Ted Dintersmith

I am in Charleston, South Carolina.

Yeah, people will say it's not working.

It actually is working really well.

It's just with an obsolete model, you know, and so we still adhere to the model that goes back to 1893.

And so that model was designed to equip, you know, young kids with road skills and intentionally erode their creativity and curiosity and audacity and agency.

And our decision, which I think was quite faithful, was as technology started to really shift things and move us out of the, you know, the industrial era to the innovation era, we just doubled down on obsolete.

And so, you know, so it's working in terms of its goal.

It just has the wrong goal.

Why was that the right goal then and the wrong goal now?

Well, I'm older than you are, but when I got out of school, I'd say 99% of the jobs in the economy were rote jobs.

You know, you worked on a factory line for the rest of your life or you were handling insurance claims or something like that.

So it was largely a rote job economy with fairly simple, you know, citizenship demands, you know, watch NBC or CBS or whatever.

And so that model was actually a great fit.

I mean, that model is what helped America do so well for decade after decade and build a really strong middle class.

It's just as, you know, an area you know really well as technology got better and better and better following its exponential growth curve.

Things change, right?

And now, you know, if you are an adult, particularly a young adult, just good at doing whatever you're assigned, we're already seeing that.

Those young adults are struggling to find their way forward, you know, because that's what AI does perfectly.

And so when you think about what the school model tries to eliminate and what is really needed today—

You know, they're at complete opposite ends of the spectrum.