachers are forced into roles they didn't sign up for, measured on whether students hit benchmarks rather than whether they sparked a lifelong love of learning. Even if a kid lights up about a subject, the teacher often has to say, "Sorry, we don't have time for that."
International schools: privilege without purpose
You'd think international schools would be better. In many ways, they're worse.
They've become status symbols — education as luxury branding. In Hong Kong, parents spend HKD 3–10 million on "debentures" — not for admission, but just for a shot at a preschool interview. I have friends whose toddlers have done over 10 interviews. One-and-a-half-year-olds.
The campuses are beautiful — gleaming pools, therapy counselors, AI labs that make for impressive brochure photos. Some schools boast Michelin-star chefs cooking for one-and-a-half-year-olds. What exactly is the point? Toddlers aren't there to develop a refined palate. These amenities feel less like investments in learning and more like selling points in a luxury status competition.
Behind the facade, many of the teachers are expats on career breaks. Not deeply trained educators or seasoned practitioners. It's common to find someone teaching business or tech who's never worked in a real startup or launched a product. If your child wants to learn investing, would you send them to someone who's watched a few YouTube videos — or to Warren Buffett?
Teaching today requires subject mastery, contextual awareness, and lived experience. Too often, international schools are filled with well-meaning generalists instead of inspired specialists. That's not education. That's outsourcing childhood to a travel-friendly jobs program.
AI exposes the cracks
We live in the age of AI, a shift as big as electricity or the internet. But education has barely budged. Instead of preparing high-agency individuals, the system continues to reward high-scoring test-takers.
I still remember being graded on the neatness of my cursive writing. Fast-forward to now: schools are banning AI tools, using software like TurnItIn to police student submissions. Imagine a company banning employees from using ChatGPT. What kind of workplace is that?
Most teachers themselves have no idea how AI works. How can they prepare students for a world they don't understand? If schools were companies, most would be bankrupt.
School as babysitting
Let's be honest: school functions, for most families, as glorified babysitting. Parents — exhausted, overwhelmed, trying their best — hand over the single most formative 12 years of their child's life to a creaky, underperforming institution that's barely changed in over a century. They do it not because they believe in it, but because they feel like there's no other option.
We would never tolerate this level of inertia in any other part of life. Would you let your startup be run by a bloated Fortune 500 company, staffed with disengaged middle managers who've never built anything themselves? Would you let a team like that set the strategy for your most important product — your kid's future?
And yet we hand our children over to systems that are slow, impersonal, and unaccountable. We let credentialism stand in for real expertise. We assume that school equals learning, when in truth, most of what kids learn comes from the world around them, not the classroom they're trapped in from 8 to 3.
What we should teach instead
We need to rethink education from the ground up — starting with what, how, and who teaches it.
1. Foundational knowledge can — and should — be taught by AI
The basics — math, reading, science, writing — can be taught far better through technology than in traditional classrooms. I came across Alpha School and was floored. Kids there are learning 2.6× faster than their peers, with just two hours of study a day. They use AI-assisted platforms built on time-based spaced repetition — like Duolingo, but for everything. And it works. They're outperforming national standards without even optimizing for them.
This is where AI shines. It doesn't get tired. It doesn't have to manage 30 students. It adapts to the pace of the individual kid. If they're struggling, it slows down. If they're thriving, it pushes forward. Kids operate right at the edge of their capabilities. That's how you create mastery.
2. Application requires real-world context
Foundational skills are just the beginning. The real magic is in how those skills are applied.
Leadership. Public speaking. Communication. Persuasion. These are the intangibles that define whether you thrive as an adult. You can't learn them from a textbook. You learn them by doing.
Warren Buffett didn't learn investing from a lecture. He shadowed Ben Graham. You want to learn accounting? Run a small restaurant and manage the books. You want to learn marketing? Take that same restaurant and figure out how to get more people through the door. That's education.
You don't need a PhD to teach this. You need practitioners — people who've done the work. Parents. Local business owners. A retired startup founder. A coder who's built something real. Passion and experience matter far more than a teacher's certificate.
3. Bring in the real world
Kids don't need to be bribed to learn — they need to see why it matters. Gamify it using real-world systems. Let them earn tokens, points, even crypto for hitting milestones. Let them simulate investing. Let them learn about debt, compound interest, risk, and return through real projects. Imagine a classroom where your kid takes out a microloan to start a mock business, repays it with a profit, and reinvests. Now they're not just learning math — they're learning leverage.
4. Replace passive consumption with active creation
Build. Present. Share. Reflect. That should be the core cycle of learning. Let kids code apps, record podcasts, design campaigns, write essays that don't go into a black hole but get shared with real audiences. Let them build portfolios that matter.
We've confused seat time with learning, and theory with understanding. Real education isn't about memorizing definitions. It's about making things. About trying and failing and trying again. None of this is hypothetical. The tools already exist. What's missing is the will to walk away from a system that no longer serves us — and the courage to build something better.
Teach life, not just curriculum
The biggest gripe I have about school is that it completely neglects the actual life skills people need to succeed — not just in their careers, but in being a functioning, fulfilled human. Values. Principles. Character. How to make decisions when there's no rubric. How to stay grounded when life doesn't go to plan. None of that is taught.
And then there are the high-leverage skills that separate great from average in almost any field — public speaking, persuasion, storytelling, sales, negotiation, leadership. These aren't important. They're everything. School gives kids zero opportunity to practice them. Not because they're unteachable, but because the system was never built to prioritize them.
These aren't soft skills. They're survival skills. They determine whether you stand out in a meeting, whether you can lead a team, whether people believe in your ideas. Yet in most schools, they're treated like extracurricular fluff — if they're acknowledged at all.
The solution: let kids do. Let them pitch ideas. Let them lead mock projects. Let them debate, build, test, fail, adjust. Let them host podcasts, sell products, teach others. Let them experience the give-and-take of real-world dynamics instead of writing five-paragraph essays to please a grading rubric.
The gap will widen
The leverage AI gives is not incremental — it's exponential. We're not talking about 2× or 3×. We're talking about 100×, 1,000×, 10,000× improvements in productivity, creativity, and reach. The brutal truth: the gap between those who know how to wield AI and those who don't is only going to explode wider.
You can't afford to wait. In a compounding system, early movers don't just get ahead — they own the entire playing field. AI isn't another subject. It's leverage. It's force multiplication. The person who knows how to use AI to code, design, write, analyze, sell, teach — they're operating with superpowers, accomplishing in a week what others take a year to do.
Most schools are still teaching kids as if this revolution hasn't happened. They're pretending we're in a world of textbooks, essays, and handwriting assessments, while the frontier is being claimed by kids who are building with GPT-4, designing apps, editing video with voice prompts, and running micro-businesses before they're old enough to drive.
What I'll do with my own kids
When I think about raising my own kids, I genuinely worry. Would I send them to a traditional school?
Hell no.
Not because I care about vanity metrics like test scores, but because I want them prepared — for the real world. For a world of exponential change, AI disruption, and unbounded leverage. For a future that rewards curiosity, creativity, and agency — not obedience and rote memorization.
I believe we can build something radically better — not by tweaking the existing machine, or partnering with a polished British boarding school — but by starting fresh. A bootcamp. A summer lab. A grassroots, high-agency learning experiment that centers on the child, not the institution. Something dynamic and alive. Something that proves — not in 12 years, but in 12 weeks — that learning can be faster, deeper, and more joyful than we've ever been led to believe.
What if it didn't have to be rooted in one place? What if, instead of locking families into a zip code just for access to a "good" school, education became portable? Imagine a world where, whether you're in Bali, Lisbon, or Nairobi, you could drop into a local learning hub — the same guides, the same projects, the same peers (virtually or physically), just a different time zone and new local flavor. Learning could follow the rhythm of real life — of travel, of curiosity, of global connection.
Start small. Let it be messy. Iterate fast. Prove that kids can learn 2–3× faster when you treat them like people, not statistics. Show that they can be happier, more confident, more capable of building and leading in the real world. Give them room to surprise you.
I want to prove this is possible. That we don't have to settle. That we can reclaim education — not as a bureaucratic pipeline, but as the most exciting startup of all.
These are just initial thoughts. But I'm serious. I want to pilot something real. Test, refine, scale from the bottom up. Because if we get it right, we won't just be improving education — we'll be transforming the trajectory of the next generation.
That feels like a legacy worth dedicating a life to.