Rethinking School
The bell was designed to produce compliance. It's still ringing.
Schooling still runs on a chassis built in the factory era. For a century that was survivable, because knowledge was scarce and school was where you got it. Knowledge is no longer scarce. What students need now is not storage — it's curation, judgment, and the capacity to turn understanding into action.
The paradigm shift
A 19th-century map, a 21st-century ocean
The lineage is real, not rhetorical: Prussia's post-1806 compulsory system, imported by Horace Mann, standardized by the 1892 Committee of Ten — age-graded batches, bell schedules, subjects in sealed compartments. It was a genuine achievement for its century. It is a historical artifact, not a natural law.
Meanwhile the conditions it was built for have inverted. We swim in information abundance; a third of students report being "always bored" in school; the vast majority already use generative AI while only a small fraction of their teachers feel confident with it. When a tool can produce competent prose, working code, and plausible analysis on demand, an education organized around information delivery and product collection has lost its anchor — not its value. The task is not to defend the old design harder. It is to name what school is for and design deliberately toward it.
The signature habit
The H-AI-H model: Human → AI → Human
One model that scales from a third-grader's writing process to a superintendent's board brief.
- Start with human inquiryA thoughtful question, a real goal
- Use AI to augmentDraft, explore, compare, accelerate
- Close with human judgmentReflect, edit, verify — and own the work
The final work is owned by the human — responsible for its quality, accuracy, and integrity. AI in service of human intellect, not a replacement for it.
The taxonomy, reframed
Remembering is the floor, not the ceiling
When AI can supply recall and competent first drafts, each level of Bloom's shifts upward — and a new peak appears.
| Classic level | AI-era reframe |
|---|---|
| Remembering | Curating & Questioning |
| Understanding | Prompting & Explaining |
| Applying | Adapting & Applying |
| Analyzing | Comparing & Validating |
| Evaluating | Challenging & Reflecting |
| Creating | Co-Creating |
| — new peak — | Transforming — using knowledge + AI for real-world impact |
Task design in three words
AI-resistant. AI-assisted. AI-partnered.
The vocabulary that makes redesign concrete. Some tasks should beAI-resistant — designed so the thinking must happen live, in process, in the room. Some should beAI-assisted — the tool handles scaffolding while the student does the judgment. And some should beAI-partnered — the student works with AI as tutor, debate partner, simulator, collaborator, or object of critique, because that is itself a capability worth teaching. The failure mode is not choosing any of these; it's leaving the choice to chance.
What school could be
Four purposes, tested deliberately
A curriculum for an AI era answers to four purposes: cognitive development, civic preparation, personal flourishing, and economic participation. From there the design conversations get concrete: durable skills and human capacities; mastery-based time instead of bell-based time; portfolios that track each student's jagged profile instead of a single average; interdisciplinary themes that mirror how problems actually arrive.
And a note of honesty: the AI-native school models drawing headlines are experiments to learn from, not templates to copy. The wiser path for a district is deliberate — pilots, evidence, shared vision — which is exactly the arc of Course 3.
The essays
The argument in long form
Three essays make the case in full — publishing here as the site's long-form spine.
The Educational Renaissance: A Call to Action
Why "improving" the current model is no longer enough — and the three commitments that start the pivot.
Publishing soonEducation's AI-Era Paradigm Shift
The research case: information abundance, hybrid intelligence, and the reframed taxonomy — with the evidence behind each claim.
Publishing soonBeyond the Bell: Retiring the Prussian Model
The ghost in the classroom — where the bell schedule came from, what it still does to thinking, and what replaces it.
Publishing soon