Hi friends,

​Studying the Bible has been one of my biggest intellectual themes of the past few years because familiarity with it is table stakes if you want to be an educated Westerner. I wouldn't be so interested in it without the work of René Girard. He showed me how we live in a Christian moral paradigm. Many of our baseline values, beliefs, and myths were born out of long-forgotten Biblical stories.

Along with my interlocutor Johnathan Bi, I just published a lecture about Girard's perspective on Christianity.

Schools Are Victims of their Own Success

People talk about the school system like it’s a failure, but it’s actually a success. It was explicitly designed to turn people into rule-following automatons who followed orders on command. People only critique these traits because schools realized their original vision so thoroughly.

The origins of the contemporary American school system began with Horace Mann. As the Secretary of Education for the state of Massachusetts in the 1840s, he wanted to create a statewide system inspired by Prussia’s “common school” system. At the time, Prussia was a military state. Their school system was designed to create an orderly population of soldiers. The Prussians invented much of contemporary education, such as the lecture model and the Conveyor Belt idea of segmenting kids by grade, depending on their age.

The Prussian education system wouldn’t have taken off so fast without corporate endorsement. Prussian schools weren’t just good at training soldiers. They were also good at training assembly line workers — and the demand for them soared with the early 20th century manufacturing boom.

Workers rebelled against industrial work though. Ford employees famously protested after Henry Ford introduced the assembly line. To combat the mass exodus, Ford introduced a $5 per day wage. Even if higher pay worked in the short term, it wasn’t a sustainable long-term strategy. Training kids to think like factory workers had to begin in childhood, while minds were still plastic.

“Scientific management” was the hot new industry trend in the early 20th-century. The philosophy was simple: Managers did the thinking. Workers did the work. Employees were hyper-specialized and constantly monitored. Their jobs were easy to train, easy to measure, and easy to replace — which made workers as interchangeable as the machine they operated. “Show up, shut up, and do what you’re told” was the name of the game.

I witnessed the grueling monotony of factory work while visiting the Ford Factory a few years ago. The narrowness of industrial labor was somehow even more narrow than I’d imagined. I watched a guy do the same thing (get a screw, pick up a plate, put it in the center of the car, and lock it in with a screwdriver) over and over again. I bet he occupies this same position in the assembly line every day too.

If you wanted to design a school system to train people for such rote work, you’d end up with something like what we have today.

Our kids have neither agency nor autonomy because the system is explicitly designed to strip it away from them. Contemporary schools, like Ford’s factories, dehumanize the people within them. Their individuality is squashed. Their passions are silenced. These were the explicit goals of the Prussian system, which we so readily adopted.

Our school system is a failure because it succeeded in its original mission. ​
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If we want to implement something better, we need a vision as clear as Mann’s, but built for the Information Age, where everybody has access to a smartphone with an Internet connection.

Building a New Education Paradigm

​Write of Passage is my answer to what education can look like in this Information Age. We want to move away from the assembly line model. Here are some of the questions we're asking:

1. How should education change when everybody can instantly access nearly unlimited information?

2. How can school increase people's curiosity instead of repressing it?

3. What kinds of learning become possible when education benefits from increasing returns to scale?

4. How can we make writing education more fun and more effective?
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5. How can education expand people's individuality instead of homogenizing students?

Four years after starting the company, the video below is a showcase of what we've already created.