For the last 20 years, I’ve taught over 2000 children in 3 countries. I pioneered an English language program in an impoverished area is the Middle East. I’ve worked as a public school teacher at some of the highest and lowest performing public schools in all five boroughs. I’ve helped hundreds of parents start microschools (or learning pods) and I’ve tutored 18 subjects to some of the wealthiest families in NYC, San Francisco and Paris to make up for failings in private schools they were paying up to $60,000 a year to attend. Most recently, I founded a virtual learning program to help families through the pandemic and a hotline that served 100,000 families impacted by school closures.
Based on what I’ve observed in my experience in this wide array of educational settings is that that there are thousands of extraordinary people working diligently to fulfill a very unambitious goal. From what I’ve seen, the goal of school is to do an adequate job preparing our future workforce to do jobs that were relevant yesterday. Though more often than not, school is actually still optimized to prepare kids to work in industrialized factories. Or at best, schools may aim to prepare kids for currently relevant jobs in tech which are bound to also be obsolete when they actually join the workforce in 5–10 years, taking our inflexible school system another 100 years to catch up to prepare kids for what were our most needed careers today which by that time will also be obsolete.