tl;dr: Ranger, 20-something taxi driver, is confident school was (and still is) a waste of time. Is he right?

School is a machine.
Schooling is what we do inside the machine.
Learning is what it is supposed to produce.
The problem is the machine is still optimized for an old target.
This creates a gap between school and current career needs.

To distract my friend from the excruciating pain she was in from surgery, I struck up conversation with the taxi driver, a 20-something-year-old, and got to talking about what we're doing. I told him about my ed venture. He had a lot to say, AND he wanted to go on the record:

At five, he didn't picture driving a taxi. Now it pays the bills and leaves him flexibility to work on his own IT/AI projects whenever he wants. And school? He thought about it, and decided it was a waste of time and money. Driving a taxi checks enough boxes.

If you're somewhere north of 35, your first instinct is probably something like what is this kid doing? But remember, Ranger is in his early 20s, and he's echoing what a lot of other 20-somethings are saying right now. Maybe they're onto something.

Some say school is failing our kids. Look closely, though. School isn't doing anything unusual. It's operating business as usual. The only problem is the business: it's succeeding at a job we stopped needing done.

It's organized the way the industrial era that built it was organized. Sort a room of children into age-based lanes, ring a bell, move them through separate subjects, reward the right answer on cue. For all the reform efforts and alternatives, as a whole it still does exactly that, with remarkable efficiency. Some parts of the world do it better than others, but as a whole, it's still doing that.

The tragedy is all that effort, 12 to 13 years of it, sometimes 4–8 more, aimed at a target that has moved.

I read Diane Ravitch's The Death and Life of the Great American School System in 2012, already turning over ideas about reforming the school system, and it's why I did my master's in the years to follow.

Ravitch isn't a bomb thrower. She was the U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education and an early champion of testing and school choice, and the book is her public epiphany. Her argument set me on this path: school is supposed to give every child a rich, genuine education. Real knowledge across history, literature, science, the arts, math, and the capacity to think. That purpose, she says, is to develop well-rounded, critical-thinking human beings capable of participating fully in civic life. Our obsession with producing a workforce narrowed school to what's easy to measure.

We optimized the metric and lost the thing it was supposed to stand for, all in the name of building a workforce. And yet, that target has moved.

This is what I mean when I say school is not schooling. School is a machine. The bells, the subjects, the grades, the sorting are all structures. They aren’t learning themselves. What starts off interdisciplinary in early elementary becomes rigid, separate, and siloed by the time students graduate. We built a system that is very good at organizing knowledge into boxes, but the world outside those boxes doesn't stay in there.

Learning, the real usable kind Ravitch and so many educators are fighting for, is what's supposed to happen inside the machine. For most of history the two traveled together. They've come apart. This has created a gap.

And a growing number of young people have quietly done the math. And that math ain't mathin', the school ain't schoolin'. So they've decided school isn't worth the price, the money or the time, and they've gone looking for other ways to reach the target.

And this isn't one 20-year-old's hot take. Monday, I watched Jacob Coxon, late 20s, Cambridge grad and mathlete, say his version of the same thing to Jon Stewart. Coxon has the credential Ranger skipped, a researcher at the frontier of AI, formerly at OpenAI and Anthropic. He'd wanted to study zoology, to think about history, and went into computer science because that's what pays.

The man who skipped school and the man with the elite degree looked at the same system and reached the same verdict:

It moves me further from the target I actually want the longer I stay.

I keep seeing it. A friend's younger sibling, into philosophy and music, picked computer science for the lifestyle it buys. A former student of mine left school early because they weren't learning “anything relevant” and wanted to get to work. And when I posted "School is not Schooling" with Issue 0 on Insta last week, the people who showed up to support a deep dive into this topic were my former students and loved ones between 18 and 26.

This tracks in the published data. In an Instructure/Harris survey this year, 87% of Gen Z say they feel unprepared for the workforce. Not unmotivated. If anything, the opposite: they have to do more schooling, more gap-filling, more in-between than any generation before them just to reach a real career.

Year after year, our young people did what the machine asked, crossed the finish line, and found the line had been drawn for a race nobody's running anymore. It moved. It's over there now. They can stay in the race, OR jump off and start working… if they're confident enough. Most, that study says, aren't. So they opt out early, like Ranger, like a former student of mine, and get to work. Or they power through and choose what pays, like Coxon, even when it isn't what they originally wanted.

And many just disengage. Different choices. Every one of those is a response to a credential that no longer hits the target it promised.

I'll double down as someone who lived it. The skill that became my entire career, seeing patterns across fields, building bridges between things that look unrelated, never once showed up on a test I took. The closest it came was the spatial-reasoning section of the Iowa Basics. Shout out, 99th percentile!

School could measure what I knew inside each subject. It had no way to see what I could actually do, the thing I actually excelled at. I got labeled by how I fit the form, not by what would matter later.

Then I spent 14 years inside these machines, across very different sectors. Teaching science, training other teachers, running school performance across two dozen schools, building learning systems for companies. I'm still in them, and I'm great at operating them. That's exactly how I know what they're built to do, what they aren't, and what they'll never hit unless they change.

School thinks it's aiming students at a career, but it's aiming at the old version of "career," the one where the credential reliably pointed to the job.

That target shifted.

School keeps pointing where it used to be, while students can plainly see it's somewhere else now, which is exactly why they go looking (or stuck hoping) for other ways to reach their target.

We are running a system built to prepare people for a workplace that no longer sorts, silos, or stands still, and the gap between the two is now wide enough to see in the everyday.

AI is making the disconnect much harder to ignore. If machines can increasingly retrieve information, generate first drafts, automate routine tasks, and move across disciplines, then the question becomes what people need to be able to do with what they know.

That's the question I want to spend the next issues exploring. Everything after this is evidence. The mission of this newsletter is to test this claim, one piece at a time. Some weeks it's governance failures. Some weeks the people trying to patch it. Some weeks dip into AI and agency. The question underneath stays the same:

To the ones who already feel this: former students, young people, witnesses, anyone who crossed the finish line and found it had moved or didn't match:

When did school stop pointing toward the career you imagined? And what did you decide to do about it? Hit reply. Help build the argument. I read every one and thank you for the input.

Thank you for reading.

— JV

Think outside the black box.