The old education playbook prepares kids for jobs that may not exist. I’m not willing to make that bet with my son.
My 12-year-old was struggling in school. School has just never fit him the way it seems to fit other kids. He isn't into sports. Sitting still and paying attention all day is hard for him. He gets anxious, and most days he came home feeling like he didn't belong. This summer he started asking me about his future.
“Dad, do I have to go back to school next year?”
My wife and I had already been wrestling with that question for a long time. I couldn't see the future, but I knew it was time to tell him what we had decided.
“Jude, you're not going back to public school next year. You may not go to high school or college either. You're going to AI school.”
Now, does AI school actually exist? No. I made it up.
Honestly, I wanted him to feel like he wasn't being pulled out because something was wrong with him. He wasn't failing. He was leaving to try something new. Something that could actually feel exciting. The original plan was simple: homeschool him for a year and see what happened.
Why Recreate School at Home?
But once I started thinking about what that should look like, I kept coming back to the same question. Why pull him out of school just to recreate school at home?
I wanted to build an education for the world he is actually going to inherit. I'm building Atonom, where we create AI employees that do real work inside companies. I use AI every day. I'm watching it transform jobs, companies, and entire career paths faster than most schools can update a textbook.
And the more I see, the harder it becomes to ignore a pretty uncomfortable truth.
Schools Are Preparing Kids for Yesterday
We are preparing millions of kids for a world that won't exist by the time they graduate.
The old playbook was simple. Get good grades, go to college, earn a degree, find a stable white-collar job. Parents followed that path because it worked for us. Schools keep teaching it because institutions are built to preserve the system they know, not prepare kids for a future nobody understands.
But what happens when AI can already do huge portions of the job we're spending sixteen years preparing our kids to get?
What exactly are we preparing them for?
We still run education like information is scarce. Sit in a room, listen to someone explain the same thing to thirty kids at the same speed, memorize the approved answers, repeat them on a test and then forget most of it two weeks later.
Meanwhile, every kid now has access to a tutor that can explain almost anything, at any level, in dozens of different ways, without getting tired or frustrated.
The problem is that most schools treat that tutor like a cheating device.
I think that's stupid.
Schools can call it cheating all they want. By the time these kids enter the workforce, using AI will be part of almost every job. The kids learning how to use it now will have a massive advantage over the kids being told not to touch it.
I'm not saying math doesn't matter. Writing doesn't matter. Science, history, and reading don't matter. They probably matter more than ever. A kid still needs enough knowledge and judgment to recognize when AI is confidently feeding him garbage.
Memorizing answers isn’t an education when every answer is already in your pocket.
The advantage now is knowing what to ask, what to believe, and how to turn an idea into something real without outsourcing your brain.
That’s what I want AI school to teach my son.
We’re only a few weeks in, and we’re making it up as we go.
So What Is AI School?
My wife handles the fundamentals. He is still learning math, science, and writing, and the kid absolutely devours books. He reads a couple every week.
That’s part of what made this decision so frustrating. He clearly loves learning. He just didn’t love the way school expected him to do it.
AI doesn’t replace the fundamentals. It lets us build around the way he actually learns.
He’s learning Spanish by having real conversations with GPT instead of memorizing vocabulary words long enough to pass a test.
Then there are the projects.
His first was building a Pokémon app with Lovable. I gave him an account and told him to play around with it. A week later, he had an app and I had no tokens left.
So apparently the first lesson at AI school was usage-based software pricing.
His second project was editing our family videos with AI.
Next, he wants to build a fantasy sports app that helps him beat his friends, which is honestly the strongest business case he’s come up with so far.
And that’s exactly what I want.
I want him learning how to turn an idea into something real. I want him to get stuck, ask better questions, use AI to push through what he doesn't know, and come out the other side with something he can show people.
We also know he needs to get out into the physical world.
Grandma volunteered to take him on a field trip once a week. I still have no idea what all those field trips are going to be, and honestly, neither does she. She said she was willing, so we’re going to start going places and figure it out.
We’re also choosing small real-life activities that make him interact with people and get a little uncomfortable.
This week, he ordered his own food at a restaurant and interviewed the manager at Chick-fil-A. For some kids, that would be easy. For him, it wasn’t.
And that is the point.
I don't want AI to become a hiding place. I want it to give him enough confidence and leverage to do more in the real world.
AI school can't just teach kids how to talk to machines. It has to teach them how to talk to humans, look adults in the eye, ask good questions, explain what they believe, handle disagreement, keep commitments, and recover when something doesn't work.
If all this does is make him really good at prompting ChatGPT, we failed.
I want to raise a builder.
Someone who sees a problem and doesn't wait for an assignment. Someone who can learn whatever he needs to learn, use whatever tools are available, and create something that didn't exist before.
The Safe Choice Is Still a Bet
Maybe that becomes the most valuable education he could possibly receive.
Maybe I am completely wrong.
That's the part nobody wants to admit when they talk about the future of education. None of us knows what the job market will look like in ten years. I build in AI every day, and I can't tell you exactly what it will do next year.
So yes, this decision scares me.
I worry about what he might miss. I worry about whether we're doing enough. I worry that one day he might look back and think his parents made a massive bet with his childhood.
Because we did.
But keeping him on the default path is a bet too. It just feels safer because millions of other parents are making the same one.
I am not confident enough to know exactly what education should become.
I don’t know exactly what education should look like anymore. But I know the old path isn’t automatically safe just because it’s familiar.
The world has changed, and my son’s education needs to change with it.
